Was Four-Lane Road Through Amazon Forest Construction To Facilitate A (Checks Notes) Climate Summit?

A big highway is being cut through the Amazon rainforest
in northeast Brazil, and according to sources, it's 
hypocritically being built to facilitate a major
UN climate change conference in November. 

 Critics are accusing a Brazilian state of building a four-lane freeway through tens of thousands of acres in sensitive Amazon rain forest to, of all things, facilitate a major UN climate summit.  

The summit is scheduled for November in the city of Belem in northeast Brazil, in the Amazon not too far inland from the Atlantic Ocean. 

Officials in the  Brazilian state of Para where the highway is being built, deny the summit was the impetus behind the highway construction. 

Those officials say construction on the highway started in 2020, before Belem was announced as the location for the climate summit, known as COP30.

Brazilian and  Para state officials also said the nation's federal government is not funding the project. 

Still, locals and environmentalists are highly suspicious, to say the least, noting the sudden, fast progress of highway construction after decades of resistance. That fast pace came after Belem was selected as the COP30 site 

Per Reuters:

"Still, some locals tie recent progress on the long-discussed highway to the approaching UN summit, when tens of thousands of delegates are expected to swarm the Amazon city home to 1.3 million."

 Plus, local officials basically admitted to the BBC the highway was being built to service the COP30 climate summit.  

Per BBC

"Adler Silveira, the state government infrastructure secretary, listed this highway as one of 30 project happening in the city to 'prepare' and 'modernize' it, so 'we can have a legacy for the population and more importantly, serve people for COP30 in the best possible way."

Silveira also said the highway would have wildlife crossings for animals to pass over, bike lanes and solar lighting 

All wonderful, but they're chopping down part of a critical rain forest to do all this.   

There's other projects ahead of COP30 that might harm the Amazon rain forests too, mostly by bringing in more people. The more people there are, the more harm an ecosystem will suffer.  The Belem airport is being expanded, new hotels are under construction and the port is being redeveloped to accommodate cruise ships. 

Like unloading a 1,000 people off a cruise ship into the Amazon, or at least near it, won't harm anything. Jeez! 

As usual, it's the locals who depend on the rain forest that got screwed the most. 

People who live adjacent to the new highway so they weren't compensated for land takings. They also fear the  highway will cause an explosion of new development like warehouses, stores, gas stations and such that would mow down much more of the rain forest. 

As the BBC reports, the road would leave two disconnected areas of protected forests, fragmenting the ecosystem and disrupting the movement of wildlife.

The bottom line:

We're having a big UN conference to combat climate change. And we're flying thousands of people from all over the world to the Amazon to attend this conference. I'm not advocating a ban of air travel, but airliners are a major contributor to climate change, so there's that.

Then, we're cutting a major highway through the Amazon, which is essential a large part of the Earth's lungs. The Amazon is a major natural ally against climate change because it absorbs huge amounts of carbon dioxide.

So, the solution is to cut down some of the Amazon to bloviate about climate change in political setting.

It makes no sense.  

Surprise! Another Politician's Hypocrisy On Climate Change Policy

Republican Congressman Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania hated
President Biden's climate spending, but his business
dipped right into it to the tune of $315,000

 Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa) really didn't like President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

Not a lot of Republicans did. And that's their right, the loyal opposition and all that. 

That is until the hypocrisy sets in. There's plenty of examples, but Kelly's is the latest and one of the more over the top of all the examples. Kelly used the climate portion of the act to receive a grant to install solar panels at one of his car dealerships. 

He got quite a bit of money out of the deal, too.  According to HuffPost:

"The U.S. Department of Agriculture gave a Uniontown dealership owned by Mike Kelly Automotive Group a nearly $315,000 grant to install a 261.9 kilowatt solar panel array, according to the Erie Times-News, the local news outlet that first reported the grant on Monday. The grant is set to save the firm $23,700 per year in energy costs, according to the USDA."

After the Inflation Reduction Bill was signed into law, Kelly said it was "loaded with bad policy and wasteful spending that will ultimately worsen inflation, expand government and hurt the middle class.

He really hated the law's climate provisions, at least supposedly. Kelly said in a statement at about the time the Inflation Reduction Act became law that the climate change portion of the spending package was wasteful and elitist. 

I guess Kelly forgot to mention he was one of those "elitists."

Responding to all this, a Kelly spokesman said:

"Representative Kelly's energy policy has always supported an all-of-the-above approach.... Additionally, Rep. Kelly does not have an active role in the day-to-day operations of his family's business. "

Ya, sure he's invested in the business but has no idea what's going on with it. Tell me another one. 

 

  

 

 

Exxon Did A GREAT Job Of Predicting Climate Change In 1977. But Of Course Favored Profit

 I was struck by recent reporting from the journal Science that showed scientists at the oil giant Exxon had a great handle on the future of climate change as far back as the 1970s.  

As the Associated Press reported: 

"The study in the journal Science.... looked at research that Exxon funded that didn't just confirm what climate scientists were saying, but used more than a dozen different computer models that forecast the coming warming with precision equal to or better than government and academic scientists." 

It has been known for awhile now that Exxon was aware of climate change decades ago, but publicly casted doubt about it. The Associated Press again: 

"What the new study does is detail how accurate Exxon funded research was. From 63 percent to 83 percent of those projections fit strict standards for accuracy and generally predicted correctly that the globe would warm about 0.36 degrees (0.2 Celsius) a decade."

The Exxon-funded science was 'actually astonishing; in its precision and accuracy, said study co-author Naomi Orestes, a Harvard science history professor. But she added so was the 'hypocrisy because so much of the Exxon Mobil disinformation for so many years...was the claim that climate models weren't reliable. "

This was during the same time that the oil giant publicly doubted that warming was real and dismissed climate models' accuracy.  

The Exxon studies in this piece were done in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  Though scientists at the time already had an idea that fossil fuel emissions would raise global temperatures, there was a lot of what turned out to be false media narratives of a coming ice age. 

Fossil fuel research into climate change was really quite extensive in the second half of the 20th century, even as their spokespeople were telling us climate change was at best uncertain and at worst a hoax. 

Public statements from Exxon since the 1980s cast climate science as uncertain and unreliable. The company's public position was clearly to dismiss or diminish the evidence that human caused climate change was about to occur, or occurring. 

The journal Science published the review of Exxon scientists' accurate climate change studies published decades ago. 

As the journal Science notes:

"In 2015, investigative journalists discovered internal company memos indicating that Exxon oil company has known since the late 1970s that its fossil fuel products could lead to global warming with 'dramatic environmental effects before the year 2050.' Additional documents then emerged showing that the US oil and gas industry's largest trad association had likewise known since at least the 1950s, as had the coal industry since at least the 1960s, and electric utilities."

The Exxon document said the effects of climate change would become detectable by around the year 2000, give or take five years.

Science continues:

".....Exxon's internal documents, as well as peer-reviewed studies published by Exxon and ExxonMobil Corp scientists, overwhelmingly acknowledged that climate change is real and human-caused. By contrast, a majority of Mobil and ExxonMobil Corp's public communications promoted doubt on the matter."

As you can imagine, these revelations will probably become fodder for lawsuits, both current and existing. Numerous complicated, slow moving lawsuits against Exxon and other oil giants are slowly making their way through the legal system. 

For their part, Exxon says its understand of climate change developed along side that of the scientific community. They also said that critics are focusing on the company's internal policy debates and recasting them as a disinformation campaign, as NPR reports.  

It's been known for years that Exxon accurately knew about climate change and its effects, but the latest revelations just add more fuel to the fire, so to speak. 

In October, 2019, for instance, during House hearings, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez showed graphs from 1982 Exxon research that predicted with remarkable accuracy the rate of carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere and the corresponding warming it would cause. 

Exxon remains an insanely profitable company on its sales of fossil fuels. Exxon made an estimated $15.4 billion in the fourth quarter of 2022 and took in roughly $58 billion in all of 2022, its most profitable year on record.