What Lula’s Victory in Brazil Means for Climate Change
In the world of international politics, nothing gets more attention than the significance of a victory for one of the world’s most popular and influential political figures, like the one that the global elite and its media outlets invested so much in covering this week.
But this week’s news of former U.S. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as the winner of Brazil’s presidential election is something that we should all be focusing on, not least because it is another illustration of how the world’s leaders have fallen for the same type of fraud that has been used in the past to keep the masses distracted from the true causes of climate change.
Brazil elected Lula da Silva as its new president in May. During the campaign he made several claims about his climate policies that were clearly fraudulent, like promising to stop deforestation and reduce carbon emissions “beyond any government in the world,” or pledging to build an energy grid connecting Brazil to Latin America and Europe via an oil pipeline, despite that his plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions was never to build such a grid in the first place. At the time, Lula da Silva also announced that he would fight the effects of rising sea levels, declaring that “the government is going to protect the Amazon.”
But Lula’s victory has caused a frenzy in the international media, with The Guardian, Washington Post, Huffington Post, and others all promoting the narrative that the current leader of the world’s largest democracy is the “most ethical” candidate to lead the country that has been led by the most unethical for the past forty years.
But these narratives can be misleading, because they do not take into account the facts about Lula’s record. In particular, the claims about deforestation and emissions do not match up with his recent history. In fact, Lula has consistently promoted policies that are driving the destruction