Full-On Climate Denier, Industrial Farming Devotee Latest Additions To New Brazilian Cabinet - NYT
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Ms. Rousseff, a leader of the leftist Workers Party, has been speaking strongly about the need to reduce carbon emissions around the world, raising hopes that Brazil will work harder to preserve much of its Amazon rain forest. The destruction of tropical forests is viewed as a major contributor to climate change.
But Mr. Rebelo’s appointment comes as some scientists are questioning Brazil’s commitment to reducing deforestation and emissions. Environmentalists have also expressed concern over Ms. Rousseff’s new minister of agriculture, Kátia Abreu, a combative supporter of industrial-scale farming who worked with Mr. Rebelo on a recent overhaul of Brazil’s forest protection laws. “Old-line Communist Rebelo is on exactly the same page on climate science as the hardest of the hard-core Tea Partiers,” Stephan Schwartzman, director of tropical forest policy at the United States-based Environmental Defense Fund, said in a blog post.
Before the international climate talks that were held in Lima, Peru, in December, the Brazilian government said that the rate of deforestation in the Amazon had declined by 18 percent in the period from August 2013 to August 2014. But analysts said the government had tailored its announcement to exclude a recent resurgence in deforestation. Imazon, a Brazilian institute that uses satellite imagery to track the issue, saw a fourfold increase in November compared with the same month in 2013.
Mr. Rebelo, who was sports minister during Ms. Rousseff’s first term as president, has not distanced himself from his earlier statements about climate science, including his assertion that “there is no scientific proof of the projections of global warming, much less that it is occurring because of human action.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/07/world/americas/climatologists-balk-as-brazil-picks-skeptic-for-key-post.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=5
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