Leonardo Sakamoto
The orange sky taking over cities, giant fire lines blocking highways, lack of water for human or animal consumption, ash invasions into homes, and difficulty breathing showed São Paulo, in the last few days, a glimpse of its future. Yes, the thriving state may turn into a Mad Max-style wasteland, with climate change.
Paulistas depend on the Amazon to survive, literally. In South America, Africa, and Australia, the Tropic of Capricorn cuts through deserts. Here, thanks to the humidity that comes from our largest forest, it hits the Andes mountain range and descends to the Southeast and South, and we have life.
When the Amazon is dry, we’re in trouble. Whether it’s by accident or by criminal activity, fire finds a propitious environment to spread here. If the forest goes up in flames, São Paulo will go with it. Simple as that. Goodbye, agriculture and industry. On the other hand, we’ll always need someone to sell masks and medicines.
The El Niño is over, but its effects continue, amplified by climate change. It’s not that we’ve never lived in a Mad Max scenario before, but extreme events have become more frequent due to our own fault. If you disagree with this, you’re part of the 20% of climate change deniers, according to a Datafolha survey last month, who see everything as a natural fluctuation. A minority, once 77% believe that climate change is mainly caused by human action.
When scientists warned that the rise in global temperature was leading to an increase in extreme climate events, deniers, proud of their ignorance, questioned on social media, “This winter was colder, where’s the warming?”
Now, everyone is watching in horror as the climate paints apocalyptic scenarios. What many call hell is just an appetizer for our new normal. The fire that consumes areas of São Paulo is blowing the same trumpet as the water that flooded Rio Grande do Sul and killed dozens, announcing that a new climate has arrived.
Any polar bear wandering on a melting ice floe in the Arctic, any camel wandering on a rooftop in the floods in Rio Grande do Sul, or any tamandua wandering in a burning forest in the Amazon can say that, unfortunately, we’ve already adjusted the planet’s thermostat to the “roast the idiots” position. And that, in this moment, facing the lack of effective measures taken by governments to reduce carbon emissions, we’re only trying to get the roast ready before the hour.
Climate change is already irreversible. In the next decades, we’ll have millions of environmental refugees due to rising sea levels and extreme climate events; widespread famine due to reduced and desertified areas of production and loss of fishing capacity; increased number of sick and undernourished people, and conflicts and wars over water and land for planting.
Many people will die in Brazil and the world. And the survivors will have to adapt to living in a more hostile environment. The rich will have more chances, but won’t escape unscathed. After all, the orange sky in Ribeirão Preto this week covered both rich and poor.
The question is no longer “avoiding” climate change, but “reducing the tragedy that has already begun”. The world needs to understand that we’re already in the bottom of the pit. The question is that, at the bottom, there’s a trapdoor.
We’ll host the COP-30, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, in Belém next year. We have the chance to help close the gap between grandiose promises and daily destruction of the Amazon, the Cerrado, the Pantanal, and the Atlantic Forest, driven by criminal sectors of the agribusiness and extractivism, by the cattle ranching projects that facilitate land grabbing and environmental destruction, and by the dismounting of the fiscalization by the previous government and being rebuilt now at great cost, and by the discourse of “progress” used to justify the exploitation of oil in the Amazonian coast of Amapá.
Don’t believe those who say we’re counting down: we’ve already entered a new era of mass extinction of many species. Perhaps less of our own. Because, in the end, the rich will buy their security and inherit the Earth, this time more arid and violent. Without Tina Turner (for the older ones), nor Anya Taylor-Joy and Charlize Theron, in a Mad Max-style parody – that will come not as a tragedy, but as a farce.
Originally published on Uol
