What the commentators said

Last week, the stunned citizens of São Paolo were swept up in a nightmare vision of a dystopian future, said The Economist. A dense black cloud of smoke from fires burning hundreds of miles away in the Amazon basin blotted out the afternoon sun and plunged the city into darkness. And a single man is largely to blame, said David Miranda in The Guardian. Jair Bolsonaro – aka “Captain Chainsaw” – has ditched Brazil’s commitment to protecting the Amazon in the name of economic development. An unashamed climate change denier, he has appointed a man convicted of fraudulently helping mining companies as environment minster, dismissed most of the senior officials at Brazil’s environmental protection agency and slashed its funds. And he has the gall to blame Western NGOs for starting some of the fires. Thanks to a “toxic brew of radical ideology, political corruption and banal greed”, an invaluable asset which produces some 16% of the world’s oxygen has been placed in jeopardy.

You don’t have to be a Bolsonaro fan to feel queasy about this deluge of Western outrage, said Brendan O’Neill on Spiked. It’s not just the refusal to heed the satellite reports which show that the number of fires in the Amazon this August is actually less than the average for the past 15 Augusts. It’s also the implicit colonialist assumption that developing countries can’t use their natural resources to achieve a decent standard of living in the way we have done in the West. We forget that the rainforest belongs to Brazilians, not to us. No it doesn’t, said Harry Hodges in The Daily Telegraph. The whole world has a stake in its preservation and is duly paying for it. This March alone, Brazil picked up $96.5m under a UN scheme to reduce emissions caused by deforestation. Britain itself is funding a £30m effort to restore the forests and promote lowcarbon farming across Brazil’s savannah. Germany and Norway suspended their funding this month in an effort to get Bolsonaro to face his responsibilities. Britain should follow suit.

What next?

Finland, which holds the EU’s rotating presidency, has proposed that if the fires aren’t extinguished, the EU should halt the import of all Brazilian beef. Boris Johnson’s refusal to rule out seeking a post-Brexit trade deal with Brazil, or to join France and Ireland in their threat to veto the EU’s proposed trade deal, may jeopardise the UK’s chance of hosting next year’s UN climate change summit.

Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio says he’ll donate $5m to an Amazon Forest Fund to help save the forest. The fund was launched this year by his environmental charity, Earth Alliance.