Bolsonaro names climate denier as Brazil’s foreign minister

(Climate Change News, 15 Nov 2018) Brazil’s president-elect Jair Bolsonaro has named an anti-globalist diplomat to lead on foreign affairs and his country’s relationship to the Paris Agreement.

Ernesto Araújo has praised US president Donald Trump and accused the political left of appropriating climate change to serve an ideological agenda. He currently runs Brazil’s US and Canada department, a relatively junior position in the foreign service, and only became an ambassador this year.

On Twitter announcing his new minister, Bolsonaro called Araújo a “brilliant intellectual”.

During the election campaign, Araújo started a blog, which he used to question the moral underpinnings of internationalism. In a post on 12 October, Araújo wrote that the left twisted legitimate causes “to serve their political project of total domination”.

Thousands of studies by hundreds of scientists agree that climate change is real, serious and driven by human activity. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent report warned that only radical action can avert dangerous impacts.

Araújo has dismissed that body of evidence, claiming it is selective and politically motivated. “The left has appropriated the environmental cause and perverted it to the point of paroxysm over the last 20 years with the ideology of climate change, the climatism,” he wrote in the blog post.

This movement gathered data “suggesting a correlation” between rising temperatures and CO2, he claimed. They “ignored data suggesting the opposite… and created a ‘scientific’ dogma that no one else can contest or he will be excommunicated from good society – exactly the opposite of the scientific spirit.”

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Climate Change News, 15 Nov 2018: Bolsonaro names climate denier as Brazil’s foreign minister