The Future of Climate Policy for Brazil and the United States after Bolsonaro and Trump

On October 30th, 2022, former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva beat incumbent Jair Bolsonaro in the Brazilian presidential election. It was a close election, with Lula getting 50.9% of the vote and Bolsonaro getting 49.1%. Bolsonaro had a turbulent and divisive one-term presidency with attacks on the democratic institutions in Brazil, improper COVID-19 policies which left 700,000 citizens dead, unfounded claims of voter fraud in the most recent presidential election, and telling his supporters to take to the street in protest. Now, if you think that this all sounds familiar, you are right. Former United States president, Donald Trump, also had quite a divisive and controversial presidential term that has similarities to Bolsonaro’s in terms of ideologies and policies. However, one of the most impactful and important ways that these two conservative presidents were similar was their climate and environmental policies. The two almost seemed to copy and bounce off each other with such matching policies and rollbacks. Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro have similar degradation of environmental policies such as wanting to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords and dismantling their federal environmental agencies, the EPA and the MMA. However, now that both countries’ recent elections have ousted both the right-wing presidents, Biden and Lula are now cutting back on conservative climate policy to try to fill the gap.

The Paris Climate Accords

What exactly are the Paris Climate Accords? Put simply, they are a legally binding international treaty concerning climate change. In December 2015, world leaders came together at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris, France because they agreed that climate change is a global emergency that all the countries of the world need to concern themselves with. The agreement that they came up with a set of long-term goals for the 194 countries in attendance. The agreement’s main goals were to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, limit the Earth’s temperature rise to 1.5C, review countries’ commitments to cutting emissions every five years, and provide financial aid to developing countries who need help financing environmental policies. Every five years, each country is expected to submit a climate action plan to the United Nations. In that plan should be the actions they plan to take to meet the agreed upon long-terms of the Paris Agreement, which are mandatory. This plan lets countries chart their own course on how they contribute to fighting climate change that best suits them. This will spark a huge economic boom for the rest of the century. There are greener jobs everywhere now, from the manufacturing of electric cars and the installation of solar panels. Not only will this plan help fight global climate change but it will also help the global economy. So why then, did Trump and Bolsonaro want to withdraw their countries from the Paris Climate Accords? In 2017, not even two years after the agreement was signed by the United States, Trump announced that the United States will withdraw from the agreement. In a press statement from the State Department that came out in November 2019, it stated that the US would withdraw from the accords because of “its unfair economic burden imposed on American workers, businesses, and taxpayers by the US pledges made under the Agreement.” It also claimed that the United States does not need the help or regulations of the UN because they have already been reducing emissions and ensuring the citizen’s access to affordable energy options. However, it promised to continue to work with other countries to react to the effects and impacts of climate change. Others believe that Trump pulled out of this agreement because it would be popular with his voters and supporters, who work in the fossil fuel industries.The US now represents around 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions, it remains the world's biggest and most powerful economy. So, when they are the only country so far to withdraw from this agreement, it raises a global problem of trust and responsibility.

Bolsonaro’s presidency

Early on in Bolsonaro’s presidential campaign, he said that he wanted to withdraw Brazil from the Paris Agreement. Just before the election, Bolsonaro changed his plan saying that he would keep Brazil in for now but only if certain conditions were met. While his mind kept changing about this particular agreement, he was dead-set on pulling out of others, such as the 2019 United Nations Climate Conference (COP25) and Brazil’s 2015 carbon emissions education pledge. In 2018, Bolsonaro said that Brazil would remain in the agreement if someone could give him a written guarantee that there would be no “Triple A” project and no “independence of any indigenous area” Triple A is a proposal of an NGO from Colombia for some protected areas between the Andes and the Atlantic. Bolsonaro thought that this proposal is a conspiracy to take the Amazon rainforest away from Brazil. When he referred to the “independence of indigenous areas,” what he really meant was foreign governments are trying to get indigenous communities to declare independence from Brazil so that those governments can take the Amazon as their own. While Bolsonaro eventually scraped his pledge to withdraw from the agreement, and the US remains the only country to actually do so, this could have set a dangerous precedent for other powerhouse countries to leave the agreement as well, effectively nullifying it.

Comparing Trump’s environmental policies to Bolsonaro

Trump and Bolsonaro also had similar plans to defund or dismantle their federal environmental agencies, for the US, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and in Brazil, the Ministry of the Environment (MMA). In the US, the Administrators of the EPA were deep in scandal and controversy. The first one was Scott Pruitt, a senator from Oklahoma, who was a fossil fuel industry enthusiast and had a disdain for climate science. He supported Trump in his rollbacks of the EPA regulation on multiple different issues. Trump signed an executive order in 2017 that would lift bans on federal leasing for coal, lifts restrictions on the production of oil, natural gas, coal, and shale, returns the power of such regulation to the states, and a re-evaluation of the Clean Power Plan. This is Obama’s signature climate policy which intended to cut 32% of power plant emissions by replacing coal with renewable energy. This plan only works if the EPA has regulation power of carbon pollution regulations. However, under Trump, this was not going to happen. If these carbon pollution regulations do not happen, the American people, especially the poor and people of color will suffer from it. There is also something called the Waters of US Rule, which Trump also wanted to eliminate. This was passed by the EPA in 2015 to include smaller streams in the Clean Water Act that could provide drinking water to a third of Americans, especially some in rural areas where access to clean drinking water is sparse. If the EPA’s ability to regulate the Clean Power Plan and the companies that produce fossil fuels, we could have a global climate crisis on our hands. Bolsonaro has used similar tactics to dismantle his federal environmental agency, the Ministry of the Environment (MMA). In 2019, he announced that he would be stripping the environment ministry’s authority over regulations in the forestry and water agency, which is a big problem since the Amazon rainforest is included in that description. Critics of this decision said that the lack of clear directives to fight against climate change is not allowing Brazil to meet its commitments to cut greenhouse gasses, which Bolsonaro has already done. Environmentalists at the time feared that since the ministry does not have as much regulatory power, deforestation in the Amazon will increase. In addition, in 2020, his government published 195 acts, ordinances, decrees, and other measures which would continually dismantle Brazil’s environmental laws. These acts would allow those who illegally deforested and occupied conserved areas of the Amazon to receive full amnesty for their crimes. Also, the supervision of fisheries was being relaxed so this could increase the illegal trafficking of tropical fish. These acts have also led to the firing of specialized agency heads and the hiring of personnel with little to no experience in environmental management. Under Bolsonaro, the Amazon rainforest has suffered an increase in deforestation rates. Brazil was once the standard for environmental conservation since they have a rainforest, whose protection is necessary for survival on Earth. However, since Bolsonaro took office in 2019, he stripped enforcement measures of the MMA, cut funding for the MMA, fired environmental experts and replaced them with personnel with little to no experience, and weakened indigenous land rights. There have been many forest fires and criminal activity such as illegal logging due to the MMA’s inability to enforce its regulations and protections. In the first three years of his being in office, the Amazon had lost 8.4 million acres, which just for context, is the same size as the entire country of Belgium. It is a 52 percent increase from the deforestation rates from previous years. In 2021, 17% of the whole rainforest had been destroyed. There are estimations that if that number reaches 20 to 25 percent, it could threaten millions of people and animals whose lives depend on the rainforest.

The new presidents and their policies: Biden and Lula

However powerless we feel as individuals about the inevitability of climate change, there is hope for the United States and Brazil in their new leaders. Both new presidents have promised to undo a lot of the policies, cuts, and setbacks to the environment from the last administrations. In the 2022 Brazilian presidential election, many felt that the Amazon’s fate was at stake. Lula has pledged to protect the Amazon and is the ‘greenest’ candidate that ran in the election. He was president also in 2003 and he often points to his track record during that term to show that he can succeed in his plans. He started enforcing a policy called the Forest Code which got many government agencies to work together to decrease deforestation. When Lula was in power, deforestation fell dramatically by 80%. Since Lula’s win of the office only occurred a short while ago, we can only look at his past performance to see if he will hold to his future promises to reduce deforestation. In the United States, the same environmental promises were made by Joe Biden when he was elected. Since Biden has been in office since 2020, we can look to see how the promises he made during his campaigns have fared. Biden has started protecting land that was opened to drilling. Trump approved the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, which invaded Native American and farming land. He also opened up federally managed land and ocean for oil and gas drilling. Biden, however, has halted oil and gas leasing, reserved land and ocean drilling for oil and gas, and blocked the Keystone pipelines. In addition, Biden has started enforcing environmental regulations again. Trump allowed businesses that polluted to not be prosecuted by the federal government for any broken environmental laws. Biden has started cracking down on pursuing and prosecuting polluters while also suing fossil fuel companies for the climate damage they have caused. He restored flood protection standards, revoked the executive order that made it harder for agencies to issue environmental rules, and reserved the requirement to reduce climate considerations when assessing the impact of a project. All that being said, the future of the environment and the impact of climate change will be decided in the next few years. All we can do as individuals are elect the officials with the Earth’s best interests in mind and hopefully, the policies being created now will help prevent irreversible damage further down the line.