In Preparation for The COP30 Climate Summit, Brazil Destroyed 10,000+ Acres of Rainforest to Build a Highway (To Help With Flow of Traffic To The Conference)
BBC - A new four-lane highway cutting through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest is being built for the COP30 climate summit in the Brazilian city of Belém.
It aims to ease traffic to the city, which will host more than 50,000 people - including world leaders - at the conference in November.
The state government touts the highway's "sustainable" credentials, but some locals and conservationists are outraged at the environmental impact.The Amazon plays a vital role in absorbing carbon for the world and providing biodiversity, and many say this deforestation contradicts the very purpose of a climate summit.
Along the partially built road, lush rainforest towers on either side - a reminder of what was once there. Logs are piled high in the cleared land which stretches more than 13km (8 miles) through the rainforest into Belém.
Diggers and machines carve through the forest floor, paving over wetland to surface the road which will cut through a protected area.
God damn it COP30 climate change conference people... you can't do that. Not when you're climate change people. When you're bringing delegates from 200 countries together to negotiate global goals for tackling climate change and present their country's individual plans for contributing to those goals, the #1 thing you can't do is destroy tens of thousands of acres of rainforest to build a highway so the climate change people don't have to sit in traffic. It's so preposterously hypocritical it sounds more like a South Park episode than real life.
Picking a location for your climate change conference should have been so easy. So much of the world isn't a rainforest. You had 92% of the earth's surface to choose from. People are fully willing to overlook the hypocrisy of billionaires taking their private jets halfway around the world to attend the climate summit. They're willing overlook all the major corporations the climate change people are in bed with who directly oppose the environmental causes they support. They're willing to overlook each delegate arriving to the summit in their own private Range Rover. But when you destroy the rainforest to build a highway... people are going to notice that.
"The rainforests are being destroyed"... that's like, the one piece of climate change knowledge people remember from high school. Aside from taking the world's biggest flame-thrower to a glacier and hosting the CO30 conference on an oil tanker in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, it's the one thing you can't get away with. They had to do the only thing that even people who pay zero attention, and couldn't care less about climate change or politics, will notice and say, "Damn that's pretty hypocritical."
Just have your conference in New York City. Or Los Angeles. Or any major city in the world that's already too far gone, and already fully equipped to host a 50,000 person event. Why choose Belém? Is having the big climate change conference surrounded by rainforest supposed to remind people what they're working to save? Will being surrounded by trees better encourage the billionaires to open up their checkbooks? Is destroying a bunch of rainforests so that influential people won't have to sit in traffic on their way to the conference meant to put them in the climate change legislation passing mood? You'd really think when the Conference of Parties (COP) were deliberating over where to hold their 2025 conference, when they threw out a few cities and made their pro's and con's lists, that "will have to destroy a bunch of rainforest" would have been a big enough con for them to not move forward with that location.
But I'm sure I just don't get it. I'm sure the Conference of Parties knows exactly what they're doing. Sometimes you have to destroy the rainforest to save the rainforest. A simple blogger like myself couldn't possibly understand the intricacies of choosing where to hold a 50,000 person climate change conference. I'm sure clearing out tens of thousands of acres of Brazilian rainforest is what's best for the environment in the long run.