Misinformation fuels wildfires in California, the Amazon
The Amazon rainforest fires are worse than last summer. But don’t tell that to Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro.
The Amazon rainforest fires are worse than last summer. But don’t tell that to Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro.
“This story that the Amazon is on fire is a lie,” Bolsonaro said last week, during the Presidential Summit of the Leticia Pact for the Preservation of the Amazon. “And we must combat this with real numbers.”
The “fake” numbers are from Brazil’s National Institute for Space, a federal institute that monitors fires and deforestation. The numbers — that last month saw 28% more Amazon fires than the previous July — didn’t tell a good story, but they were backed by good science (i.e, rooted in scientific observation and modeling and confirmed by experts).
The fires-are-a-lie story by CNN didn’t entice me to throw my computer out the window, as it probably should have. But it did get me to think about the roots of climate denialism and the role of lying and misinformation in politics.
U.S. President Donald Trump, like Bolsonaro, hates bad news and sound science, two traits currently on display in his handling of California’s devastating wildfires. Though Trump hasn’t denied their existence, he has denied climate change, which is almost certainly the culprit of these massive fires.
Trump has also scrambled the truth in another way, making unsubstantiated claims about something he has little grasp on. In a speech in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on Thursday, Trump blamed California’s fires on “many years of leaves and broken trees,” doubling down on his long-standing argument for better forest management.
But since much of California’s burned land is in the Bay Area suburbs, and not forests, these wildfires wouldn’t have even benefited from forest management. The real problem here is record heat waves in California, which on Sunday saw the world’s hottest temperature ever reliably recorded on Earth. This extreme heat, likely fueled by climate change, created the dry conditions necessary for wildfires to spark and spread.
But bashing California and its governor, Gavin Newsom — who Trump has spat with before — does little to solve the problem at hand. All it really does is deflect blame and fuel misinformation.
Over 97% of scientists agree in human-caused climate change, yet politicians like Trump and Bolsonaro have used their platforms to fan flames of doubt, calling climate change a hoax and politicizing it. But this isn’t just a Trump issue — American politicians have been lying about climate change for decades.
The Republican party is largely to blame for this, but Democrats aren’t off the hook either. They’ve created their own brand of environmentalism that looks good on paper but seldom plays out in action — and that paper is sometimes pretty thin.
Congressman Tim Ryan (D-OH), for example, has championed himself a friend of the environment. But this week HEATED reported that Ryan, despite signing a No Fossil Fuel Money pledge, has taken $10,000 from notoriously corrupt fossil fuel company FirstEnergy and then lied about it.
Also this week, the Democratic National Committee quietly, and deceptively, removed the demand to end fossil fuel subsidies from their platform. After backlash from environmentalists, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden recommitted the demand. Still, it wasn’t a good look for a party that’s failed to ever make any major climate inroads.
Voters are disenfranchised by lies, and if we equate all politicians with liars (hard not to do sometimes), we have little motivation to vote when it matters. When left with a choice between an anti-climate guy and someone who talks the talk without walking the walk, what does it matter if the result is the same?
Of course, a Biden presidency is much better than four more years of Trump. As Bill McKibben wrote in The New Yorker this week, however, real change goes beyond simply getting someone in office.
“[M]ovements can’t demobilize after Election Day,” wrote McKibben. “The pushing never ceases… When politicians are weathervanes, you need to make the wind blow.”
Here at Planet Days, we know who we’re voting for in November. But politicians are politicians. And after November, we must continue to cut through the lies and misinformation to get to our goal: a sustainable, just, and ultimately, liveable planet for everyone.