There’s a somewhat old saying: “If you want to preserve forest,” it goes, “don’t build a road through it. And if you do, make sure it’s a bad one.” But, hey, preserving trees is so yesterday; climate is the cool kids’ kick now. So it is, too, that in preparation for the upcoming COP(Conference of the Parties)30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil, the greentopian climatecrats are bulldozing a swath of the Amazon rainforest to build a new four-lane highway. They have their reasons, though. I mean, we wouldn’t want the swells inconvenienced by traffic while they’re trying to save the world.
This said, the Amazonian destruction is just the latest example of today’s greentopians’ apparent vendetta against trees.
The New York Post editorial board reported on the COP30 story Thursday:
Were it fiction, this tale would be a comic coup worthy of Evelyn Waugh, or at least Mike Judge.
Except it’s 100% real, with copious photos showing the devastated forest.
The news comes on the heels of The Post’s own devastating exclusive showing how World Bank officials — themselves among the biggest mouthers of climate pieties — emitted at least a brain-busting 1,500 metric tons of carbon flying to and from COP29 (last year’s green shindig), in Baku, Azerbaijan.
That’s the equivalent of the annual output of 200 US homes.
Hmmmm, maybe they couldn’t get their Zoom accounts working properly? It can be tricky.
Then again, onetime “climate envoy” John Kerry is notorious for flying private at every possible opportunity, arrogantly insisting that it’s the only option for “someone like me” (that is: a mega-wealthy Democrat with pretensions to moral greatness).
Enough Pretense to Go Around
Of course, Brazil being a big country, the greentopians didn’t have to have their shindig in the Amazon. But the nation’s far-left-wing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is all in. He “boasted that this year’s event will be ‘a COP in the Amazon, not a COP about the Amazon,’” the Post related in a Wednesday article. Below is a video illustrating the destruction.
Not surprisingly, most “normals” find the above shocking. “Nothing says ‘we care about the environment’ like chopping down the rainforest for a climate conference,” writes one video commenter.
“Insane! These entitled elitists are disgusting,” exclaims another. Yet a third suspects more Machiavellian motives.
“It’s real purpose is to give developers access,” he writes. And, in fact, the Post’s Wednesday piece may allude to this motive. To wit:
The state government of Pará initially hatched the idea for the thoroughfare in 2012, but it was repeatedly put on hold after concerns were raised over its environmental impact.
The state government has repeatedly insisted the highway is “sustainable” — but that rings hollow to locals and conservationists who are condemning the project.
“Everything was destroyed,” said Claudio Verequete, who lives about a quarter-mile from the roadway in progress and used to make a living harvesting açaí berries from trees near his land which are no longer standing.
… Even worse, Verequete said he’s afraid now that the once-unspoiled rainforest has been marred, future incursions further into the land could be imminent.
“Our fear is that one day someone will come here and say: ‘Here’s some money. We need this area to build a gas station, or to build a warehouse.’ And then we’ll have to leave.”
A Green Facade?
Though I’ll confess to being a bit of a dendrophile (in the non-perverse sense), it can sometimes be proper to cut down trees to facilitate development. Yet do the climate justifications for doing so make sense?
Or do they just make money?
For sure, they don’t make as much news as they should, given how much forest the climatecrats destroy. Just consider the Central Maine Power (CMP) corridor. This project enables the transfer of ostensibly “clean” green energy from Quebec, Canada, to Massachusetts. The process, however, involves cutting down thousands of trees in the largest U.S. forest east of the Mississippi. As to magnitude, this North Maine Woods “corridor” will be 145 miles long when completed. And 53 miles of it goes through what had been unbroken forest. This is, too, all so that, as the video below puts it, Maine can be “someone else’s extension cord.”
Unfortunately, it appears that the CMP corridor is now a done deal.
Worse still is the destruction of what’s known as “Grimm’s fairy tale forest” — the pre-Columbian Reinhardswald State Forest in Germany. And why is this place, home to 600-year-old oaks and beech trees that have seen four centuries, being decimated?
To make room for a wind farm — which will no doubt be obsolete in a decade or two.
Note here that while only the size of Montana (population: one million), Germany has 84 million people. It’s not a country with many “wide open spaces,” so the Reinhardswald is a rare commodity there, indeed. The forest area absolutely lives up to its billing, too, as the video below attests.
Tree-huggers No More
The irony here is that, as I’m old enough to remember (unfortunately), saving forest was once an environmentalist priority. In the early ‘70s, for example, transitioning away from paper supermarket bags (then the norm) became a priority. We were cutting down too many trees, we were warned. And while this threat was probably overblown, at least it reflects more realistic priorities. Preserving forests, after all, is something real. Our environment is nicer when there are more green spaces than when there are fewer green spaces.
But today’s climatecrats aren’t concerned about that. For they have “only 12 years to save the planet” — every year. And they have lavish conferences to attend to this end, to justify their existences and give their empty lives meaning. And we have a role to play, too.
We pay the bills.
