Meanwhile in Indonesia, the two presidential candidates – incumbent Joko Widodo (known as Jokowi) and ex-army officer Prabowo Subianto – have given vague promises of environmental protection but few details. That said, Jokowi, who won as an outsider populist in 2014, has done more than some expected to tackle deforestation. As of 2015, Brazil was home to 12 percent of total forest global cover, the DRC nearly 4 percent and Indonesia 2 percent, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. 

The alliance of rich, emerging and poor economies that sealed the Paris climate deal is falling apart. In 2015, the world’s top two emitters, the US and China, joined with Brazil, some small island countries and the European Union, led by Germany, France and the UK, to land the agreement. But climate change politics have shifted significantly since then, with two more big tilts this week. Brazil elected a staunch and radical anti-environmentalist president, while Germany’s Angela Merkel confirmed her exit plans

Both Bolsonaro and Mourão have defended the excesses of Brazil’s military dictatorship, which displaced and killed (intentionally or through diseases) thousands of Indians in the Amazon, amid an effort to build roads and hydroelectric dams in the forest. The armed forces have never recognized any wrongdoing. “If he wins, he will institutionalize genocide,” says Dinamam Tuxá, the national coordinator of Brazil’s Association of Indigenous Peoples, in a phone interview with Climate Home News. 

In a report released this week, the ‘task force on displacement’ called for better data collection and analysis on climate migration trends, and finance to help those hardest hit. “The UN currently lacks a systemwide lead, coordination mechanism, or strategy on disaster displacement, including related to climate change,” wrote the authors, who mostly represent UN agencies. They called on Secretary General Antonio Guterres to develop a response.

As the national broadcaster, the BBC reaches a lot of people. “As far as the public is concerned the BBC is the number-one source of information on climate change,” said Richard Black, director of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit and former BBC science and environment correspondent. “With this heatwave, the questioning has started a little bit earlier than it has done in previous years. One of the reasons is that this heatwave covers a pretty large area,” added Black.

“[Climate change] is the single greatest threat to anything anyone holds dear,” said Max Wakefield, one of the self-appointed ‘Trump babysitters’. “We have enough on our plate dealing with the racism, sexism, so we could do without piling ecological collapse on that.” Trump’s administration has stripped regulations designed to slow global warming and the president intends to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement as soon as legally possible.

Thoreau is relevant today because we continue to confirm his observations. He taught us that treating the environment with respect not only made economic sense, it made even more sense as a moral imperative. “We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander,” he wrote. “In Wildness is the preservation of the World.”

The sea level rise it could cause may total five or six feet by the end of this century, twice the worst-case United Nations scenario of three years ago – “so high,” according to the front-page New York Times story quoting Pollard, “it would likely provoke a profound crisis within the lifetimes of children being born today.” Think of it: Along all 95,000 miles of American coastline – not to mention coastlines all over the earth – “immense areas will most likely have to be abandoned to the rising sea.” 

The fact is that there is no way any politician can justify Keystone and still say it’s time to take stronger action on global warming. As Bill McKibbon’s 350.org puts it: “President Obama says that he will reject the pipeline if it poses a risk to the climate. That makes his decision simple: building an 800,000 barrel-per-day pipeline of the world’s dirtiest oil will mean more tar sands dug up and burned, and more carbon pollution.”

 

The United States and China announced new goals for reducing their global warming pollution in the coming decades, with the U.S. ramping up its rate of decarbonization in five to 10 years and China promising that its carbon emissions will peak in the next 15 years. The announcements, which came at a multinational summit in Beijing Tuesday, made clear for the first time the commitments that the two biggest sources of greenhouse gases will make as part of the urgent United Nations negotiations.