17
votes
Large wildfires choke 60% of Brazil and large chunks of neighboring countries in smoke
Link information
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- Title
- Choking on Smoke: 60% of Brazil Shrouded in Fire Haze
- Authors
- Published
- Sep 10 2024
- Word count
- 303 words
For reference, a Brazilian Government source has estimated that over 55 thousand square kilometers of land have burned since this year began, which is comparable two and a half New Jerseys or over half of Indiana in the USA or all of Denmark in Europe. Where I live the sky is often gray to the point where it isn't immediately obvious if it is a full-on overcast day or just a really polluted one.
Black rain has already happened in Uruguay.
Basically, not only are these fires caused by Climate Change, they are also caused by agribusiness people setting fire to the forests and vegetation because they're presumably too lazy to even mow it down.
Jesus that black rain is grim.
Your post seems to indicate you're from about those parts.... I'm curious what your impression is of how seriously these wildfires, and global warming more generally, are taken over there?
As far as I can tell it's heavily correlated with how conservative people are (as per usual), but unfortunately agribusiness captures a lot of people (and a large share of Brazil's political and economic power) fairly hard in decent part because our biggest news outlet is known for the catchphrase "Agro is tech, Agro is pop, Agro is all/everything" so the image of the small farmer is conflated with these industries. (This is also common in many many other places, but meaningfully worse here than in the west because as a developing country actual small farmers are a significant portion of the country's population.) There's also the factor that many or even most adults spend most of their day working or commuting in offices, buses, cars, etc. and people might only notice in passing that the sky above them is literally gray instead of blue while working and driving and browsing the phone in the bus. The last factor working against people caring is that the climate ministers saying these fires are caused intentionally is not common knowledge and people can just assume this summer (spring, but the northern half of the country in particular really doesn't have that type of season) was particularly bad because of El niño or some wholly natural phenomenon, or that Brazil isn't really too responsible for the heating because the bulk of emissions have always come from rich countries. My classmates seem to notice and talk about it sparingly and probably care about climate change at least a little but everyone has something more important to do.
Ahhhh so pretty much the usual story. Thanks for the insight though!
California is also on fire right now. The cal fire website is currently reporting 6000 fires being fought by nearly 550,000 emergency workers.