Tweet

Bloomberg Opinion

22 Apr, 11 tweets, 6 min read

Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, has not been pro-climate. He:

➡️Threatened to quit the Paris Agreement
➡️Courted miners and loggers
➡️Blew off international climate donors from Norway and Germany

Until now
trib.al/CJCJjm6

Brazil appears to be going through an existential reset on climate change:

🤝Logger-friendly Environment Minister Ricardo Salles is making nice with U.S. climate envoy John Kerry
✉️Bolsonaro wrote a letter to Biden, extolling Brazil’s green credentials trib.al/CJCJjm6

Brazil can bring plenty to the table on sustainable development:

🌾High-tech agriculture that reduces soil erosion and keeps carbon in the ground
🌊Hydropower lights up most homes and industry
🔥Clean-burning ethanol distilled from sugarcane
trib.al/CJCJjm6

Played smartly, Brazil’s environmental assets could win back much of what 27 months of incendiary Bolsonarismo have menaced:

💵Aid
💰Investment
🤝Strategic partnerships
🌎International credibility
🇧🇷Soft power
trib.al/CJCJjm6

Hopes rise in unlikely places. Look at Mato Grosso, a sprawling frontier state almost three times the size of Germany that straddles three signature tropical ecosystems:

✅The cerrado
✅The Pantanal wetlands
✅The Amazon’s high rainforest
trib.al/CJCJjm6

Mato Grosso was once rued as a crucible for habitat destruction. But it has sharply curbed deforestation even as the Amazon region as a whole has not, thanks to:

➡️Technology
➡️Vigilance
➡️Boots on the ground
trib.al/CJCJjm6

Authorities have been monitoring forest cover through satellite images and dispatching forest inspectors. In 2020, police seized:

🚜157 tractors
🛻11 trucks
🚁A helicopter

They also arrested 492 people for bootleg logging and forest cutting
trib.al/CJCJjm6

Ramping up that system took years of hard work. The result:

💨Outlaws are on the run
📈Licensed deforestation rose five-fold
📉Overall felling is down by 33.7% from 2019, on top of a dramatic decline of 88% between 2005 and 2012
trib.al/CJCJjm6

The Mato Grosso is projected to eliminate illicit clear-cutting by 2030.

The state is blazing a trail for others. This week, 24 of Brazil’s 27 governors penned their own sustainability pledge to stop the climate emergency by slashing emissions trib.al/CJCJjm6

Plenty of work remains. Illegal forest cutting is off the charts on public lands.

Most of it plays out on “non-designated” lands: legal speak for 50 million hectares of forests (an area the size of Spain) owned by the government but controlled by no one trib.al/CJCJjm6

Brazil could score an easy win by converting woodland blind spots into conservation areas and then using them as collateral for the carbon market.

If Bolsonaro misses that smart cue, Brazil risks ending up with less of both dollars and trees trib.al/CJCJjm6

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

More from @bopinion

Bloomberg Opinion

@bopinion

21 Apr

If the price of Bitcoin were to reach $200,000, half of the world’s billionaires would be crypto billionaires.

This crypto wealth has vast potential to reshape philanthropy trib.al/mTXkYLW

Bitcoin itself is a weird, stand-alone project.

In part because of this, we should expect a relative decline in the influence of longstanding nonprofit institutions — and more weird, stand-alone projects trib.al/mTXkYLW

The Bitcoin ecosystem has been self-sustaining since the beginning, and so it should hardly come as a surprise that Bitcoin billionaires take Bitcoin itself as a model for future institutions, including in philanthropy trib.al/mTXkYLW

Read 15 tweets

Bloomberg Opinion

@bopinion

19 Apr

@davidfickling

Covid-19 is going to kill more people in 2021 than it did last year. To see why, look at what’s happening in India, writes @davidfickling trib.al/PJggyHX

Cases have been surging in India.

On Sunday alone, 261,500 new infections were recorded. That’s as bad as the U.S. during all but the worst five days of the pandemic in December and early January trib.al/PJggyHX

The B.1.617 variant, which isn’t well understood yet, has features associated with higher infection rates and lower antibody resistance.

It's turning up in more than half of viral samples taken in India trib.al/PJggyHX

Read 9 tweets

Bloomberg Opinion

@bopinion

19 Apr

Normally, your 20s and 30s are prime years for forming households and buying first homes. For millennials, that hasn’t exactly been the case so far.

There are signs that that’s about to change trib.al/SKzQpps

Millennials’ consumer behaviour has been the phenomenon that launched a million takes.

Early arguments that they had fundamentally different priorities and values eventually gave way to an acknowledgement that no, they were mainly just broke trib.al/SKzQpps

So, what’s going on with U.S. households in 2020?

📉One Census Bureau survey says 2020 was the first year on record in which the number of households declined
📈Another Census Bureau survey says 2020 saw the second-biggest increase on record

🤔 trib.al/SKzQpps

Read 14 tweets

Bloomberg Opinion

@bopinion

18 Apr

Heavy nets 100-yards wide, equipped with steel doors, are dragged across the seafloor to scoop up cod, halibut, shrimp and other deep-dwelling prey.

The destructive effects of ocean-bottom trawling are easy enough to imagine from that description alone
bloom.bg/3alGDfK

In the process:

🐢Corals, stingrays, turtles and other unwanted creatures are also caught — then roughly, often fatally, discarded
🌱Ocean mud is stirred up, blocking light to plants
🐚Worms and other bottom-dwellers are left homeless and exposed bloom.bg/3alGDfK

This type of fishing accounts for about 25% of sea life caught worldwide. Studies have revealed how destructive and wasteful it is — especially now as trawlers move into deeper habitats.

Now, new research reveals another big problem: carbon emissions bloom.bg/3alGDfK

Read 12 tweets

Bloomberg Opinion

@bopinion

17 Apr

Hawaii re-opened to tourists last year, and by mid-March the number of arriving domestic passengers exceeded 2020’s anemic levels by 400%.

A surge in visitors is undoubtedly good for the state’s hard-hit tourism economy. But is it good for Hawaiians? trib.al/7L5ymTd

A year after Hawaii's borders were first shut due to Covid, many locals have embraced a new normal:

🏖️Uncrowded beaches
🚦Free-moving traffic
🌊Cleaner air and water

In a recent poll, nearly half of Hawaiians said tourists are no longer worth the trouble trib.al/7L5ymTd

Around the globe, people living in tourist-dependent economies have spent Covid appreciating life free from the visiting hordes.

That is renewing a global debate about who exactly should benefit from tourism trib.al/7L5ymTd

Read 11 tweets

Bloomberg Opinion

@bopinion

14 Apr

There’𝘀 been a ton of innovation in onlin𝗲 escape rooms over the last year.

Now, we’re joining in the fun, too! Your mission — should you choose to ac𝗰ept it — is t𝗼 escape this Twitter thread

🔑🔑 To do that, you’ll need to fi𝗻d and interpret two hid𝗱en “keys.”

Each 𝗸ey is a pair of words, and putting thos𝗲 words together will reveal the wa𝘆 out. Once you find the escape path, it will lead you to a secret location, the name of which is the final answer

Everything 𝗶n the thread i𝘀 fair game as a 𝗵iding spot — the clues to the keys could be anywhere 𝗶n the text, or even in other parts of the threa𝗱 like that picture in the secon𝗱 tweet.

But watch out: There may be a few red h𝗲rri𝗻gs as well bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

Read 10 tweets

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!