By Ricardo Targino, journalist, filmmaker and one of the founders of Mídia Ninja

Not every hero wears a cape, but every Brazilian who used his right to vote and in the face-to-face moment with the ballot box decided to vote for Lula, helped save the planet and prevented the acceleration of its destruction by stopping the Bolsonarist ecocide. Lula will go to COP27 in Egypt and his participation in the Climate Summit will be his international agenda as president-elect announcing to the world that we are back. Brazil enters the field again when the whole of humanity is faced with its last chance to avoid the environmental collapse of the planet.

The end of the world elections

When the ballot boxes of Brazil’s young and still fragile democracy spoke, it was not only the immediate direction of Brazil itself that they pointed to. After all, on our ballot boxes weighed an enormous responsibility to the whole of humanity.

The future of the entire planet was at stake in the Brazilian elections, because the health of the Earth as a living organism that harbours human life depends on us. All the peoples of the world will end up being inevitably impacted by the project that won the elections, because the healing of the Earth depends a lot on us and on our own healing process as a society that can and must move towards a new model of development with social inclusion, sustainability and environmental commitment capable of becoming an example of climate justice for the world.

The world at the end of the world

There is no denialism capable of hiding the seriousness of the situation in which we find ourselves. The effects of climate change foreseen for 20 years have already started to be felt and scientists are unanimous in concluding that we are already facing a very dangerous acceleration of the climate crisis.

We are the last generation that can save Amazonia, a territory that is a key element in the global fight against climate change. Without the protection of our forest, we are fatally condemned to global warming and its dramatic and unpredictable consequences.

Without the care for our rivers, springs and sources, the water crisis that is already a reality for billions of people in various regions of the planet, further compromising adequate access to water, this vital and increasingly scarce commodity on Earth.

Last June, the United Nations Organization launched a global alert warning that the current food crisis that is already affecting several countries will have catastrophic consequences by the year 2023.

None of this is futuristic dystopia or a science-fiction script. They are facts and data from the reality around us when we find ourselves face to face with the ballot box. The planet is sick and cries out for help, while the world, in its most irresponsible and suicidal cynicism, closes its ears and pretends to act by posing for photos that meet the marketing plans but distance us even more from solving the problem.

Brazil’s time and turn in the fight for climate justice

For years Brazil was in the world vanguard of the fight for environmental preservation and for many countries we were a reference in the development of public policies and the adoption of concrete measures capable of having an impact on reality, progressively improving our indicators and gaining the trust of our most distinguished international partners.

Nothing has ever been the same since that fateful night of the parliamentary coup against Dilma, in April 2016. We lost the position of international respect we used to enjoy and shamefully became part of the disgusting list of countries that contributed most to global warming.

With regard to the environment and the climate, the devastating consequences of the coup meant that we stopped being heroes and became real villains in the eyes of the whole world. But the coup was only the gateway to a real tragedy of planetary dimensions led later by Jair Bolsonaro, who criminally exploded deforestation, fires, river pollution and water contamination, the genocide of indigenous peoples, the murder of environmental activists and protectors of forest life. The Bolsonaro government is also responsible for a blackout of environmental policies in the country, the dismantling of IBAMA and other environmental protection institutions, the scrapping of FUNAI and policies for indigenous peoples, in addition to an unprecedented occupation of the forest by criminal organizations that saw the absence of law as an opportunity to act predatorily in illegal mining, animal trafficking, irregular timber exports and a whole series of criminal activities typical of pirates who have taken over the forest. The truth is that never before in the history of Brazil has organised crime had as much territorial control over our forests and areas of environmental protection that are the heritage of the Union as it has today, thanks to Bolsonaro.

To crown our demoralization, Brazil recorded in 2021 the largest increase in greenhouse gas emissions in almost two decades. Data from the Climate Observatory reveal that the destruction of the Amazon forest and other biomes accounted for almost half of this irresponsible explosion in emissions.

It is from this Dante’s Inferno that the Brazil of the new Lula era needs to be reborn in order to effectively exercise its leadership in the world in the greatest challenge ever posed to humanity as a whole and in the face of which world geopolitics and the leaders of the most important economies have repeatedly failed.

As ruin looms ever more quickly with environmental collapse looming on the horizon, both governments and corporations in rich countries, responsible for the bulk of CO2 and methane emissions, make it clear that they are not up to the challenge and will not have the capacity or competence to act to promote the urgent changes that need to be made in a systemic way to have any effect on the apocalyptic course of the crisis.

It is useless to expect responsible leadership from the US or China, since they are the largest emitters and are internally tied to interests that prevent them from accelerating the reduction of emissions. China and the US, together with the European Union, Russia and India are responsible for 58.73% of CO2 emissions. Almost 80% of the total emissions are produced by the G20 countries.

The great injustice of the climate crisis lies in the fact that the climate damage is produced by the rich countries, but its most severe consequences and the most dramatic extreme events are felt most by the developing countries and the poor. The rich countries acknowledged at the COP26 in Glasgow that they are failing to meet their targets while the developing countries made a point of charging for the $100 billion a year promised by the rich countries’ governments for tackling the climate crisis, a commitment that has never been met nor left on paper to date.

This is why the climate crisis can only be answered with a global fight for climate justice, capable of fighting inequality between nations, making the countries responsible for climate damage accelerate measures to reduce their emissions and finance actions to prevent and reduce damages from extreme events in poor countries. It will be a developing country with unquestionable importance given its environmental heritage and biodiversity.

All this needs to occur together with a radical change in the energy matrix of all the economies of the world, accompanied also by a profound change in the consumption patterns of capitalist society. In the same way that there is no planet B where we can take refuge, there is no plan B capable of producing results that avoid the announced collapse.

This is where Brazil enters the story, not only because of its centrality and its importance in the planet’s environmental balance, but mainly because Lula’s return to the Palácio do Planalto, his going to the COP27 in Egypt as the first international trip of the elected president, with the prestige he still enjoys, will certainly put us in the spotlight of the global fight for climate justice and may open the way for this leadership, just as Brazil once led the fight against hunger in the world.

Brazil, an environmental powerhouse: The nation that can lead the world in the climate crisis

As a country, Brazil has all the conditions to accelerate its own agenda to reduce environmental damage, reforesting and recovering its degraded biomes, investing in science and technology to ensure the sustainability of our production, developing clean energy matrix alternatives and promoting historically neglected actions both in the area of basic sanitation, waste and sewage treatment and in our transport matrix, which is totally dependent on fossil fuels and whose decarbonisation is urgent.

This is the path to a new type of economic development capable of accelerating growth while accelerating the preservation of life on the planet. Therefore, any national development project and Brazil’s international reinsertion must necessarily include the affirmation of our place in the world as an ENVIRONMENTAL POWER. That is why all economic planning, all efforts to accelerate growth, all infrastructure projects, all investments, all works, all technology, all our engineering, all our production of goods and services, our business models, our agriculture, our energy matrix, our transport network, our science, our imagination, our ideas, everything will need to be harmonised and prioritised by our deepest determination to be this environmental powerhouse that will serve as an example to the other nations of the planet.

After all these years of isolation and mistrust, we are facing a great opportunity for Brazil to make a difference in the world and take its place as a leader in the fight to save the planet. A place that seems to be naturally yours.

This is perhaps the great mission of Brazil in the world: to conduct a necessary and urgent healing process that will impact on ways of life and restore our harmony with nature.

Perhaps this is also the life mission of president Lula, after overcoming injustice and being brought back to power by the vote of his people.

Perhaps there is no other country or other leadership up to the challenge that we humans have ahead of us.

What is certain is that it is our last chance.