Stop Eco-Apartheid: The Left's Challenge in Bolsonaro's Brazil

The horrors threatened by Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil's new president, are compounded by the global climate stakes of a potential war on the Amazon. Roberto Schaeffer, a leading energy and environment scholar based in Rio de Janeiro, told me, "It could not be worse. Donald Trump would be a blessing for Brazil right now." Bolsonaro has promised an orgy of destructive new development in the embattled Amazon rainforest, which would release gigatons of heat-trapping carbon. But the backlash has already begun. Brazilian social movements are mobilizing, and even key pro-Bolsonaro business leaders are telling him to back off on deforestation. This combined economic and environmental battle isn't a sideshow—it's the new center stage.