Emmanuel Macron may not technically be a celebrity, but he tweets like one.
Prior to the G7 summit, the French president declared on Twitter, “The Amazon rain forest—the lungs which produce 20% of our planet’s oxygen—is on fire.” He added that, “Our house is burning. Literally,“ and called the fires an “international crisis.“
Macron’s tweet was deeply ill-informed and misleading, but indistinguishable from the commentary of all the actors and singers who pride themselves more on their (alleged) social and environmental consciences than their knowledge. They got images that they believed were of today’s Amazon fires wrong and repeated lazy cliches about “the lungs of the planet,” wrapping it all in apocalyptic warnings of climate doom.
At least Diddy and Leonardo DiCaprio don’t host multilateral meetings of Western heads of state.
Macron does. He made the Amazon fires a major item of discussion at the G7 summit, with the ready assent of other Europeans governments. The Germans agreed that the Amazon fires are “frightening and threatening.”
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The fires aren’t an epochal event. According to the New York Times, the Brazilian agency tracking fires by satellite image reports that, at this point in the year, it’s the highest number of fires identified since 2010, which obviously isn’t thousands of years ago, indeed, not even a decade ago. In the 10 years prior to 2010, there were years when the number of fires was much higher.
The fires aren’t the spontaneous result of global warming. The program director of the group Amazon Watch told CNN, “The vast majority of these fires are human-lit,” noting that it isn’t easy for the rainforest to catch fire, even in the dry season.
Nor is it true that deforestation in the Amazon is spiraling out of control. Deforestation markedly diminished in the 2000s, declining by 70 percent from 2004 to 2012, per Shellenberger. It has picked back up again under Brazil’s new populist president, Jair Bolsonaro, a trend worth monitoring but hardly the onset of planetary catastrophe.
