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The Amazon is being destroyed for a climate summit

Yep, you read that correctly. We’re living through peak dystopian greenwashing. 

There’s something morbidly poetic about bulldozing eight miles of pristine Amazon rainforest to build a road to a… climate summit.

A new four-lane highway has cut through tens of thousands of acres of land ahead of COP30, which takes place in the Brazilian city of Belém. The goal is to reduce traffic as around 50,000 people descend on the area as part of the event.

Besides destroying a stretch of the world’s most vital and protected ecosystem, the new road will connect Belém’s city center to the climate conference venue, providing easy access to delegates eager to discuss deforestation’s dangers, amongst other environmental concerns. You can’t make this stuff up.

This is greenwashing with a chainsaw. A crash course in how performative environmentalism continues to disrupt any real progress. The Amazon is vital to our entire global landscape, absorbing carbon for the world and providing crucial biodiversity.

Every one of us relies on the region for food, water, wood and medicine, while the 150-200 billion tons of carbon stored in the rainforest help to stabilise the Earth’s climate. The region is also home to most species of primate than anywhere else on Earth, and around 47 million people, including 2.2 million Indigenous people speaking over 300 different languages.

Cutting down swathes of the Amazon isn’t just an aesthetic issue, but a threat to humanity as we know it. The rainforest quite literally serves as our planet’s lungs.

The new summit highway’s construction is justified under the guise of improving infrastructure for COP30. Translation: Let’s raze the planet’s lungs so we can comfortably discuss how to save them.

Besides the global impacts of this decision, locals are already feeling the impacts on their livelihoods.

‘Everything was destroyed,’ says Claudio Verequete, who lives around 200m from where the road will be completed. He used to make an income harvest açaí berries from nearby trees.

‘Our harvest has already been cut down. We no longer have that income to support our family.’

Verequete also says he’s received no support from the state government, and worries further construction will only lead to more damage for local business.

‘Our fear is that one day someone will come here and say: ‘Here’s some money. We need this area to build a gas station, or to build a warehouse.’ And then we’ll have to leave. We were born and raised here in the community. Where are we going to go?’

Adler Silveira, the state government’s infrastructure secretary, described the highway as an ‘important mobility intervention’ and a ‘sustainable highway’ (whatever that means).

‘We can have a legacy for the population and, more importantly, serve people for COP30 in the best possible way,’ he said.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has also defended the project, saying it will help to highlight the needs of the Amazon and show the world what the federal government has done to protect it. Urmmm, okay? I fear there may be a better way to go about promoting the Amazon’s well-being without, well, hacking down miles of it.

But despite how painfully ironic all of this is, hypocrisy is ultimately a mainstay of environmental discourse. Western corporations have long been masters of the green illusion, with airlines slapping ‘carbon offset’ labels on their tickets, despite guzzling thousands of tons of jet fuel.

Fast fashion brands continue to churn out ‘sustainable’ collections while filling landfills with last season’s microplastics. Even oil giants run heartwarming commercials about renewable energy, their pastel-drenched montages conveniently omitting their main source of profit.

The Amazon road debacle is simply a bolder, more destructive example of the same old con. A four-lane highway through a delicate rainforest ecosystem isn’t just environmentally irresponsible; it’s a glaring emblem of the performative nature of the green sector.

Climate action often appears as little more than a PR campaign designed to placate shareholders and Instagram followers alike. It’s a tale as old as time.

Even the language around environmentalism is wrapped in clever euphemisms. ‘Sustainable development’ often means ‘slightly less destructive capitalism.’ ‘Eco-friendly’ labels are frequently affixed to products with negligible reductions in waste. And now ‘infrastructure improvement’ apparently includes reducing eight miles of biodiversity to a construction site.

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