The Amazon Scam

Rich Lowry

Emmanuel Macron may not technically be a celebrity, but he tweets like one. Prior to the G-7 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,” and called the fires an “international crisis.” Macron’s tweet was deeply ill-informed, but indistinguishable from the misleading rants of sundry actors and singers. At least Diddy and Leonardo DiCaprio don’t host multilateral meetings of Western heads of state. Macron does. He made the fires a major item of discussion at the G-7 summit, with the ready assent of other European governments. The problem with the G-7 summit wasn’t that Donald Trump didn’t get with the program; it was that the program itself, insofar as it dealt with the fires, relied on a hysteria-induced misunderstanding of what’s happening in the Amazon. The Amazon fires are catnip for proponents of radical action on the climate. They pine for a mediagenic, easy-to-understand planetary emergency and are happy to manufacture one as necessary. It wasn’t just celebrities who hyped the fires. An NBC News headline declared, “Amazon wildfires could be ‘game over’ for climate change fight.” According to CNN, “An inferno in the Amazon, two-thirds of which is in Brazil, threatens the rainforest ecosystem and also affects the entire globe.” The meteorologist Eric Holthaus related the opinion of a specialist in prehistoric Amazon fires that “the current fires are without precedent in the past 20,000 years.” This is the sense of imminent crisis that so moved Macron and his brethren. Some press reports, beneath the alarming headlines, related a more sober version of events, and a few isolated voices, most notably the environmentalist Michael Shellenberger at Forbes, resisted the dominant narrative. The fires aren’t an epochal event. According to the New York Times, the Brazilian agency tracking fires by satellite reports that, at this point in the year, it’s the highest number of fires since 2010, which isn’t thousands of years ago — indeed, not even a decade ago...MORE