Paving Paradise for a Meeting About Paradise?
Well, I'll be hornswoggled. They're going to cut a four-lane highway through the Amazon rainforest so that all the important folks can get to a climate summit in Belém. You can't make this stuff up, can you?
Here we have all these world leaders, fifty thousand of 'em they say, flying in to talk about saving the planet, and the first thing they do is okay a project that tears up a chunk of one of the most important parts of it. It's like saying you're trying to save water while drilling a new well in the middle of a drought. The logic of some people just escapes me.
They say it's to ease traffic to the city, which is going to host this big conference in November. Fifty thousand people descending on a city is bound to cause a bit of a jam, I suppose. But isn't the point of a climate summit to maybe think about ways we don't have to build more roads and encourage more driving?
It reminds me a bit of when they build those "theme restaurants". They go to all sorts of trouble to make it look like a pirate ship or an airplane, and you sort of forget they're supposed to be serving you food. Here, they're going to this great environmental expense so that everyone can talk about the environment. You'd think the irony would be as thick as the humidity in the Amazon.
Once that highway's in, it's in. It's not like you can just roll it up and put it away after the summit's over. It'll be there encouraging more traffic, more development.
It all feels a bit backward, doesn't it? Like trying to save paper by sending out six copies of a memo about saving paper. You scratch your head and wonder if anyone's really thought this through. Maybe they should have just had a video conference. It might not have been as grand, but I bet the trees would have appreciated it.
https://youtu.be/DYtmc2JPIfM?si=3Cc09TK0Ch-YJnDZ