The Amazon Fires Are More Dangerous Than WMDs
One person shouldn’t have the power to set policies that doom the rest of humanity’s shot at mitigating rising temperatures.
Updated at 1:55 p.m. ET on August 25, 2019.
When Jair Bolsonaro won Brazil’s presidential election last year, having run on a platform of deforestation, David Wallace-Wells , “How much damage can one person do to the planet?” Bolsonaro didn’t pour lighter fluid to ignite the flames now ravaging the Amazon, but with his and rhetoric, he might as well have. The destruction he inspired—and allowed to rage with his days of stubborn unwillingness to douse the flames—has placed the planet at a hinge
