A recent Bloomberg View article (“Brazil Puts a Denier in Charge of Climate Change,” January 7) draws a sharp contrast between Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s September UN General Assembly reference to climate change as “one of the greatest challenges of our times” and a just-announced appointment to her cabinet. A slightly edited version of my “comment” to the article follows.
It appears that the President has selected a climate denier – Aldo Rebelo – as Brazil's minister of science and technology (the agency that has climate in its portfolio), a move that seems seriously misguided. Aside all else, Brazil's acknowledged emergence as a significant power – hemispherically and beyond – makes responsible political judgments a test of the country's claim to international respect. If this appointment threatens a politicization of climate science, Brazil fails that test decisively.
But there is more. And it adds both irony and disillusionment to what, over a number of years, has pointed to a growing Brazilian policy-embrace of environmentally responsible growth. And no one embodies that record more than Dr. José Goldemberg – the Brazilian-born physicist who, both as a distinguished academic and public official, played a leading role in hosting the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio. Among many other distinctions, Goldemberg served as Rector of the University of Sao Paulo, Visiting Professor at Princeton, President of the Brazilian Association for the Advancement of Science, and co-recipient of the (US-based) Mitchell Prize for Sustainable Development.
That a tradition reflected in such contributions should, in effect, be so casually shrugged off with the appointment of a viscerally committed climate denier – one who appears to lack the interest or intellectual wherewithall to articulate the basis for such denial – is truly troubling.
