There is no crisis. But there’s lots of melodrama, double standards, and cherry picking.

In recent days, numerous people have stepped forward to challenge fake news about fires in the Amazon rainforest. This is encouraging.

Not everyone learns from mistakes, but many of us do. And most of us don’t like being taken for fools. We don’t appreciate being emotionally manipulated. If CNN and National Geographic can’t be trusted to give us the straight goods, if presidents of prominent European nations are shown to be spreading fake news willy nilly on Twitter, an ever-growing cohort of the population is surely learning the value of skepticism.

Last week, I assembled a list of articles that challenge the dominant, celebrity-fueled narrative about what’s going on in the Amazon. Since then, I’ve added to it. Still other commentary has since appeared. So here’s Part 2 of that list, along with some great lines:

As far as I can tell, there has been more coverage of the fake ecological ‘crisis’ in the Brazilian Amazon on the BBC website over the past fortnight than there has been of the very real political crisis afflicting [France’s] President Macron over the past year.

…the Amazon rainforest still spans 5.5 million square kilometres. It would take many centuries, perhaps even millennia, and a gargantuan industrial operation, to destroy it. It is not, as some greens would have you believe, tiny, fragile and on the brink.

Ben Pile, Emmanuel Macron’s fake news about the rainforest

the number of fires in Brazil this year is more than last year, but about the same as in 2016 and less than in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2010 and 2012. For most of those years, Brazil’s president was a socialist, not a right-wing populist so in BBC-world those fires did not count.

Matt Ridley, The most dangerous thing about the Amazon fires is the apocalyptic rhetoric

The most fervent devotees of climate change don’t really want science, no matter how often they invoke the word; they want drama and memorable images, believing they will catalyze action in a way that…the best research won’t.

Rich Lowry, How the G7 fell for the Amazon scam

deforestation increases until average income levels reach about $3,100 per capita. As it happens, Brazilian per capita incomes reached $3,600…in 2004, which is when deforestation rates began trending decisively downward.

Ronald Bailey, Don’t Panic: Amazon Burning is Mostly Farms, Not Forests

when somebody is talking about how to ‘make the world a better place’, it’s worth asking yourself whether they are really advocating for a kind of control, if they are making a power move or if there is an agenda being dressed up as altruism.

Michael Shellenberger, interviewed by Fraser Myers, What everyone gets wrong about the Amazon

The global condescension of the modern environmentalist movement is captured perfectly in this suggestion that we should treat foreigners as criminals simply because they want what we already have.

Brendan O’Neill, The myth of ecocide

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LINKS:

• my previous posts: Fake News and Fires in the Amazon
• Polar Bear Dies, National Geographic Lies
• Trump, Censorship & Media Bias
• The Media’s War on the Public