Mac Margolis, Columnist

Brazil Has Climate Summit Shot at Redemption

Once a driver of deforestation, the state of Mato Grosso shows you don’t have to slash and burn the Amazon to thrive.

April 22, 2021 at 8:30 AM UTC

Mac Margolis is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin and South America. He is the author of “The Last New World: The Conquest of the Amazon Frontier.”

Time for a reset.
Photographer: Mauro Pimentel/AFP via Getty Images

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Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro needs no introduction at this week’s virtual climate summit convened by U.S. President Joe Biden. He rode into office in 2019 threatening to quit the Paris Agreement on climate change, courted miners and loggers and blew off international donors Norway and Germany rather than hear them harp about the fate of the Amazon rainforest. With an eye on reelection in 2022, he has habitually dissed any who would put trees before the stump.

Until now. Gone is the mercurial foreign minister who dismissed climate change as a globalist ruse. Logger-friendly Environment Minister Ricardo Salles is making nice with U.S. climate envoy John Kerry. And Bolsonaro wrote a seven-page letter to Biden, heralding the sustainability agenda and extolling Brazil’s green credentials.