Brazil’s Minister of Environment, Joaquim Leite, has criticized on Tuesday the «leaders and businessmen» who have flown in private planes these days to Egypt to attend the United Nations climate summit (COP27), which for the second time the still president, Jair Bolsonaro, refused to attend.
«Philanthropists, leaders and businessmen and their always exaggerated number of advisors arrived in private jets to the luxurious Red Sea resort to demand other emission reduction targets,» Leite has criticized after it became known that the president-elect, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, traveled in one of these planes.
Leite dismissed the proposals of those who attended the climate meeting in the Egyptian city of Sharm el Sheikh for being «completely disconnected from the reality of the different regions of Brazil and the world», referring for example to the use of «modern hydrogen or one hundred percent electric cars».
«Governments have the responsibility to act on this agenda with rationality without populist and utopian speeches,» said Leite, during his speech at the climate summit, which for yet another year was not attended by Bolsonaro, strongly reprimanded for his environmental policies.
While last year he decided not to attend the event held in Glasgow after being criticized for his management of the fires in the Amazon, on this occasion, both this summit and the G20 to be held in Bali, Indonesia, coincided with his defeat in the elections, which has led him to self-impose a kind of voluntary reclusion while Lula is already president.
Since he lost the elections last October 30, Bolsonaro has rarely left the Alvorada Palace, the president’s official residence, and has limited his interventions through social networks to the maximum.
His allies and party colleagues have gone from initial understanding to some anger at his ostracism and reproach him for not doing enough to be the leader the opposition needs, while his followers are still in the streets shouting coup claims and protesting Lula’s victory.
