Word that Brazil's new Science Minister is a true-blue Red State Red seems to have equally dismayed the environmental Left, and Neocons given to chanting 'Green on the outside, Red on the inside.'
Simon Romero, The New York Times man in Rio reports:
Calling Aldo Rebelo a climate-change skeptic would be putting it mildly. In his days as a fiery legislator in the Communist Party of Brazil, he railed against those who say human activity is warming the globe and called the international environmental movement “nothing less, in its geopolitical essence, than the bridgehead of imperialism.”
...his appointment this month as minister of science by President Dilma Rousseff is causing alarm among climate scientists and environmentalists here, a country that has been seeking to assert leadership in global climate talks.
Socialist International president turned United Nations Environmental Program head Dr. Gro Brundtland has yet to call Comrade Rebelo a Left Deviationist, but Environmental Defense Fund Director of Tropical Forest Policy Steve Schwartzman styles him an“At first I thought this was some sort of mistake, that he was playing musical chairs and landed in the wrong chair,” said Márcio Santilli, a founder of Instituto Socioambiental, one of Brazil’s leading environmental groups. “Unfortunately, there he is, overseeing Brazilian science at a very delicate juncture when Brazil’s carbon emissions are on the rise again.”
"old-line Communist fan of Marx and Engels,... on exactly the same page on climate science as the hardest of the hard-core tea partiers in the United States : it’s all speculation – ‘scientism’ – not real science.”
Schwartzmann isn't happy with Aldo's counterpart, either:
'The new Minister of Agriculture [ former Senator ] Katia Abreu ...led the Congress’ powerful anti-environmental, anti-indigenous 'bancada ruralista' or large landowners’ caucus, and earned the title among environmentalists of “chainsaw queen.”
Will Rebelo & Abreu's 2012 widely reviled revision of Brazil's forest protection laws divert Chris Mooney from his war on Republican scientists? The Climate Progress party line thus far remains pas d’ennemi à Gauche , in more ways than one.
