Antônio Fernando Pinheiro Pedro, São Paulo’s municipal secretary for climate change, was accused of being a climate denialist during a forum on climate change and environmental disasters hosted by the São Paulo chapter of the Brazilian Bar Association (OAB).
The event was held on June 1, but a video showing part of Mr. Pinheiro Pedro’s talk and the outraged reaction from Georgia Sena Martins, a federal prosecutor with a Ph.D. in geosciences, has just recently emerged and was published this week by website Metrópoles.
“The planet won’t be saved by us, no one saves Planet Earth, usually it saves itself. It’s been doing this for 4.3 billion years, and climate has been changing throughout this whole time,” Mr. Pinheiro Pedro says at the lectern. “We are part of the problem…but our solution is very small,” he continues, attributing current extreme events to “geological, cosmic, and solar” factors.
Ms. Martins then interrupts, accusing the municipal secretary of making “denialist” assumptions “without basis” and speaking a “litany of rubbish.”
This week, during the presentation of the second report of São Paulo city’s climate action plan, Mr. Pinheiro Pedro reportedly once again cast doubt on the scientific consensus surrounding man-made climate change and questioned the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations scientific body responsible which groups scientists from countries around the world to assess climate change.
The IPCC’s latest report, released this March, found among other things that human-induced warming has spurred unprecedented changes to the Earth’s climate and that greenhouse gas emissions are increasing global warming in the near term — but also offers solutions for decisive action to try and limit warming to 1.5 degree Celsius.
While acknowledging that cities must build resilience to extreme climate events, Mr. Pinheiro Pedro played down the role of humans in these phenomena.
Brazil is not immune from extreme meteorological events likely exacerbated by man-made climate change. The south of the country is currently on high alert, bracing for an extratropical cyclone — less than a month after a storm of the same kind killed 14 people in Rio Grande do Sul — while flooding in the north-eastern state of Alagoas has left tens of thousands homeless in the past days.
As The Brazilian Report noted in this Thursday’s Brazil Daily newsletter, Brazil is the fourth most vulnerable country to intense precipitation events according to a recent climate risk assessment by the International Energy Agency.
Scientists and environmentalists have condemned the positions defended by Mr. Pinheiro Pedro and deplored the fact that someone with his views should be leading the environmental agenda of Brazil’s largest city.
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