Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, hit out at the apparent Trump victory, claiming it marks a “dark, dark day for people around the globe.”
He said: “This is a dark, dark day for people around the globe. The world’s largest economy and most powerful military will be led by a dangerous, destructive demagogue.
“The next President of the United States is a man who actively undermines the rule of law, human rights, international trade, climate action and global security. Millions of Americans – especially women and minorities – will be incredibly fearful about what comes next. We stand with them.
…
Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, struck a similar tone. He said: “I know that many Londoners will be anxious about the outcome of the US Presidential election. Many will be fearful about what it will mean for democracy and for women’s rights, or how the result impacts the situation in the Middle East or the fate of Ukraine. Others will be worried about the future of NATO or tackling the climate crisis.
…
“The lesson of today is that progress is not inevitable. But asserting our progressive values is more important than ever – re-committing to building a world where racism and hatred is rejected, the fundamental rights of women and girls are upheld, and where we continue to tackle the crisis of climate change head on.”
A view of the damaged area after a deluge brought up to 200 liters of rain per square meter (50 gallons per square yard) in hours in towns across the region of Valencia, Spain on October 30, 2024. (Photo: Alex Juarez/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“These disasters are only getting worse, and stopping the industries and systems driving climate collapse is the only rational response,” one climate group said.
Spain’s deadliest flooding in 30 years killed at least 72 people as torrential rain slammed the eastern region of Valencia on Tuesday, with some towns recording a year’s worth of rain in a single day.
The flooding sent churning muddy water down narrow streets, tossing cars, downing trees, bulldozing bridges and buildings, and trapping people in rising flood waters.
“The neighborhood is destroyed, all the cars are on top of each other, it’s literally smashed up,” Christian Viena, who owns a bar in Valencia’s Barrio de la Torre, told The Associated Press. “Everything is a total wreck, everything is ready to be thrown away. The mud is almost 30 centimeters (11 inches) deep.”
As of Wednesday morning, officials reported 70 deaths in Valencia and two in the bordering region of Castilla La Mancha. However, the death toll could rise as search and rescue operations continue amid difficult conditions, such as power outages and blocked roadways. Many people remain missing with their fates uncertain.
This includes residents of Utiel in Valencia, whose mayor, Ricardo Gabaldón, told Spanish broadcaster RTVE that Tuesday was the “worst day of my life.”
“We were trapped like rats,” Gabaldón said. “Cars and trash containers were flowing down the streets. The water was rising to 3 meters (9.8 feet).”
One person who was rescued was Denis Hlavaty, who spent the night perched on the edge of the roof of a gas station where he works.
“It’s a river that came through,” Hlavaty told Reuters, adding, “The doors were torn away and I spent the night there, surrounded by water that was 2 metres (6.5-feet) deep.”
“The fossil fuel industry increases the climate emergency, destroys the balance of critical ecosystems, and puts people’s lives in danger.”
The storm also canceled high-speed rail travel between Valencia and Madrid and Barcelona, and derailed one high-speed train near Malaga, though no one was injured.
While the rains had tapered off in Valencia by Wednesday morning, the rest of the country is not out of danger, as the storm is projected to move northeast.
“We mustn’t let our guard down because the weather front is still wreaking havoc and we can’t say that this devastating episode is over,” Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told the nation on television Wednesday.
Even if the death toll does not rise, Tuesday’s floods are already the deadliest in Spain since 1996, when a flood near the Pyrenees killed 87. They are also the deadliest in Europe since floods in 2021 that killed at least 185.
In the immediate term, Tuesday’s deluge was caused by a phenomenon called a gota fría, or “cold drop,” a storm formed as cold air moves over the warm Mediterranean. In Spain, these kinds of storms are also commonly referred to with the acronym DANA—for Depresión Aislada en Niveles Altos, or isolated high-level depression.
However, scientists observe that the climate crisis is making rainstorms like this one more extreme, as warmer air can hold more moisture to dump when conditions are right. For Europe specifically, the warming of the Mediterranean causes more water to evaporate from its surface, super-charging rainstorms.
“Events of this type, which used to occur many decades apart, are now becoming more frequent and their destructive capacity is greater,” Ernesto Rodriguez Camino, senior state meteorologist and a member of the Spanish Meteorological Association, told Reuters.
The Spanish flooding comes a little more than a month after record rainfall swamped Central Europe and Eastern Europe, in an event that scientists concluded was made approximately twice as likely and 7% more severe by the climate crisis fueled primarily by the burning of fossil fuels.
“When we talk about climate change and climate emergency, it’s often perceived as an abstract concept far from our daily reality,” Eva Saldaña, the executive director of Greenpeace Spain, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, this is climate change: the intensification of extreme weather phenomenons like what happened tonight, with the level of destruction greater each time. Ignoring it causes deaths that we cannot allow.”
In a post on social media, Greenpeace Spain said that fossil fuel companies including the Spanish Repsol should pay for the damages.
“DANAS are more intense every time due to climate change,” the group wrote. “The fossil fuel industry increases the climate emergency, destroys the balance of critical ecosystems, and puts people’s lives in danger.”
⛈️Las DANAS son cada vez más intensas por el cambio climático. La industria fósil aumenta la emergencia climática, destruye el equilibrio de ecosistemas críticos del planeta y pone en peligro la vida de las personas.
Extinction Rebellion Global agreed. “These disasters are only getting worse, and stopping the industries and systems driving climate collapse is the only rational response,” the group wrote on social media.
The U.S.-based Climate Defiance, meanwhile, shared images of flood-ravaged streets with dismissals often leveled at climate activists.
Yellow Dot Studios, Don’t Look Up director Adam McKay’s climate-focused media studio, also shared an image of cars dropped in piles in the street by the flood waters to call out the double-standard in how direct-action climate protests and the corporate crimes of the fossil fuel industry are punished.
Friends of the Earth Spain focused on the human impacts, arguing that urgent climate action meant “putting people’s lives, and not economic models, at the center.”
“Don’t prioritize sending people to work in extreme and dangerous conditions,” the group wrote. “It is a priority to take effective, ambitious, and urgent measures in response to the climate crisis we are living through.”
Far-right industry allies with ties to Chevron have mounted an “unprecedented” pressure campaign calling on the Supreme Court to stop a potentially historic climate deception lawsuit against oil majors from going to trial. Graphic design by Tess Abbot
Fossil fuel interests are deploying unprecedented strategies to hide evidence of companies’ deception and block liability lawsuits before they reach trial.
This article by ExxonKnews is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
In the face of mounting scrutiny from local, state, and federal officials, fossil fuel companies and their allies are deploying a range of tactics to obstruct ongoing lawsuits and investigations concerning evidence that the industry has misled the public about the harms it knew its products would cause to the climate, environment, and human health.
Far-right industry allies with ties to Chevron have mounted an “unprecedented” pressure campaign calling on the Supreme Court to stop a potentially historic climate deception lawsuit against oil majors from going to trial. Republican attorneys general are separately urging the Supreme Court to throw out similar climate fraud lawsuits from five states. Plastics industry trade associations are suing the California state attorney general’s office to block an investigation into whether oil companies lied about plastic recycling. And fossil fuel giants and their trade groups have responded to congressional subpoenas with highly redacted records and “baseless” First Amendment legal defenses.
“I think we’re seeing an escalation by the industry to do anything it can to avoid being held accountable for the consequences of climate change,” said Lisa Graves, executive director of investigative watchdog group True North Research and an expert on dark money special interest groups. “It continues to try to thwart efforts to try to mitigate climate change and it continues to try to stop efforts to get any compensation for the harms it has caused, not just through the burning of fossil fuels but also by the delay and deceit that it has promoted through front groups.”
State and local climate lawsuits, which accuse oil and gas majors of lying about the dangers of fossil fuels and seek to hold them accountable for the resulting damages, are advancing in state courts despite the industry’s efforts. Most recently, a Colorado judge denied nearly all motions by ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy to dismiss the City and County of Boulder’s case against them.
It’s the fifth time to date that a court has rejected Big Oil’s efforts to dismiss climate accountability lawsuits — bringing the companies closer to facing trial and potentially billions of dollars in liability. If any of the cases go to trial, said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, “it will shine a very harsh light on the fossil fuel companies and it could lead to crushing monetary judgments.”
“Clearly the defendants here are using everything they can think of to derail these cases,” Gerrard said. That attitude has been most evident in Big Oil’s response to a lawsuit from Honolulu, which could be among the first communities to put the companies on trial.
In February, oil company defendants — including Exxon, Chevron, BP, and Shell — petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review a Hawai‘i state Supreme Court ruling that allowed Honolulu’s case to move toward trial. The case, the companies argued in their petition, is preempted by federal law and should be dismissed.
But after traditional legal arguments have failed to shield the industry to date, allies seem to be turning to more extreme and novel measures.
Leonard Leo to the Rescue?
In the weeks and months before the Supreme Court was scheduled to hear Big Oil’s petition in Honolulu’s lawsuit, a flood of social media ads and op-eds called for the Supreme Court justices to take up — and throw out — the case.
“To end this nuisance charade, the Supreme Court needs to take up the Honolulu case and declare once and for all that public nuisance is for local issues, not global climate change,” reads the narrator of one such video ad posted to X.
The name behind that ad, the Alliance for Consumers, is part of an organization called the Concord Fund, formerly known as the Judicial Crisis Network. Those groups, Graves and others have pointed out, are projects of billionaire Leonard Leo, head of the far-right legal advocacy group the Federalist Society and known as the architect of the current Supreme Court. CRC Advisors — one of the Leo-backed companies in the effort — appears to have had Chevron, a defendant in Honolulu’s case, as a client.
The fossil fuel industry also helped fund the Federalist Society, and partners at major law firms representing oil and gas companies — including Theodore Olson of Gibson Dunn,the law firm representing Chevron against Honolulu and other communities’ climate liability cases — sit on its board.
Former Hawai‘i Supreme Court Justice Michael Wilson, who served on the state’s highest court for a decade, called the pressure campaign targeting the Supreme Court a “powerful intervention” by “the strongest special interest group in the history of human civilization.”
“This is the most important case in the United States from the point of view that it will allow a jury of citizens to see the fraud and to decide what to do about it,” said Wilson. “This is a high-risk strategy that shows that the fossil fuel industry is desperate.”
Oil companies, which quietly funded front groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to sow climate denial and oppose climate action on their behalf, are now rallying their allies and benefactors to strike at lawsuits that seek to hold them accountable, explained Graves. In April, 20 Republican attorneys general filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of the oil companies’ petition.
“The Leo-tied groups are a soup-to-nuts intervention machine, from the Republican attorneys general to the judges he helped put on the court,” said Graves.
In June, the Supreme Court delivered a one-line order asking the U.S. Justice Department to weigh in on the case — an “extraordinary” response at this stage, according to Wilson, considering that the case has not yet gone to trial. If the Solicitor General neglects to weigh in before the election, that response could be in the hands of a Trump administration. Trump has promised that if re-elected, he will “stop the wave of frivolous litigation from environmental extremists.”
A ‘Highly Unusual’ Request
In May, 19 members of RAGA made a “highly unusual” request to the Supreme Court: to intervene in and undermine climate accountability lawsuits filed by five states — California, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Rhode Island — claiming that their cases would impose “ruinous liability” on fossil fuel companies and threaten “our basic way of life.”
The Supreme Court has original jurisdiction over disputes between states — meaning it can hear a case without it first being heard by another court — but such challenges are more commonly brought over issues like water rights, said Gerrard of Columbia’s Sabin Center. “I’ve never previously heard of an instance where there’s an effort to invoke the original jurisdiction of the [U.S.] Supreme Court to swat down litigation,” he said.
RAGA obtains some of its largest donations from the fossil fuel industry — including Koch Industries, Exxon, and the American Petroleum Institute, all of whom are defendants in climate liability cases — according to an analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy.
“These AGs have now placed their allegiance directly with the special interest group that is threatening the survival of future generations,” said Wilson.
The filing argues that “oil and natural gas have supported improvements in environmental quality and have reduced weather-related deaths,” and claims that “America’s air is cleaner than a century ago thanks in part to the increased use of oil and natural gas.”
It isn’t the first time Republican attorneys general have rushed to shield oil companies from accountability for their climate deception — and overtly used climate denialist talking points first leveraged by Big Oil in their defense. In 2016, Exxon sued the attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts in an attempt to block investigations into the company’s private research and public communications about climate change, claiming the probe was an attack on their free speech and other constitutional rights.
Republican attorneys general from 12 states filed a 2018 brief in support of the oil giant, arguing that “Climate change is the subject of legitimate international debate.”
“[T]he most undeniable fact about climate change is that, like so many other areas of science and public policy, the debate remains unsettled, the research is far from complete, and the path forward is unclear,” they wrote.
A(nother) First Amendment Fight
Another industry strategy to block accountability is playing out in response to California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s investigation into whether Exxon and other petrochemical companies deceived the public about the efficacy of plastic recycling as a solution to plastic waste. In May, the American Chemistry Council and Plastics Industry Association — two major trade groups representing oil and chemical giants including Exxon, Chevron, Amoco, Dow, and DuPont — filed a lawsuit against the attorney general in federal court, claiming the investigation violates their free speech rights.
Bonta, who had said he would decide whether to sue Exxon by the summer, responded with petitions asking the Sacramento County Superior Court to order the groups to comply with his office’s subpoenas.
“For years, the plastics industry has engaged in an aggressive campaign to deceive the public, perpetuating a myth that recycling can solve the plastics waste and pollution crisis,” Bonta said in a statement. “The continuous delay tactics are failing to comply with our subpoena. Enough is enough: What are they trying to hide?”
Members of Congress have similarly accused the Big Oil companies of trying to obstruct investigations.
When Senate Budget Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and House Oversight Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) referred their years-long investigation into the industry’s climate deception to the Justice Department, the lawmakers wrote that “some companies claimed that the First Amendment or undefined ‘privilege’ protected them from the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena.” The main subjects of that investigation have been Exxon, Shell, Chevron, BP, API, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
“The companies further obstructed the investigation by significantly redacting or entirely withholding more than 4,000 documents without any valid basis,” the lawmakers wrote, adding that their refusal to comply “provides a basis to infer that there is even more damning evidence of deceptive practices by the companies and their trade associations waiting to be uncovered.”
Fossil fuel companies and the law firms representing them have used a First Amendment defense to try to dismiss the climate accountability lawsuits, claiming company statements on climate change are protected political speech. One of the most prominent voices for that argument have been attorneys at Gibson Dunn, the firm that represents Chevron, and whose partner Theodore Olson sits on the Federalist Society board.
If these “overt” and “brazen” efforts to escape accountability can be overcome, the industry will no doubt face a reckoning, said Wilson, the former Hawai‘i Supreme Court justice. Communities like Honolulu “are being ravaged by climate” and “will apply the rule of law fairly,” he said.
“Hawai‘i is not a place that can be manipulated by the fossil fuel industry. That is a very big threat to the most powerful special interest group that’s now maintaining its power based on complicity.”
UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders under the Aarhus Convention Michel Forst attended the trial of five Just Stop Oil supporters at Southwark Crown Court. He attended as an observer because of his serious concerns.
Silencing defendants is the courtroom parallel to the wider attack on protest rights by the last government, including the “public nuisance” offence the Just Stop Oil five have been found guilty of and other measures that allow the police to shut down demonstrations before they have even begun, or haul peaceful citizens off marches for carrying placards or wearing imagery they object to.
Both reveal the collapse of ruling-class confidence in the people they rule. Grasping, after the shocks of Brexit and the Corbyn movement, that people are deeply dissatisfied with the system, their only answer is to ban protest and silence dissidents.
We cannot be silenced. The stakes are too high: as the Just Stop Oil cause illustrates, climate change, in the form of erratic weather, increasingly severe droughts and floods and crop failure, is already upon us. British farms saw a 19 per cent income drop in the last year because of mass flooding. The disruption to our lives from upsets to food production and the water supply will outweigh that from halting traffic on a motorway. The five must be freed.
Labour in power has a chance to change course from the crazy authoritarianism of the Tories. It is committed to restoring workers’ strike rights — but it must be made to restore protest rights too. Like the Tolpuddle Martyrs, we must “raise the watchword, liberty,” defying a state that tramples on our freedoms.
Right-wing groups are peddling false claims that the heavy rainfall that led to the region’s disastrous flooding in May is not related to climate change.
On May 9, volunteers and emergency workers were still rescuing people and animals who remained stranded on the sixth day of flooding on the streets of Rio Grande do Sul’s capital, Porto Alegre. Social media images of the rooftop rescue of a horse named Caramelo shocked the world.
A day before the dramatic rescue, Porto Alegre’s deputy mayor, Ricardo Gomes, appeared on a livestream wearing a cap with the Brasil Paralelo logo. Brasil Paralelo is a far-right media company with a streaming platform focusing on “journalism, entertainment, and education,” as its website states. The company was founded in Porto Alegre in 2016 and serves as a main channel of climate denialism among right-wing groups in Brazil. By wearing the Brasil Paralelo logo, Gomes associated himself with an institution that experts say is a purveyor of climate denialism, at the height of a climate-related disaster.
Some days later, Ricardo Felício, a professor of Brasil Paralelo’s education wing who has also appeared on many of the platform’s documentaries, wrote that climate change did not cause the extreme rainfall in South Brazil. He published his opinions in the Revista Oeste (West Magazine), a print and online publication that caters to far-right followers of former President Jair Bolsonaro, saying “CO2 has nothing to do with it!”
Southern Brazil was under water for the entire month of May, and two months later, it’s still facing the consequences of the worst flood in its history. Hundreds of thousands have been displaced – 180 have died, and 32 are still missing.
Flooded rivers swept away entire communities in a disaster on par with 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. The town of Estrela, located on the banks of Taquari River, was more than 70 percent submerged. In recent years, the region has experienced more and more extreme rainfall. Residents of towns on the Taquari River are still feeling the impacts of their third consecutive flood in a six-month period.
Porto Alegre, with 1.4 million inhabitants, was flooded for four weeks between May and June due to swelling water from the Guaiba River and failures of the city’s anti-flood system. The region’s main airport, Salgado Filho International Airport, is not expected to operate again until December.
Porto Alegre’s mayor, Sebastião Melo, and Deputy Mayor Gomes have led its city council since 2021. Both were elected in the wake of Bolsonarism and won decisive victories. And both have faced media criticism for failures in managing the city’s emergency responses to the flood and for failing to update its anti-flood system.
Gomes has participated in events run by Atlas Network, an extensive global collective of more than 500 think tanks, many known to have a history of working against climate action. He attended Atlas Network’s 2019 CEO Summit of the Americas, where leaders of right-wing think tanks gathered to exchange ideas. He appeared at the summit as president of RELIAL, a network of right-wing Latin American research organizations. He is a member of Atlas Network’s Global Council of CEOs team.
Gomes also participated in Atlas Network’s 2020 Latin America Liberty Forum online, again representing RELIAL. The politician is also a long-standing ally, teacher, and host of a political series on Brasil Paralelo’s YouTube channel. His political connections reveal an intricate network that links Brazilian far-right organizations that deny climate change with international think tanks.
Brasil Paralelo’s Roots
In the months after the center-left Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff was impeached in 2016, far-right proponents established Brasil Paralelo, which arose from the growth of far-right ideas that gained ground in the country at the time. Its five founders, who were students, claimed that mass media was overwhelmingly left-wing, and they wanted to challenge mainstream public opinion about the nation’s political crisis after Rouseff’s impeachment.
Three of the original founders, Lucas Ferrugem, Henrique Viana, and Filipe Valerim, now run the company. Experts interviewed for the platform’s first documentaries included names from Instituto Millenium, Instituto Liberal, and Instituto Mises, partner think tanks of Atlas Network in Brazil in 2016.
A panel titled “Entrepreneurship for Common Good” by Atlas Network partner Acton Institute used Brasil Paralelo’s founding and development as a case study in 2021. The panel explored how “entertainment can shape a society’s culture,” and Brasil Paralelo’s role within the “prevailing cultural winds to point Brazil towards pillars of freedom and virtue through a holistic approach to education and entrepreneurship,” as the video states.
Alejandro Chafuen, president of Atlas Network between 1991 and 2018 and a Mont Pelerin Society member, taught a Brasil Paralelo course about faith and free-market ideas in 2019. Chafuen also mentioned the media company in his Forbes magazine column in 2023, in which he compared the Brazilian organization to the U.S. nonprofit conservative media group PragerU. He made the same comparison to his YouTube subscribers (over 3.38 million) and Instagram followers (2.5 million), indicating that Brasil Paralelo surpassed PragerU’s audience levels with more than 300,000 subscribers on YouTube and around 400,000 on Instagram.
Chafuen compares the popularity of Brasil Paralelo to widespread support for Olavo de Carvalho, the deceased influential far-right philosopher who was also known for his strident scientific denialism, including climate denialism. Chafuen also wrote in Forbes that “Brasil Paralelo is planning to land in the United States and replicate its success with U.S.-focused topics, teams, and profiles.”
In August 2023, Brasil Paralelo ran an article raising doubts about the effects of climate change stemming from a speech by UN Secretary Antonio Guiterrez claiming that “the era of global boiling has arrived”. According to the article,”It is not a question of denying climate change, but of discussing whether or not humankind influences this process and to what degree the planet will warm up (or cool down).”
Chafuen’s article promoted a 2021 Brasil Paralelo documentary called “Cortina de Fumaça” (“Smoke Screen”). It stated that the documentary seeks to answer questions such as, “How does the environmental movement affect the economy in Brazil and other countries? What lies behind some of the main environmentalist misinformation?”
Patrick Moore, a known climate science denier, is presented in the documentary as a co-founder of Greenpeace. Years before, DeSmog had reported that this claim was false. Moore stated in the documentary that Greenpeace is “a conspiracy organization, spreading junk science around the world.”
One of the sections in “Smoke Screen,” which is available on YouTube, is titled “Environmental apocalyptic predictions that are false.” The journalist Augusto Nunes, one of the founders of Revista Oeste, said in the segment that the Amazon rainforest is not being destroyed, contradicting official data from 2021. Other sources in Brazil, including Aldo Rebelo, former minister of defense during Rousseff’s government, supported the same argument.
According to the documentary, environmental campaigners’ criticisms and so-called “lies” about the Amazon rainforest’s deforestation are attempts to protect the U.S. and European agricultural markets.
In another article in September 2023, Brasil Paralelo defended the idea that global warming legitimizes NGOs’ actions pushing international actions such as the Paris Agreement, which the platform claims keeps developing countries producing less while first-world countries maintain their production.
In an interview with The Intercept Brasil, researcher Renata Nagamine from the Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning (Cebrap) said Brasil Paralelo’s “Smoke Screen” uses a “scientific repertoire on the margins of climate science.”
When contacted by DeSmog, representatives for Brasil Paralelo did not respond to requests for comment.
“CO2 Has Nothing to Do With It!”
Climate change boosted the rainfall volume in Rio Grande do Sul by 15 percent, according to a study by the website Clima Meter, which confirmed the influence of climate change on the recent flooding disaster in the region.
Clima Meter is “an experimental rapid framework for understanding extreme weather events in a changing climate based on looking at similar past weather situations.” From the analysis of the patterns of local precipitation and the ElNiño-Southern Oscillation, the researchers interpreted the “Brazil floods as an event whose local characteristics can mostly be ascribed to human driven climate change.”
Flooding in South Brazil on May 5. Credit: Ricardo Stuckert/Wikimedia Commons
Davide Faranda, a researcher of the Laboratory for Sciences of Climate and Environment at the Institute Pierre Simon Laplace and coauthor of Clima Meter’s study on Brazil’s flooding, said in an interview with the local newspaper, GaúchaZH, that floods have been intensified by the burning of fossil fuels and have a major impact on vulnerable communities, which bear the brunt of climate change.
However, Ricardo Felício, who teaches courses at Brasil Paralelo and is a professor of geography at the University of São Paulo (USP), offered a contradictory explanation for the disaster.
“It is confusing to relate the climate to a meteorological scenario of large dimensions, which is the case here,” wrote Felício in his May 12 weekly column in Revista Oeste. “CO2 has nothing to do with it!”
In addition to writing for Revista Oeste, Felício is a well-known climate denier in Brazilian politics. DeSmog uncovered an interview with Felício on a once-popular Brazilian TV show, where Felício stated in 2012, “There is no scientific proof of global warming.” Brazil’s ex-president Bolsonaro tweeted an interview between Nando Moura, a well-known right-wing influencer, and Felicio in 2017.
Between 2017 and 2021, Felício gave several lectures at universities and trade associations across the country denying climate change after the Aprosoja Mato Grosso (an association of soybean growers) sponsored his talks, according to a BBC investigation.
Journalists and media executives founded Revista Oeste in 2020. It is a self-proclaimed conservative outlet and claims the problems of capitalism should be solved with more capitalism.
The magazine’s print cover in June 2024, a month after the tragedy in Rio Grande do Sul, showed the planet resting on a palm, followed by the headline “The global warming hoax.” The periodical also published other articles on the floods in Rio Grande do Sul, denying climate change had a part in the disaster.
“Historically, apocalyptic predictions about the climate have not come close to coming true. Now, activists are blaming climate change for the floods in Rio Grande do Sul,” wrote the journalist Myllena Valença. The piece claimed that “facts overturn the delirious prophecies of environmental activists, who for decades have been announcing disasters caused by global warming.” Felício is a leading source in the report.
The June print edition also featured an interview with the president of Environmental Progress, Michael Shellenberger, a well-known nuclear energy enthusiast and a Republican witness in climate hearings in the U.S. Congress. In the interview, he pointed out he is optimistic about the environment and pessimistic about civilization. “I’m worried about the hysteria around global warming,” Shellenberger said.
When contacted by DeSmog, representatives for Revista Oeste did not respond to requests for comment.
A Well-Connected Deputy Mayor
Donations poured into Rio Grande do Sul in the aftermath of the flooding disaster to help people who had lost everything. Brasil Paralelo asked for donations for an organization called Instituto Cultural Floresta (ICF).
Porto Alegre’s Deputy Mayor Gomes also requested donations to the same organization, even though his City Hall made its own donation channel available, an Agência Públicainvestigation revealed last month.
The ICF is a nonprofit organization based in Porto Alegre, and according to its website, it focuses on providing security forces with military equipment. Leaders and members of the organization are connected to the Instituto de Estudos Empresariais (IEE), an Atlas Network think tank partner in Brazil that promotes the right-wing annual meeting, Liberty Forum, which is sponsored directly by Atlas Network, and boosts right-wing political candidates.
Leonardo Fração is president of the ICF and a former IEE president. He spoke at the Liberty Forum in 2018 and in 2010.
Other ICF members are affiliated with IEE, including Bruno Zaffari, the owner of real estate and supermarket companies, and Wilson Ling, the director of the plastic packaging and forestry company Évora S.A.
Gomes held various positions, including president of the IEE from 2009 to 2012. But his relations with right-wing think tanks stretch much further. Between 2016 and 2020, he served as the president of RELIAL, and he also is a member of the Mont Pelerin Society. DeSmog research found that Mont Pelerin Society members are affiliated with over 100 organizations that also appear on the membership list of the Atlas Network.
Atlas Network also quoted Gomes in a report about the Latin America Liberty Forum in 2021.
RELIAL presents itself as a network of brain trusts that “disseminate and implement liberal principles as their flag.” Agustín Etchebarne, a member and a former director of RELIAL, is also the general director of the Fundación Libertad y Progreso, an Argentinian Atlas-affiliated think tank that supported the election of far-right Argentinian President Javier Gerardo Milei.
Atlas Network awarded Fundación Libertad y Progresoa a grant in 2024. The organization spent the money to promote an international summit in partnership with the Cato Institute for the six-month anniversary of the inauguration of Milei. The event took place June 11-12 in Buenos Aires, and Milei attended.
Fundación Libertad y Progresoa promoted an international summit in partnership with the Cato Institute for the six-month anniversary of the inauguration of Argentininan President Javier Milei. Credit: Wikipedia
When contacted for comment, Atlas Network said in a statement that the organization “has no grant programs related to climate change and makes no policy prescriptions to its partners on the subject of climate change.” It also stated that it “does not fund initiatives advocating against the existence of climate change.”
The organization stated that it “has no partnerships with candidates, parties, or government officials,” and that its “partners are independent, nonprofit organizations engaged in public policy issues.”
Atlas also asserted that “there are no ‘Atlas Network groups’ in Brazil,” but instead “independent partner organizations that apply to receive training, grants, and networking opportunities from Atlas Network.” The think tank network also stated that its partners are “each governed independently and are not managed by our organization.”
Political Negligence and Climate Denialism
The media has widely criticized Porto Alegre’s Mayor Melo for his crisis management issues and his administration’s low budget for flood prevention. To defend against the criticism, Melo claimed online that, “I’m not a denialist on anything, much less on the climate issue.”
Porto Alegre suffered two severe floods in 2023, including its biggest flood since 1941. However, since 2021, the city council reduced its investment in flood protection, and added no additional protection in 2023.
Experts also condemned the city’s failure to maintain its anti-flooding system, which was designed in the 1970s. The Municipal Department of Water and Sewage, which operates the system, has laid off more than half of its employees since 2013. In addition, Melo’s term in office has included environmental scandals and conflicts with environmentalists and indigenous people.
When contacted by DeSmog, Porto Alegre’s City Hall Press Office, which represents Melo and Gomes, did not respond to requests for comment.
When the flooding crisis deepened in Porto Alegre, Melo used a Bolsonarist style, applying the motto that every person looks out for his own, which summarizes his way of doing politics. “If you have a house on the beach and can afford to leave, I recommend that you leave and go to the beach,” he said, talking about wealthier families who have second homes at the beach. This comes from the mayor of a city where inequality is so entrenched that many people don’t have one home, let alone a second beach house.
Gomes has said he will not seek reelection with Melo this year, but that he will continue supporting Melo against “the radical left.” Everything suggests, however, that the Brasil Paralelo cap will officially be part of his uniform.
