Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro responded furiously to French President Emmanuel Macron after the latter urged his fellow world leaders to prioritize the fires in the Amazon on their agenda at the G7 summit.
The French president also called the wildfire blazing in the Amazon rainforest an “international crisis.”
The comments played out on Twitter as news reports indicated there is international concern about Bolsonaro’s environmental policy and its effect on the forest. The European Union called the forests there the world’s “lungs and life support system.”
Bolsonaro added that Macron was only sensationalizing the massive fire to “make personal political gains in an internal matter for Brazil and other Amazonian countries.”
The exact number of burning fires is somewhere around 2,500. Sao Paulo was in the dark for about one hour Monday afternoon as a result of the fires about 1,600 miles away. One Twitter user posted a photo of the clouds and said, “Imagine how much has to be burning to create this much smoke.”
However, federal prosecutors in Brazil started probing the reason behind the sudden surge of deforestation and wildfire cases in the country.
20% of the world’s oxygen comes from the forest where different kinds of animals and plants live.
Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research counted 47,155 wildfires as of Tuesday, an 84 percent increase compared to the same period last year.
Aside from this, Bolsonaro admitted that farmers may intentionally setting the fires to clear the land for their own use, even admitted that his country does not have enough resources to protect the “lungs of the earth.”
