RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — When Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva opens the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, he is expected to call on the world to do more to combat climate change.
It remains to be seen whether he will address fires ravaging the rainforest back home and criticism of his administration’s own environmental stewardship. Brazil’s Amazon saw 38,000 blazes last month — the most for any August since 2010, according to data from the country’s space institute. September is on track to repeat that ignoble feat.
Smoke has been choking residents of many cities , including metropolis Sao Paulo that’s thousands of miles away. Lula has cast these fires as the result of criminals and proposed harsher punishments for environmental offenders. But enforcement has been hampered by a six-month strike at environmental regulator Ibama that ended in August — three months after his administration was aware of significantly heightened risk of fires amid historic drought.
At the same time, members of his Cabinet have presented conflicting views of environmental and energy policies. And Lula’s rhetoric about tapping oil reserves near the mouth of the Amazon River has worried environmentalists who want Brazil to drive a global transition to clean energy. This month, he promised to pave a road in the Amazon experts say will drive deforestation.
When Lula was last president, between 2003 and 2010, he repeatedly spoke about climate change, holding up Brazil as a .