100,000 Amazon Trees Chopped Down to Build Road for COP30 Climate Conference

But all is not lost, as CO2 is making the trees bigger

Spare a thought for the BBC’s Justin Rowlatt as he considers his upcoming trip to the Brazilian city of Belém to report on COP30. Saving the world and its environment is his gig so how will he face the prospect of travelling down a new four-lane highway cut through the dense Amazon rainforest to help speed him and his 70,000 other political activists to their luxury hotels? Based on trees per acre, an estimated 100,000 mature specimens have been chopped down and logged to build the eight-mile Avenida Liberdade causing untold disruption to local wildlife. Happily, all is not lost in despair. If he wishes, the BBC’s activist-in-chief can consider recent findings published in Nature Plants that increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide have led to substantial growth in the remaining Amazon forest, with mature trees growing by over 6% a decade. Perhaps he could start promoting on the BBC the enormous benefits of CO₂, rightly known as the gas of life. He could front a campaign to assuage his dented COP conscience along the lines: ‘Forward with Carbon Dioxide, not Chainsaws.’

Needless to say the fatter trees of the Amazon have received little publicity in narrative-driven mainstream media. Extensive Green Blob-funded grooming is deployed to keep this type of inconvenient global ‘greening’ material out of the papers. Little mention is made of the astonishing CO₂-fuelled growth in global vegetation seen across the planet in the last 40 years. Increases of around 15% are common, some deserts have started to shrink and world famine has been alleviated by higher crop yields. SciLine is connected with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of Science, and it recently suggested that writers head off the ‘greening’ story by noting that “in many cases, CO₂ disproportionately favours weeds over crops, causing more problems for agriculture”.