Conservative Conference Speech: Foreign Minister Araújo Claims Brazil is Victim of “Climatism”

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo said that Brazil is the victim of a global ideological action that is expressed, among other things, by climatism, which would be a misrepresentation of the discussion on global warming.

The Chancellor spoke on Saturday, October 12th, at the opening of the second day of CPAC, a conservative conference taking place in São Paulo. Damares Alves, Minister of Women, Family and Human Rights and Onyx Lorenzoni, Presidential Chief of Staff, are also expected to speak.

“Climatism is for climate change just as globalism is for globalization. Climate change should be studied sensibly and rationally, but it has also been harnessed by an ideology,” said Araújo. According to the Chancellor, climatism abandons the discussion of facts and has become a pretext for the defense of economic intervention.

“The United States has pulled out of the Paris Agreement and managed to reduce its emissions through market mechanisms, the use of natural gas, for instance. But Brazil and the United States are being vilified in this regard,” he said. “Brazil accounts for two to three percent of emissions, while China emits more than 25 percent, and its commitments do not begin before 2030”.

He said that, contrary to what is said, the world has not yet reached the increase of the 2ºC rate regarded as very serious, and at the current rate it will only reach this level by the end of the century.

According to NASA (the US space agency) and Copernicus (the European Union’s climate change service), however, the last five years have been the hottest since the end of the 19th century.

The average global temperature in the last five years has been 1.1°C above pre-industrial times. According to a UN climate report, temperatures will rise 1.5°C above pre-industrial times in the middle of the century with current trends, with the prospect of an even more extreme climate.

According to the minister, Brazil is facing an ideological war, which includes, in addition to climatism, globalism, political correctness and even neo-Maoist authors.

“There is an ideological trend that is working against Brazil. Brazil is a conservative country that is facing this trend”.

He also took a swipe at Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, 16, ironically using the line “How dare you?” which she pronounced at the UN.

“This Greta Thunberg, on the same day she spoke at the UN, I received a picture of a girl in Venezuela who is 14 years old and weighs 14 kg. And Greta, 16, well-fed at the United Nations, the same United Nations that does nothing for this girl from Venezuela. I ask: how dare you?”

He also emphasized the importance of maintaining total freedom on the Internet. “We need to work 100 percent of the time for Internet freedom; the Internet equals democracy,” he said.

Right-wing exponents often claim to be censored on the Internet and position themselves against any kind of regulation.

In his speech at São Paulo, Araújo made a lengthy exposé of what it is to be conservative. One of the moments when he was most applauded was when he said that as a follower of this ideology he was late in discovering it.

“The conservative is the least prejudiced individual there is. It is our opponents who like to reason by labels, by slogans. For them, there are the gays, the women, the workers, the peasants. For the conservative, there is this and that person. Leftism is totalitarian because of this, because it wants to characterize the individual through one of his or her features”.

He also opposed the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and their ideals of freedom, equality, and fraternity.

“Voltaire [the French Enlightment philosopher] began to want to seal people in,” he said. “He took the thousand-year-old institutions of his people, said they were of no use, disrespecting faith and the monarchy. Voltaire and his followers called for freedom, equality, and fraternity: freedom to obey power, fraternity for me to take what is yours and equality to be afraid of the guillotine,” he said.

The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is an annual political conference attended by conservative activists and elected officials from across the United States. CPAC is hosted by the American Conservative Union (ACU).

The conference was founded in 1974 by the American Conservative Union and Young Americans for Freedom as a small gathering of dedicated conservatives. Ronald Reagan gave the inaugural keynote speech at CPAC in 1974. 

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