Greetings from Michigan—I last wrote one of these dispatches on Sunday, from Kansas; since then I’ve been in Texas, where the remarkable James Talarico is apparently locked in a dead-heat race with the execrable Ken Paxton; now I’m headed to greater Lansing with my Third Act colleagues to try and boost the Senate fortunes of Abdul el-Sayed and the House race of Will Lawrence, once a founder of the Sunrise Movement. (If you want to join us, here’s the info). So you might say I’m taking this election seriously.

More seriously than I wish we had to. In democratic societies elections should always be important. But they shouldn’t, ideally, be the deciding factor between continued stability and whatever kind of creeping fascism we’re playing with. And they certainly shouldn’t be determining questions of planetary survival. But they are.

The chart above shows the rate of deforestation in the Amazon; it comes ahead of Sunday’s contest between the next Bolsonaro (think chainsaw) and the incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (think standing tree). As George Monbiot writes in The Guardian Thursday morning:

Physically and politically, Flávio Bolsonaro is the spitting image of his father, the jailed coup-plotter, Jair. When Jair Bolsonaro was president of Brazil, he appeared to see ecological destruction as a kind of a holy duty. The deforestation rate rose by 59% in his four years, and attacks on Indigenous people and other forest defenders, as well as invasions by illegal ranchers, loggers, and goldminers rocketed. The crudest forms of extractivism—regardless of their costs, or how they might hold back all kinds of progress—were a matter of policy.The ideology of the far-right in Brazil has been described as “beef, Bible, and bullets”: violence against those who resist the seizure of their resources, an ultra-conservative evangelism, and the expansion of cattle ranching, which is both a potent symbol of far-right machismo and the primary driver of deforestation in the Amazon.

If you combine this with the knowledge that we’re very very near a tipping point in the Amazon, you start to get worried. The Amazon rainforest is almost an organism itself—it in essence generates half its own rainfall, recycling rainwater five to six times as air moves east to west across it. As early as 2018, my old friend, the dearly missed Tom Lovejoy, and his collaborator Carlos Nobre had a paper in Science that concluded:

We believe that negative synergies between deforestation, climate change, and widespread use of fire indicate a tipping point for the Amazon system to flip to non-forest ecosystems in eastern, southern, and central Amazonia at 20-25% deforestation.The severity of the droughts of 2005, 2010, and 2015-16 could well represent the first flickers of this ecological tipping point. These events, together with the severe floods of 2009, 2012, (and 2014 over SW Amazonia), suggest that the whole system is oscillating. For the last two decades the dry season over the southern and eastern Amazon has been increasing. Large scale factors such as warmer sea surface temperatures over the tropical North Atlantic also seem to be associated with the changes on land.

Here’s what Nobre told the Times this week:

Legal deforestation, he said, put the Amazon at “total risk” and could sharply reduce rainfall throughout much of South America, threatening Brazilian agriculture and global food prices. Brazil is the world’s second-largest food exporter and could surpass the United States this year. “We are going to lose all of this,” Mr. Nobre said.

We may lose even more. It’s not at all clear that the Earth’s climate system can function if the Amazon begins to break down—along with the poles, it’s one of the planet’s handful of truly keystone physical systems. That its fate depends on an election is terrifying. Needless to say, the usual cast of characters like Elon Musk are allied with the chainsaw in this one. But of course Musk, fresh off his breathtaking betrayal of the Ukrainian people, is playing an even more critical role in America’s elections. As Laurent Belsie pointed out this week, the reason that Talarico may lose is largely down to this one man:

Mr. Musk’s biggest donation was $158 million to the GOP’s Senate Leadership Fund, which put that same amount into the Senate race in Texas—where Mr. Musk’s companies are based. On X, Mr. Musk has been urging people to vote for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, saying, “The fate of Texas and America is at stake.”

But more’s at stake even than that. Here’s this week’s United Nations Environment Programme report (titled, with more wit than usual for these things, The Point of Return) about just how far we’re overshooting the Paris climate accords. What it demonstrates is........

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