Emmanuel Macron may not technically be a celebrity, but he tweets like one.
Prior to the G-7 summit, the French president declared on Twitter, “The Amazon rain forest — the lungs which produce 20% of our planet’s oxygen — is on fire.” He added that “our house is burning,” and called the fires an “international crisis.”
Macron’s tweet was deeply ill-informed, but indistinguishable from the misleading rants of sundry actors and singers.
At least Diddy and Leonardo DiCaprio don’t host multilateral meetings of Western heads of state. Macron does. He made the fires a major item of discussion at the G-7 summit, with the ready assent of other European governments.
The problem with the G-7 summit wasn’t that Donald Trump didn’t get with the program; it was that the program itself, insofar as it dealt with the fires, relied on a hysteria-induced misunderstanding of what’s happening in the Amazon.
The Amazon fires are catnip for proponents of radical action on the climate. They pine for a mediagenic, easy-to-understand planetary emergency and are happy to manufacture one as necessary.
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