Damming the Amazon unfettered after Brazilian purge (commentary)

The Belo Monte mega-dam under construction. Belo Monte displaced as many as 40,000 people and did tremendous damage to the Xingu River fishery, plus other environmental harm. Its construction was cloaked in charges of government and construction company corruption. Photo courtesy of Lalo de Almeida/Folhapress. Amazon dam plans appear to have gotten a new boost from a shakeup in Brazil’s Ministry of Mines and Energy in April 2018. Hope had surged in January 2018 that Brazil’s energy priorities were shifting away from highly destructive Amazonian dams. Two key officials — Paulo Pedrosa, the executive secretary of the Ministry of Mines and Energy, and Luiz Augusto Barroso, the head of EPE (Energy Research Enterprise, which is the agency under the Ministry of Mines and Energy responsible for energy planning) — stated that the heavy environmental and social impacts of Amazon dams meant that priority should shift to other energy sources, such as wind and solar. But both of these officials have now been removed from their posts after a new minister of mines and energy was appointed. The Santo Antônio dam on the Madeira River, part of the Madeira Hydroelectric Complex. Photo by the Brazil’s Growth Acceleration Program (Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento (PAC) on flickr, used under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license While it would be a great advance if the January statements were transformed into a change in the role of environmental and social impacts in decision-making, many destructive dams in the pipeline for construction would be likely to…

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