As Brazil prepares to elect Jair Bolsonaro, the Donald Trump-like contender for president currently the frontrunner in polls by a wide margin, the left is responding approximately the same way the left responded over here: They're screaming bloody murder, chasing people from restaurants, rioting, and trying legal maneuvers to nullify the election that they know won't be going their way.

Funniest of all is the foreign left, however, which is gradually realizing that 'Tropical Trump' has every intention of pulling out of the Paris climate accord ... and destroying the planet.

Because ... rainforest.

We all know about the left's rainforest romance, what with Sting and the Amazon's painted natives.

Seriously. One of them sounded the screech alarm at the Washington Post, in a column headlined 'How Brazil's Bolsonaro threatens the entire planet.'

Ishaan Thraroor wrote:

But while experts and pundits wring their hands over another blow to liberal democracy in the West, others see a more dire risk lurking behind Bolsonaro’s platform: The candidate’s potential war on the environment.

In speeches, Bolsonaro has declared that, like President Trump, he would pull his country out of the Paris climate accords. Courting the support of the powerful agribusiness lobby, Bolsonaro has railed against the country’s “excessive” policing of its rural areas and forests. He floated the idea of combining the country’s agriculture and environment ministries, which critics worry would enfeeble environmental protections. And he has long supported opening up indigenous areas, currently protected by the government, to agricultural and commercial use.

“Environmentalists fear that a Bolsonaro presidency will signal open season in the Amazon for illegal loggers, miners and crooked ranchers in Brazil, home to 60 per cent of the world’s largest rainforest,” noted the Financial Times.

So what he's saying is that the planet will no longer be saved if Brazil pulls out of the crummy little bureaucratic agreement that empowers European Union bureaucrats to act ever more high and mighty on us, with their central planning diktats, the detested Paris climate accord.

If Brazil pulls out, he warns, the planet will no longer be saved. Because see, the only thing that can save the planet is the Paris accord. The planet can't be saved otherwise.

Can you say 'hyperbole'?

The reality is, the U.S. pullout of the Paris accord has been the best thing that has ever happened to the planet. U.S. greenhouse gases, if that's what these people care about, have gone down, not up, and not just down, but below the target levels, while sanctimonious Europe's greenhouse gas levels continue to go up. Anybody criticizing Germany for emitting more greenhouse gases because it got rid of its nuclear power plants? Not hearing anything. And anybody praising the U.S. for cutting its emissions? Nope, not a peep.

Yet the U.S. has done that, the only one that has, and this is the result of going it alone, without Paris. According to a recent Investor's Business Daily editorial:

The EPA sampled more than 8,000 large factories and found that emissions of greenhouse gases had dropped 2.7% from 2016 to 2017. Most of the decline was due to reductions in CO2.

"The Trump Administration has proven that federal regulations are not necessary to drive CO2 reductions," said EPA action Administrator Andrew Wheeler. "While many around the world are talking about reducing greenhouse gases, the U.S. continues to deliver, and today's report is further evidence of our action-oriented approach."

This is no one-off, freak decline. Output of gases that can contribute to global warming have fallen sharply in recent years. It's a result of the fracking revolution producing enormous amounts of cheap, clean, plentiful natural gas — which has increasingly replaced coal and oil for energy production.

What all of this shows is that the Paris accord was not and never was about lowering greenhouse gases. It was just about signing on the dotted line for a feelgood virtue-signal and giving unelected EU- and UN-style bureaucrats more power.

Now we return to Brazil, which plainly sees the U.S. example, and wants to elect a president who will achieve the same results, a man who would privatize more land, because that's the best way to get rid of illegal loggers (these environmental bozos have never heard of the 'tragety of the commons') and dump prosperity fettering regulations. The left yells about that, too, as if prosperous Brazilians would somehow be against an environmentally sound country, and only poor ones would keep the country pristine.

You can see how stupid this is. Basically, the left is yelling that Bolsonaro's election means the planet will go unsaved. What's really unsaved is the environmental wacko groups out there, financed by lefty billionaires, who have built up such an environmenal-industrial complex that they have a stake in bigger government with more bureaucratic regulators to dictate their orders to.

And yes, a Brazil pullout will make the Paris climate accord irrelevant.

Some warning. All the rest of us can say is: Bring it on.

Image credit: Alpha, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0