Did Trump just set the world on fire?

Eduardo Ckl
6 min readAug 29, 2019

Social and mainstream media are on fire after NASA said the smoke from the fires in the Amazonian Rainforest could be seen from space. So does the roof of your house by the way. Any search on Google will yield pages and pages regarding the fires.

If you look behind the smoke, it is a dry grass field that is burning, surrounded or cornered by the forests.

On this image, I put the red rectangles to draw attention away from the yellow area they marked. What happened to this map?

When I saw the first share at the beginning of the week on FB, I immediately thought “How can the Rainforest be on Fire?” I disregarded the info but by now (4 days later), the worldwide reality is that the Amazonian Forest is burning, that the smoke can be seen from space, and that sit will affect the global climate. Everywhere they look at, they will find the same information, Google, TV, Radio and Social Media. I went to check several pages and images and I noticed I could not find any High-Resolution pictures, so I resource to Google Maps for HD images, to get a better idea of the magnitude and state of the fires and smoke.

Location of the Fire Displayed on Nasa’s website. They didn’t bother showing a clear scale of the country,
Nasa said there was a 5mil wide fire in there.
These are just clouds
Notice the deforestation, minuscule, done in the margins of the river. These are probably local rural small populations that use the river to transport food and products.. same people you see in the videos being used to manipulate the media. They also deforest and they also clean pieces of land with fire and other means.
At this distance, the Google Map image lost resolution.

Now, What about Africa, Guatemala, Boliva, Nicaragua? Are they also burning? No. the picture is definitely accumulated data over a period of time being crowded to look like a disaster. These satellite images have been around for decades and published in printed publications decades ago.

It seems to me that this picture HAS to be at least the ACCUMULATED data across the years, or they were using too large pointers in a too large scale map, so it looks like a disaster.
Same type of image. Accumulated data over time, in a zoomed-in map. doesn’t look so terrible now
https://medium.com/@OECD/sustainable-development-new-ways-to-measure-the-goals-9d904d55fdb3

So, what is going on? Who could possibly want to cause a world-wide commotion over some fires going on in grasslands nearby a tropical forest? What interest could be behind?

Maybe, it was just an innocent reporter who saw NASA’s statement and created the first article. Since it was NASA, all other new agencies in USA had to run and cover the story, it was backed up by NASA, and then the rest of the world followed into the interpretation of an interpretation of what the satellite actually displayed on a screen, which is by the way just another interpretation of the actual data captured by the satellite.

Maybe, it is not that simple and naive. What international interest could there be to cause worldwide attention on the RainForest and Bolsonaro and rejection and political pressure on Brazil to not extend its arable lands and not do mineral extraction on its own land? What is the actual threat of Brazil Expanding its arable land?

China and India are using all the arable land they can and want. China, the biggest food importer of the world, has limited arable land to feed its own growing middle class. Brazil on the other hand still has a large differential between its footprint and its Biocapacity.

So, what would happen if Brazil, as part of the BRIC, increases its Arable Lands? Well, it seems pretty obvious that it will increase its production in Agriculture. Maybe the prices of some grains and meet will go down worldwide due to the increased offer.

Why would anyone sabotage a strategy for having cheaper food worldwide?

Is it really possible? Is the USA behind this worldwide conspiracy against Brazil’s economic development and Bolsonaro, a guy that at first, I thought was too rough, but now I think he is rough enough for the size of its country. Can this be another USA move like the G5 move against Huawei-China? Just another move in the economic war?

Let's remember that Trump and its team are experts in manipulating reality with Social Media and Trendy topics. I recommend the Netflix Documentary. Trump himself is an expert in using media and creating buzz.

Curious to see the next move. Maybe Brazil would start charging ALL countries with a negative CO2 Footprint, updated prices based on all these studies they are publishing and public perception.

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Eduardo Ckl

Systems Engineer, Digital Strategist & Universal Generalist