This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Brazil’s environment minister, Ricardo Salles, will meet a rightwing US advocacy group that denies climate change, just four days before the United Nations Climate Action Summit.

Salles will meet representatives from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) at the headquarters of the US Environmental Protection Agency on 19 September, Brazil’s Folha de S Paulo newspaper revealed.

The meeting was immediately condemned by environmentalists, who said it showed that the government of the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, had no commitment to fighting the climate crisis.

'Chaos, chaos, chaos': a journey through Bolsonaro's Amazon inferno Read more

News of the meeting emerged a day after Brazil’s foreign minister questioned the scientific proof for global warming in a convoluted speech in Washington. Addressing the Heritage Foundation, Ernesto Araújo said “there is no climate catastrophe” and described efforts to fight climate change as a plot to destroy national sovereignty.

Brazil is doubling down on its efforts to convince the world the Amazon is in safe hands, despite soaring deforestation and a huge spike in seasonal fires that provoked an international crisis. Bolsonaro is due to address the UN general assembly on 24 September.

“This is a government that makes efforts to deny the problems, not to face them,” said Marcio Astrini, director of public policy at Greenpeace Brasil.

A spokesman for Salles said he could not confirm nor deny the meeting and a spokeswoman for the Competitive Enterprise Institute did not respond to requests for comment.

The CEI’s director for energy and environment, Myron Ebell, led Donald Trump’s transition team at the Environmental Protection Agency. His biography quotes Business Insider, which said: “Myron Ebell may be enemy #1 to the current climate change community.”

“Climate change does not endanger the survival of civilization or the habitability of the planet. So-called climate solutions are bureaucratic power grabs and corporate welfare schemes with no detectable climate-related benefits,” read a June article on the CEI site.

Before Salles took office in December, a São Paulo judge found he had altered plans for an environmentally protected area in order to favour businesses while state environment secretary. Salles denied the accusations and is appealing against the ruling.

In July he said that Brazil was not far from “zero illegal deforestation”. Satellite date from Brazil’s Space Research Institute calculated a 278% increase in deforestation in July. The institute’s director was fired after Bolsonaro described the data as “lies”. Its data showed more than 30,000 fires in the Amazon in August, the highest since 2010.

In a recent interview with the far-right Canadian YouTuber Stefan Molyneux, Salles hailed Brazil’s conservation record.

The minister argued that a primary cause of deforestation was the lack of proper documentation for Amazon land, despite widespread evidence that much degradation takes place in protected areas and indigenous reserves and has been partly fuelled by Bolsonaro’s attacks on environment agencies and protection.