When President Joe Biden becomes the first U.S. president to visit the Amazon Sunday, he will view the storied ‘lungs of the planet’ from a gas-guzzling aircraft above the forest canopy.
The trip is just one way in which Biden will try to send a message about the importance of environmental stewardship and conservation, while keeping to a tight schedule that will have him blowing through the region in a matter of hours.
The ‘comprehensive’ guidance released by the White House reveals how regimented Biden’s historic fly-by will be.
He begins by departing Lima, Peru Sunday at the conclusion of the APEC summit, where he got put in the back of a ‘family photo’ after having to settle for a relatively standard greeting upon arrival even while China’s President Xi Jinping got treated to a state visit.
The two men then met for two hours at Xi’s hotel, shortly after Biden corrected himself after saying the U.S. has an alliance with China, considered its chief competitor.
Then, he will ‘participate in an aerial tour of the Amazon.’ That suggests Biden will view the amazing convergence of the Rio Branco and the Rio Negro from a helicopter.
That is the way he typically travels when he wants to scope out a large swath of terrain, as when taking in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene when it slammed the U.S. weeks before the elections.
Then, Biden will will ‘participate in a tour of Museu da Amazônia’ in Manaus, a city of 2 million people in the heart of the Amazon.
President Joe Biden is stopping for four hours in the Amazon region of Brazil, where he will take part in an aerial tour
The museum, located within the the Adolpho Ducke Forest Reserve, features ‘exhibitions, orchids and bromeliads, araceae, palm trees, ferns, snakes, spiders and scorpions, butterflies, cicadas, mushrooms and fungus vivariums, and also a sensory garden, a Victoria amazonica lake, and aquariums.’
It also has a 42-meter tower providing a ‘magnificent view of the treetops.’
The museum also has a series of forest trails, to allow visitors to take ‘pleasant walks and make surprising discoveries,’ that Biden could explore.
It all adds up to a a business trip to announce funding commitments and environmental projects complemented by a brief dose of ‘ecotourism,’ which has become popular in the region, even as loggers race to clear cut and burn down rainforest to create lucrative farmland and extract resources.
Other common activities include boat tours and jungle hikes, which present difficulties for Secret Service agents who must protect Biden from all manner of threats (those in the Amazon include mosquitos and piranhas).
It will all be a new adventure for the 81-year-old president, who has traveled the world and continues to take regular trips to Wilmington, Delaware and his Rehoboth Beach house, where he was seen struggling to walk through sand on his last visit.
Biden always has a heavy footprint when he travels, and that will be no difference this time. An online calculator puts the cost of the brief trip by a smaller 757 (Air Force One is a modified 747) 45 tons of C02.
According to the U.S. Government’s Office of Science and Technical information, the Blackhawk helicopters that the president sometimes uses for transport emits 0.2-1.4 g/kg fuel of particulate matter, for the T700 engine, depending on the fuel. The feds have conducted reports on the gaseous and particulate-matter emissions when the aircraft are used in populated areas.
Biden hopes to call attention to the importance of preserving the rainforest as a global carbon sink just days after leaders gathered for the annual COP20 climate change summit. This year’s climate conference was held in fossil fuel-generating Baku, Azerbaijan.
Biden is set to take aerial tour of the Amazon
The Amazon is a carbon sink for the earth’s admosphere thanks to its extraordinary assembly of trees
Aerial view of Laguna Grande in the protected Amazon rainforest of Cuyabeno, Ecuador, on March 26, 2024. Biden visits the Brazilian Amazon after leaving Peru
Biden’s foreign trip, one of his last as president, had him attending the APEC summit in Lima, where leaders posed for a family photo in Alpaca scarves, as well as Manaus in the Amazon and Rio de Janeiro
It follows the hottest year on record, and the stunning reelection of Donald Trump, who has vowed to rip up Biden’s climate change initiatives.
Then Biden, who has no scheduled press conference on his South American sojourn, will deliver a statement to the press.
It is all a part of a stopover lasting just hours after the conclusion of the APEC summit in Lima where the host country appeared fixated on a massive new port project built through Chinese financing.
The White House released a fact sheet Sunday detailing that Biden will announce the U.S. has reached $11 billion in international climate financing, proclaim November 17th to be ‘International Conservation Day,’ announce $50 million for the Amazon Conservation Fund, and announce a coalition to harness $10 billion in public and private investment for land restoration and ‘bioeconomy-related projects’ by 2030.
They comprise the kind of multilateral climate-focused efforts that Biden championed when he came into office four years ago, but which Trump plans to dismantle. On Saturday he announced an oil company executive engaged in fracking as his choice to lead the U.S. Energy Department.
The trip is a swan song for Biden, as he underlined by breaking with his usual routine by attending a dinner gathering at the ornate Government Palace during APEC in Lima.
Then he had his a meeting with Xi, hosted on the Chinese leader’s hotel in an upscale neighborhood, as part of what what the White House described as a rotation of political turf.
In Rio de Janeiro, Biden will be staying at a hotel on the beach under heavy guard by the Brazilian military, with a naval vessel patrolling the coast off the city’s famed Copacabana beach.
He is visiting for annual meeting of G20 leaders. He’ll be on the ground for less than 48 hours before heading home to Washington.
Brazil’s left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva blasted ‘neoliberalism’ in remarks setting the tone for the event, as Biden and other politically weakened leaders start to roll into town.
‘Neoliberalism has worsened the economic and political inequality that is currently plaguing democracies,’ he said.
The preliminary schedule released by the White House has Biden launching an alliance against hunger and poverty in a city whose iconic beaches are surrounded by impoverished favelas.
He is also set to attend a reception for leaders in what is likely to be his last international conference, after spending decades jetting to all manner of global gatherings as a senator, vice president, and president.
Then, he is set to have a ‘working lunch’ with the Brazilian president, before heading back to Washington on Air Force One for the last two months of his term.