Fábio Medina Osório, for “O Globo”: “Entrenched eco-ideology”
Article in O Globo, of 23/09/2019, on environmental bureaucracy as an obstacle to development, citing hydroelectric plants in the Amazon.
Translated from the original.
One of the problems that holds back development is the environmental agenda. To generate investment in strategic areas, the heavy bureaucracy of the public machinery must be overcome. In recent governments, there were environmental pending matters that dragged on forever, such as the hydroelectric projects in the Amazon, and they were authorized only after the dismissal of Environment Minister Marina Silva.
The so-called eco-ideologies, which permeate associative movements and the entrails of the branches of power, have taken root in the culture of oversight. In this sense, Science itself came to be taken over by eco-ideologues, who fight for a new environmental culture.
One of the side effects is radicalism in the defense of the environment. Any conduct aimed at socioeconomic growth, even sustainable growth, may end up being considered an environmental transgression, insofar as the legislation is made up of general clauses and indeterminate legal concepts, opening a path to dubious interpretations. In this context, a field of legal environmentalism may even be created.
As if the profusion of generic and undefined norms that supply the Executive’s environmental bureaucrats were not enough, this same complex body serves as an instrument for members of the Public Prosecution Service, armed with sovereignty, to act without institutional unity in controlling the Executive Branch.
It is healthy for there to be democratic controls over the Executive, but there must be a position by the Public Prosecution Service that respects the principles of separation of Powers and of economically sustainable development, which seeks the production of wealth and the opening of jobs.
In this sense, it becomes essential to assess whether there are egalitarian criteria and rationality in conduct adjustment agreements in the environmental area in Brazil, and whether there is already a rationally traceable administrative case law on this matter, in the direction of the desired sustainable development.
Fábio Medina Osório is a lawyer and former minister of the Office of the Attorney General of the Union