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Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s former president, center, addresses supporters after winning the runoff presidential election in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on Sunday, Oct. 30, 2022.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The narrow win by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the Brazilian presidential election marks a key turning point on environmental issues, analysts say. 

Da Silva, commonly known as Lula, took 50.9% of the second round vote to incumbent Jair Bolsonaro’s 49.1%, according to Brazil’s election authority. 

The 77-year-old leftist campaigned on policies including exempting the lowest earners from income tax, raising the minimum wage and upping investment in public services to create new jobs. He has vowed to reduce poverty and boost economic growth, citing his record of doing so when he served two terms as president from 2003 to 2010.

The remarkable political return comes after he was jailed in 2017 on money laundering and corruption charges that were overturned in 2019.

“It’s a significant change, I can’t emphasize how much things will be different in this country with Lula’s election,” James Green, professor of Latin American History at Brown University, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” Monday, citing planned increases in welfare provision, more public-inclusive decision making, and the return of a “government of transparency.”

It also, Green said, “means a return to policies to save the Amazon.” As well as containing 25% of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity, the Amazon plays a crucial global role through storing billions of tons of carbon and releasing billions of tons of water each year.

Lula's victory will enable Brazil to return to a democracy, says professor

Lula used his victory address to pledge to combat climate change and deforestation — issues observers say have not just been sidelined but severely worsened under Bolsonaro’s tenure.

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon rose to an all-time high in the first half of 2022 and was 80% higher than the same period in 2018, the year before Bolsonaro took office, according to a report by the Amazon Environmental Research Institute.

Bolsonaro has been criticized for enabling the proliferation of illegal activity in Brazilian rainforests — including land grabs and violence against indigenous people and campaigners — through funding cuts to on-the-ground law enforcement; slashing the national environment agency’s budget; seeking to overturn environmental regulations; approving thousands of new pesticides; and appeasing the country’s powerful agricultural businesses by failing to act on encroachment onto protected lands.

Brazil has also failed to detail plans to cut carbon emissions in line with international agreements, according to Human Rights Watch, and its emissions from agriculture and cattle-raising have risen to the highest level on record.

Bolsonaro’s office was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC. Bolsonaro has previously said he was taking action to protect the rainforest; but he has also defended the expansion of mining projects, while also accusing foreign governments and the media of exaggerating the damage being done. In 2019, he told foreign journalists: “No country in the world has the moral right to talk about the Amazon. You destroyed your own ecosystems.”

Environmental turnaround?

Organized crime has taken hold of several areas of the Amazon during Bolsonaro’s presidency, with many illegal miners and land grabbers seeing him as an ally, Carlos Rittl, international policy advisor and Brazil specialist at Norwegian NGO Rainforest Foundation, told CNBC on a call.

“Around 95% of deforestation in the last four years in the Amazon has had some level of illegality,” he said. “Areas that should have remained as forest have become private land, indigenous land has been invaded. It has reached this level because of the inaction of the government.”

“If we take a look at the promises Lula has made, including in his victory speech last night, he was addressing several major problems but also net zero deforestation, protecting indigenous people’s rights,” Rittl continued.

“We can expect him to re-strengthen the environmental agency and recover the budget to allow them to act against environmental crimes” — but only so long as he “walks the talk,” Rittl said.

It won’t be easy or immediate, he added, for a variety of reasons. A 2023 budget has already been agreed and systems have to be rebuilt and put to work. Lula will be seeking consensus in a strongly divided country and political system. And things have changed since his previous term (when annual deforestation of the Amazon plunged from 25,396 sqkm in 2003 to 7,000 sqkm in 2010) due to higher levels of organized crime with a strong foothold.

International cooperation on these efforts will be important, Rittl added. Norway is already looking to resume aid for anti-deforestation efforts to Brazil, which it suspended during Bolsonaro’s term, local newspaper Aftenposten reported Monday.

Growth targets

A further challenge is the pressure on Lula to start delivering on the economy, job creation and poverty alleviation, themes he became known for during his previous term.

Brazil’s economy has stuttered over the last decade, falling into a deep recession 2015 and 2016 which was followed by a period of political instability. It was also heavily hit by the coronavirus pandemic, when its population suffered one of the world’s worst death tolls and inequality increased, according to think tanks. Inflation is set to average 5.8% this year and interest rates are near 14%.

Meanwhile, described by some commentators as socially rather than economically right wing, Bolsonaro also leaves behind various subsidy and unfunded spending programs that have added to Brazil’s high levels of debt, which Brown University’s James Green called a “series of time bombs.”

However, the Brazilian real has been among the only currencies to outperform the U.S. dollar this year due to commodities demand, central bank tightening and the economy’s distance from volatility such as the war in Ukraine.

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It remains to be seen how international investors will respond to the return of a Lula presidency, especially one with significant spending pledges to fulfil, and where he will take Bolsonaro’s planned pro-market reforms and privatizations.

The real dropped 2% on the news, before trimming losses, and shares in U.S.-listed Brazilian companies, including oil giant Petrobras, fell in pre-market trading.

The immediate concern for markets and also Brazilians and the international community is political stability during the handover of power, which is set to take two months.

There are still questions over whether Bolsonaro will challenge the election outcome. He could also seek to block a smooth transition, Green noted.

Energy question

And if he has set ambitious goals to cut deforestation to zero and review emissions targets in line with the Paris Agreement, Lula has also acknowledged oil will be necessary for some time and would oversea an increase in oil and gas production, Climate Home News reports.

Brazil has a relatively clean domestic energy supply, with nearly half of its power coming from renewable sources. But it is also a major oil producer, with its crude oil exports providing a key income source along with soaring commodities demand during Lula’s previous terms.

Rittl said there was potential for an even greater shift toward renewable energy domestically.

Beyond that, he continued: “We need to see finance for agriculture that is linked to emissions reduction, protecting the environment, controlling fertiliser use and managing cattle. Brazil needs mandatory emissions reductions standards and an updated plan to fulfil them.”

“It needs economic policies that are aligned with climate policies to make sure that infrastructure, agriculture and industry are all drivers for change in Brazil,” Rittl added.

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I found this cheap Chinese e-cargo trike that hauls more than your car!

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I found this cheap Chinese e-cargo trike that hauls more than your car!

If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you combine a fruit cart, a cargo bike, and a Piaggio Ape all in one vehicle, now you’ve got your answer. I submit, for your approval, this week’s feature for the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week column – and it’s a beautiful doozie.

Feast your eyes on this salad slinging, coleslaw cruising, tuber taxiing produce chariot!

I think this electric vegetable trike might finally scratch the itch long felt by many of my readers. It seems every time I cover an electric trike, even the really cool ones, I always get commenters poo-poo-ing it for having two wheels in the rear instead of two wheels in the front. Well, here you go, folks!

Designed with two front wheels for maximum stability, this trike keeps your cucumbers in check through every corner. Because trust me, you don’t want to hit a pothole and suddenly be juggling peaches like you’re in Cirque du Soleil: Farmers Market Edition.

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To avoid the extra cost of designing a linked steering system for a pair of front wheels, the engineers who brought this salad shuttle to life simply side-stepped that complexity altogether by steering the entire fixed front end. I’ve got articulating electric tractors that steer like this, and so if it works for a several-ton work machine, it should work for a couple hundred pounds of cargo bike.

Featuring a giant cargo bed up front with four cascading fruit baskets set up for roadside sales, this cargo bike is something of a blank slate. Sure, you could monetize grandma’s vegetable garden, or you could fill it with your own ideas and concoctions. Our exceedingly talented graphics wizard sees it as the perfect coffee and pastry e-bike for my new startup, The Handlebarista, and I’m not one to argue. Basically, the sky is the limit with a blank slate bike like this!

Sure, the quality doesn’t quite match something like a fancy Tern cargo bike. The rim brakes aren’t exactly confidence-inspiring, but at least there are three of them. And if they should all give out, or just not quite slow you down enough to avoid that quickly approaching brick wall, then at least you’ve got a couple hundred pounds of tomatoes as a tasty crumple zone.

The electrical system does seem a bit underpowered. With a 36V battery and a 250W motor, I don’t know if one-third of a horsepower is enough to haul a full load to the local farmer’s market. But I guess if the weight is a bit much for the little motor, you could always do some snacking along the way. On the other hand, all the pictures seem to show a non-electric version. So if this cart is presumably mobile on pedal power alone, then that extra motor assist, however small, is going to feel like a very welcome guest.

The $950 price is presumably for the electric version, since that’s what’s in the title of the listing, though I wouldn’t get too excited just yet. I’ve bought a LOT of stuff on Alibaba, including many electric vehicles, and the too-good-to-be-true price is always exactly that. In my experience, you can multiply the Alibaba price by 3-4x to get the actual landed price for things like these. Even so, $3,000-$4,000 wouldn’t be a terrible price, considering a lot of electric trikes stateside already cost that much and don’t even come with a quad-set of vegetable baskets on board!

I should also put my normal caveat in here about not actually buying one of these. Please, please don’t try to buy one of these awesome cargo e-trikes. This is a silly, tongue-in-cheek weekend column where I scour the ever-entertaining underbelly of China’s massive e-commerce site Alibaba in search of fun, quirky, and just plain awesomely weird electric vehicles. While I’ve successfully bought several fun things on the platform, I’ve also gotten scammed more than once, so this is not for the timid or the tight-budgeted among us.

That isn’t to say that some of my more stubborn readers haven’t followed in my footsteps before, ignoring my advice and setting out on their own wild journey. But please don’t be the one who risks it all and gets nothing in return. Don’t say I didn’t warn you; this is the warning.

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OPEC+ members agree to larger-than-expected oil production hike in August

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OPEC+ members agree to larger-than-expected oil production hike in August

The OPEC logo is displayed on a mobile phone screen in front of a computer screen displaying OPEC icons in Ankara, Turkey, on June 25, 2024.

Anadolu | Anadolu | Getty Images

Eight oil-producing nations of the OPEC+ alliance agreed on Saturday to increase their collective crude production by 548,000 barrels per day, as they continue to unwind a set of voluntary supply cuts.

This subset of the alliance — comprising heavyweight producers Russia and Saudi Arabia, alongside Algeria, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Oman and the United Arab Emirates — met digitally earlier in the day. They had been expected to increase their output by a smaller 411,000 barrels per day.

In a statement, the OPEC Secretariat attributed the countries’ decision to raise August daily output by 548,000 barrels to “a steady global economic outlook and current healthy market fundamentals, as reflected in the low oil inventories.”

The eight producers have been implementing two sets of voluntary production cuts outside of the broader OPEC+ coalition’s formal policy.

One, totaling 1.66 million barrels per day, stays in effect until the end of next year.

Under the second strategy, the countries reduced their production by an additional 2.2 million barrels per day until the end of the first quarter.

They initially set out to boost their production by 137,000 barrels per day every month until September 2026, but only sustained that pace in April. The group then tripled the hike to 411,000 barrels per day in each of May, June, and July — and is further accelerating the pace of their increases in August.

Oil prices were briefly boosted in recent weeks by the seasonal summer spike in demand and the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, which threatened both Tehran’s supplies and raised concerns over potential disruptions of supplies transported through the key Strait of Hormuz.

At the end of the Friday session, oil futures settled at $68.30 per barrel for the September-expiration Ice Brent contract and at $66.50 per barrel for front month-August Nymex U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude.

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Podcast: Trump/GOP go after EV/solar, Tesla, Ford, GM EV sales, Electrek Formula Sun, and more

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Podcast: Trump/GOP go after EV/solar, Tesla, Ford, GM EV sales, Electrek Formula Sun, and more

In the Electrek Podcast, we discuss the most popular news in the world of sustainable transport and energy. In this week’s episode, we discuss Trump’s Big Beautiful bill becoming law and going after EVs and solar, Tesla, Ford, and GM EV sales, Electrek Formula Sun, and more

Today’s episode is brought to you by Bosch Mobility Aftermarket—A global leader and trusted provider of automotive aftermarket parts. To celebrate Amazon Prime Day July 8th through 11th, Bosch Mobility is offering exclusive savings on must-have auto parts and tools. Learn more here.

The show is live every Friday at 4 p.m. ET on Electrek’s YouTube channel.

As a reminder, we’ll have an accompanying post, like this one, on the site with an embedded link to the live stream. Head to the YouTube channel to get your questions and comments in.

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After the show ends at around 5 p.m. ET, the video will be archived on YouTube and the audio on all your favorite podcast apps:

We now have a Patreon if you want to help us avoid more ads and invest more in our content. We have some awesome gifts for our Patreons and more coming.

Here are a few of the articles that we will discuss during the podcast:

Here’s the live stream for today’s episode starting at 4:00 p.m. ET (or the video after 5 p.m. ET:

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