This week the French President met with the British Prime Minister and faced a number of domestic issues and so it was with little surprise that many news outlets decided to show all the investigative integrity of Fred West's gardener and instead they focused on a vacuous tweet he made about the fires currently raging in the Amazon.

The comment in question was about a number of admittedly under-reported fires in Brazil, although the press didn't seem to mind when the Olympics were being held in Rio and the stadium had that massive torch blazing for weeks. Yes the fires are bad though they're not actually that unique in the world right now. They're apparently costing a football pitch per minute, which would admittedly explain Brazil's decline in recent football tournaments, going out in the quarter finals to Belgium 2-1 last year. But they're also a lot less damaging than the mining and oil industry that the french seem happy to interact and invest with.

Most curious to me was Emmanuel Macron's description of the forest as the world's lungs, which made me wonder if his solution was to treat them like french lungs and grow tobacco or establish a factory in the region manufacturing those odd cigarillos things they have in France. Like I said, it would be perhaps better to focus on real environmental issues like the Chinese dumping plastic into the sea but that would involve politics and hard work, rather than pointing fingers. It's sort of like when doctors talk about fast food and act as if the fat and carbohydrate are the dangerous parts, when everyone knows the real danger lies in the potential knife wounds or drug overdose when you're hanging out "wiz yo mates innit" down by the local railway station.