Brazil has withdrawn its offer to host a large UN conference on climate change next year, the foreign ministry said Wednesday, leading environmental groups to question the government's commitment to reducing carbon emissions.

Brazil pulled its offer to host the 2019 climate change conference because of "the current fiscal and budget constraints, which are expected to remain in the near future," the foreign ministry said in a statement sent to The Associated Press.

Environmental groups interpreted the decision as a nod to President-elect Jair Bolsonaro, who promised during his campaign to pull Brazil out of the Paris accord on climate change.

Bolsonaro's pick of career diplomat Ernesto Araujo, 51, underscored Brazil's sharp turn to the right and the reversal of nearly a decade and a half of diplomacy under leftist Workers Party governments that focused on alliances with South American allies and ideological partners ‐ including Cuba.

...Araujo, a career diplomat, is currently head of the foreign ministry's United States and Canada department.

In his blog, Metapolitia Brasil, Araujo claims his goal is to "help Brazil and the world liberate themselves from globalist ideology".

In a post last month he writes: "This dogma has been used to justify increasing the regulatory power of states over the economy and the power of international institutions on the nation states and their populations, as well as to stifle economic growth in democratic capitalist countries and to promote the growth of China"

His pick as agriculture minister is the head of the farming lobby, Tereza Cristina Dias, who conservationists have nicknamed the "Muse of Poison" due to her enthusiastic support for relaxing controls on agro-toxins.

She and her colleagues are said to be gutting the responsibilities of the environment ministry before its new head is appointed. The environment institution is likely to be so subservient that insiders joke there will soon be two agriculture ministries in Brazil.