The only fair way to curb the deforestation of the Amazon is to make the economic incentive of not cutting it down greater than the incentive of cutting it down. In other words, Brazil needs to be compensated for not utilizing its natural resources. The majority of Western countries exhausted their natural resources (including forests) for economic gain and have no right to point fingers at Brazil, especially when they buy meat and soya from Brazil. It's important to note that Brazil has more preserved nature and a smaller carbon footprint than most - all? - countries that criticize it. I'm all for preserving the Amazon but the entitlement and double standards that surface in discussions about this subject are ridiculous.
There's lots to criticize about other Western countries and how they've managed their own resources (and especially for any outsourcing of environmental harm to which they contribute), but we don't need to be dishonest by arguing that they've depleted their own resources. North America has some of the most abundant forests, oil fields, and coal deposits in the world, and that without accepting payment to compensate for not consuming them. Similarly, Europe has many resources of its own. And (especially in Europe) most of the consumption of natural resources in these countries predated our modern understanding of environment.
If the US demanded a check from Brazil in order to halt the creation of some oil pipeline or coal mine, they would rightly be laughed out of the room--the US shouldn't contribute to worsening environmental issues because it's every country's moral responsibility to create a sustainable future.
> especially when they buy meat and soya from Brazil.
I'm a big fan of economic solutions to economically-derived environmental problems. I want as many countries as possible to have a carbon tax, and I want those countries to have a border adjustment so China or whomever can't out-compete other countries by polluting (externalizing the cost of production to the environment). Maybe the analog here is a border adjustment for Brazil and other countries that aren't managing their environment to some accepted standard, so that other Western countries aren't contributing to Brazilian deforestation (and other environmental issues).
It doesn't gloss over it at all; as previously mentioned, there's lots to criticize about the US and other countries. The US ought to do better, but its sins (especially those prior to our modern understanding of environment) don't vindicate Brazil's deforestation today. This line of argumentation--that we all need only be as good as the worst of our rivals (and by whatever standard suits us in a given moment, no less)--is just a race to the bottom and I reject it wholesale.
I’m not hostile to this point of view — I understand it. But ultimately there will have to be some sort of middle ground. Carbon emissions stick around a very long time, and we can basically assign our name (speaking from the USA here) on the majority of them. They’re the emissions causing challenges today, and they disproportionately affect the poor developing nations, who — while they may benefit from our innovations — are going to have a hard time accepting that they can’t take the same easy route to success that we did.
> North America has some of the most abundant forests, oil fields, and coal deposits in the world, and that without accepting payment to compensate for not consuming them
How much economic benefit would those resources offer if consumed? In the case of forests, is the land covered by them fit for pasture or crops? Is that an apt comparison with the Amazon?
Also, how much does North America need the money they'd get out of consuming those resources?
> Similarly, Europe has many resources of its own
Is that so? How much of Europe is covered by native forests? In Brazil it's roughly 50% of the country. And that's native rain forest, not artificial reforestation.
Is Europe willing to relocate people out of territories they've occupied for generations to restore the original forests?
> most of the consumption of natural resources in these countries predated our modern understanding of environment
Yes, but the fact is Western countries are wealthy and the resources they consumed throughout their history surely played a part in the wealth they've accumulated. Why shouldn't Brazil have that chance?
To clarify, I do not think it's reasonable to cut down the forest - but it's very easy and convenient for European countries to point fingers when they've gotten rich off their own resources and other countries' resources via colonialism.
> If the US demanded a check from Brazil in order to halt the creation of some oil pipeline or coal mine, they would rightly be laughed out of the room
If the US were a poor country and the oil pipeline would represent a big economic gain for them, I honestly don't think that would be unreasonable. You can't expect poor countries to sit on their hands if it's a game changing opportunity.
> Maybe the analog here is a border adjustment for Brazil and other countries that aren't managing their environment to some accepted standard, so that other Western countries aren't contributing to Brazilian deforestation
I would fully support that. I don't think we'll see any improvements to the situation until other countries maneuver to make deforestation an economic issue.
> Also, how much does North America need the money they'd get out of consuming those resources?
How much economic benefit would those resources offer if consumed? In the case of forests, is the land covered by them fit for pasture or crops? Is that an apt comparison with the Amazon?
The US alone has more untapped oil than any other country on the planet, including Saudi Arabia or Russia, and those countries are largely dependent on oil for their whole economies. So I would expect that there's enough oil to finance an entire second world economy (if not first world), especially prior to the recent decline in oil prices. And that's not counting forest or oil.
As far as forests, I'm sure much of it isn't fit for crops because most of what was fit for crops was cleared hundreds of years prior to our modern understanding of environment. America should work to eliminate and reverse its own environmental damage and Brazil should do the same. To that end, America has bigger environmental opportunities than reforesting agricultural land--for example, passing a carbon tax (with border adjustments) will certainly yield more environmental benefit (at lower cost).
> Is that so? How much of Europe is covered by native forests? In Brazil it's roughly 50% of the country. And that's native rain forest, not artificial reforestation.
Doesn't matter. The original claim was that western countries exhausted their own resources, so any amount greater than zero suffices to disprove it (and thus the broader argument that depends on that claim).
> Is Europe willing to relocate people out of territories they've occupied for generations to restore the original forests?
I don't buy your underlying assumption that Brazil not knowingly deforesting the Amazon is equivalent to Europe reversing damage they did during the Iron Age. What sense does it make to fault living Europeans for decisions that Iron Age Europeans made? They're both nominally European in that they reside in Europe, but they're different populations. I grant you that extant Europeans benefit from the dearth of forests in the same way that Brazilians benefit from the forests that have already been cleared, but how do we compare these things? Why do we need both polities to have the same percentage of preserved vs cleared forests? Or does fairness demand that the economies of all polities are exactly the same (or the same per-capita)?
Fairness is inherently subjective, so we oughtn't defer environmental progress to such a time as we discover some objective notion of fairness (or even one that we all agree upon); rather, each country should work to improve its own environmental trajectory and not make excuses based on other countries.
> If the US were a poor country and the oil pipeline would represent a big economic gain for them, I honestly don't think that would be unreasonable. You can't expect poor countries to sit on their hands if it's a game changing opportunity.
According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves_in_the_United_Sta...), there's something like $20 trillion in oil (at its peak price in 2008, there was about $20 trillion in undiscovered oil reserves alone). There's no dearth of poverty in the United States.
Per-capita CO2 emissions to put things in perspective:
United States 17.5
Australia 16.75
Canada 14.67
Russian Fed. 12.18
South Korea 11.78
Norway 11.71
Finland 11.53
Greenland 11.07
Netherlands 10.96
...
China 6.18
Mexico 3.91
*Brazil* 2.15
India 1.64
Even though I agree with the original argument, this Table doesn't support what is being said. In Fact China and India because of Billions of people, are kind of Outliers in this discussion. Is there a way to normalize this data?
I'm confused about what other normalization is needed. China and India have (combined) 1/3 of the world population. Why shouldn't they be responsible for 1/3 of the world emitted CO2?
As I understood from the post, the user tried to use the relation Population x CO2 emission to support that Brazil "has more preserved nature and a smaller carbon footprint than most other countries".. but to have China, Mexico and India as the top 3 cleanest countries in the World doesn't really make sense, no?
That list is not complete -- US is not the first, and India is not the last in the World. A better picture can be seen in the link in that comment.
I think that list is meant to show that a lot of the rich industrialized countries emit much more per capita than developing countries, and even China (which is usually heavily criticized for high emissions).
Would you prefer to normalize the data in the only other way that makes sense - per country? Give each country 1/193th of the world's carbon budget? The West would still not be looking pretty under that plan.
Or would you prefer that we also account historic emissions? That only seems fair to me (and would put us on track for decades of negative emissions, starting tomorrow, to pay back what we borrowed from the future.)
I'm not sure. For me just look wrong to see China, India and Mexico as the top 3 cleanest countries in the World. I visited all three. I had a different impression.
that was clearly more a way to try to set an agenda than really help Brazil. Just read the text linked in the thread. The regrowth is there, are Germany and Norway helping again?
Norway stopped the funding due to the unilateral dismantling of the board that oversees the (effective) spending of the funds. That was obviously essential for the donations to occur.
But I think the discussion is not only about how much money, but who gets it. The government? Will they give it to local farmers?
The past administrations were happy about fighting illegal deforestation. In this case they still could leverage foreign aid using the argument you mentioned, yeah. But the current one is removing as many regulations as they can get away with so those farmers can go nuts, and they don't seem like they want to negotiate.
I don't get your point. Bolsonaro is the fourth Brazilian president since 2008. And yes, environment weren't the top priority at any point, but there were actual efforts to lower deforestation, and the last URL you linked illustrates.
For sure I mean the table on Wikipedia. If you look 2013 and 2015, there were as well upside variations. Bolsonaro started his term on 1. January, 2019. To somehow attribute anything to him in this regards, you should wait at least 50% of his term. Unless the focus isn't in his work as president but on him as person.
Indeed, there is no easy answer. I think the majority of that money, if it existed, should be used for building infrastructure and financing public healthcare and education. I.e. it could replace some of the sources for the government budget, or add to it. Obviously there would be strict controls for suspending the funds if deforestation continued. If the government budget became even slightly dependent on such a fund, it'd be in the interest of every administration to make sure it kept coming. From the government's perspective, beef and soya are important exports so the funding would have to be comparable to that.
The interesting discussion would be about the indigenous people (Native people so to speak) in Germany and France claiming back land exactly as we Germans try to enforce in Brazil and US.
I suppose my confusion comes because I'm not really aware of any significant demographic shift in either of those countries in the past couple thousand years, so I wouldn't have thought the distinction of "indigenous" vs "non-indigenous" to be super relevant. I would also typically consider the connotations of "indigenous" to imply some degree of colonization, meaning that unless there's a group of people I'm not aware of, an "indigenous German" is just a "German".
Today you have native Germans and German citizens. Like the same as Brazilian citizens and Native people, i guess? To Imagine the same scenario that we Germans want to enforce in Brazil like "Give the Forest back to the Indigenous People" or "Let them live as their ancestors lived originally" but with people from Thuringia, Bavaria or Saxony claiming land to live how their ancestors lived back in the days is either bizarre or hypocritical.
Why not instead just have foreign govts buy and own the Amazon, instead of ranchers? Let the govts of the world, especially the Paris Climate Accords signatories, collectively own the Amazon and put it all into a nature preserve that can’t be mowed down and turned into farmland?
It would still be under Brazilian jurisdiction and law, of course, and the Brazilian govt would likely be contracted to run such a preserve. But the property rights would be owned by an international group of govts who do not allow destruction of the forests on their property.
Haha, maybe I'm wrong, people are downvoting me but without explaining why, so maybe there's some reason this isn't technically or legally possible I'm unaware of, who knows.
I didn't downvote you, but I imagine the main issue is sovereignty. It sure would feel awkward to sell out large patches of land to foreign countries - it's hard to argue Brazil's sovereignty would be intact after doing something like that.
Makes sense, though that seems like a relatively easily solvable technical/legal problem. Perhaps instead of foreign govts buying Amazon land directly, set up a non-profit land trust or other entity under the Paris Climate Accords that is funded by signatories, and use that to purchase the Amazon lands. Set up the governance in such a way that it doesn't compromise Brazil's sovereignty. Etc. I'm sure some clever lawyers could figure out an acceptable structure for such a thing.
This won't work unless we, as a species, cut out on meat (beaf+pork) consumption and also smaller houses/apartments would help (that would mean less need for furniture, i.e. less need for cutting down trees). No-one is going down in the Amazon to cut down trees just for the heck of it or because they are Bolsonaro's croons, they're doing it because there are very strong economic incentives to do it.
I always find funny how first world citizens don't want the Amazon being (ab)used, or dislike the palm oil industry, but still want to keep and develop their own agricultural lands AND their living standards.
I'm a reasonably hardcore environmentalist but this is true. There will be many armchair experts here suggesting that stuff should be done in Brazil but they never propose things like "let's shut down New York for two months per year", or "let's impose mileage quotas on North American vehicles" or "let's reduce German manufacturing by 50%".
Because for many "first-worlders" people in the third world are little better than exotic animals. They dont want to go to Mexico, Thailand or Kenya and find modern malls, hustling executives and last generation cars, no, they want pristine nature, exotic animals and smiling natives who treat them as gods and provide them with service for 1 dollar tips ("Dont give them more, you will spoil them").
Personally I want to reduce road traffic in favor of electric public transit, heavily reduce meat consumption, ban fast fashion and all but eliminate single use plastics, completely stop fossil fuel extraction and use.
And I think the way forward is for the globally privileged elite (that's primarily us in Europe and the US) to lead by example and use the greater resources available to us to make a difference first, improve our spotty record instead of leaning back and just dictating to others what we think they should do. Historically, we've already done that more than plenty already.
I want to ask a serious question, what's a reasonable response? Every youtube channel and nearly every podcast I listen that brings up climate change also has frivolous merch they push and commercials for wasteful things.
I know that at some level their merch and maybe the wasteful things are not a major sources of climate change but ... the attitude is. Each individual youtuber/podcaster is taking the attitude "My income is more important than the environment" which is basically the attitude almost everyone takes and arguably in the exact same category as fast fashion etc.
Do you really need a Kurzgesagt calendar/poster/plushy shipped across the world to you? Flash Forward Podcast is always advertising you should subscribe to have gourmet beers shipped to you on subscription. Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast shills for Bespoke Post to send you boxes of stuff you don't need every month. Isn't there some kind of disconnect between these shows telling us we should do more about climate change and then pushing exactly the kind of consumerism that brought us here?
It was sad to watch VOX try to justify traveling by plane 10-20 times a year.
IMO "My income is more important than the environment" is not the correct summary. The actual situation is this:
1) A youtuber needs a certain amount of income to be able to afford the time to create their content.
2) Selling merch works way better than asking for donations
3) The positive impact of having the informational videos far outweighs the negative impact of creating and shipping the merch.
You can of course criticize the viewers for (2) and if you think spreading information has a low impact, you can question (3).
So basically "my message is important so I'll burn the world to spread it but your message, probably not so don't copy me" .. Okay.
I mean you can make that same argument about almost anything "My 50k miles of air travel a year is important, yours isn't". "I need my giant house because I'm an influencer and invite lots of people over so I can convince them to save the environment". "If I don't look my best I'll never get the best opportunities which will make me rich and I can spend all my rich money on charity therefore I need all this fashion", etc...
Unfortunately, the way we've structured our economies and societies in the western world depend on continually greater consumption. It demands a constant upwards curve of resource consumption, otherwise it breaks down.
The first thought in most people's minds when they hear of a crisis is "what can I buy to help?", and many others go straight to "what can I sell?"
At the very least, they could sell something that is actually useful, instead of crap merch that serves no other purpose than to sit on a shelf for a while before being thrown in the trash.
Even better, start using Patreon to fund their media content directly, and offer non-physical bonuses for higher tiers, like early access and exclusive content.
It's hard to break out of the current consumerist paradigm, especially for the average content creator. But they should as least try to do the least possible damage within that paradigm, while advocating for a better way.
Just remember that there are billions of people moving towards the "developed" country lifestyle - people who will all want houses, cars, furniture, meat 3 times a day, etc etc. Yes, we should reduce our consumption if you already live that lifestyle, but I'm really not sure what are we going to do about billions of people who are about to get there.
There is absolutely no way that China, India, Brazil, etc. are going to limit their growth before their population's standard of living matches ours. Reducing our consumption is a prerequisite for capping their consumption at a sustainable level. Of course, even if we do that nothing is guaranteed.
Why would capping/reducing our standard of living have any influence on their choices? Is there any evidence to suggest they'd say "Americans gave up meat in favor of BeyondMeat/tofu/crickets, so we will too" and if so where can I read about that?
Well, it's not that it would influence their choices, it's that Americans are by far the biggest polluters and consumers on the planet - any reduction by them has the highest impact purely because of how off the scale they are. It's like when rich people say "oh when we gave some benefits to a poor person, they just used it on cigarettes. That means we shouldn't give anything to them at all ever". Like.....there's a very clear problem there.
"The New York Times asked Climate Interactive to calculate when Americans would have run out of fossil fuel if the nation’s population had somehow, at the beginning of the industrial era, been allocated a share equal to those of the rest of the world’s people. The calculation was premised on limiting emissions enough to meet international climate goals.
The answer: Americans would have used up their quota in 1944, the year the Allied armies stormed the beaches of Normandy."
China is emitting more than US right now. But that doesn't change the fact that US has polluted more overal.
How are the current generation Americans bound by what their ancestors did ? They can't do anything about it. Aren't they entitled to a good living standard as much as any other person ?
Like...is this an actual question? Of course people are bound by the actions of their predecessors - that's why Americans are still apologizing and making things right to native Americans, that's why things like affirmative action action exists to put things right for how people were treated half a century ago, that's why Germans still apologize and pay reparations for WW2....we can keep on going. Of course you have to take responsibility for the things you've done to the world. Otherwise you've reaped the benefit at the expense of others but hey, it was in the past so it's fine?
Peak beef [1]: the US beef cattle headcount peaked at about 45 million in the late '70s and is now at about 31 million as of 2020.
Globally [2] the beef cattle inventory has been basically stable since 1985 at between 200 and 220 million heads. One can say maybe the cows have gotten heavier, but no, the total beef production in tons has been flat too [3].
That's because we're using agricultural products to make cows get heavier, quicker than we did in the `70s. Going back to 1970s model where we had more cows which developed more slowly because they got their energy from grazing would require more labor than the system we have now but it would be much better for the environment. From an environmental and animal welfare prospective I don't have much of a problem with grazing cattle. It's the feedlots where cows now spend the last phase of their lives being stuffed with soy and high energy feed that's the problem.
I don't know if my solution is elegant or short sighted. It's hard to know because there is so much politics involved that it's hard to get a good read on my opinion.
Tax all meat, especially beef, based on the amount of "pollution"(carbon,water usage in low water areas, etc.) each "unit" of that meat takes.
At the same time, invest in nuclear. It works. There are now small nuclear stations being developed that are allegedly fallout proof.
Move to electric cars and as much electric power as we possibly can, powered by the nuclear(and to whatever extent we can, wind, hydro, solar).
We need to tax bad industries that are clearly causing us harm overall and use those taxes to fund startup costs for viablegood industries like renewable energy. No reason it can't be competitive IIRC, it's just so behind in capital compared to fossil fuel.
This is a sane proposal, but honestly an across the board ‘carbon tax’ would probably be easier to implement and have the desired effect. That’s essentially what you’re proposing on meat — with the inclusion of some other negative externalities.
And that's why I'm vegetarian, buy the few non-vegan products I eat entirely locally, buy produce in season, mostly locally, don't have a car, have never flown, instead take the train or my bicycle everywhere, refuse to use cabs/taxis, try to keep my consumption down, and focus extremely on energy efficiency in stuff I buy (our new apartment uses a total of only 32W total for all lighting, plus 20W for all christmas decoration, we don't leave any devices on standby, etc, and we're in the process of switching the power company to a green one).
But the extreme choices I made aren't necessary to fix the world: If every person in the top 10% globally (that means you, the reader of this comment) would cut down their meat consumption by half, we'd already have saved the rainforests, and significantly reduced climate change
If you'd have actually read my comment til the end, you would understand why diet is actually important if we're talking about deforestation and climate change, and can't just be ignored.
There's two ways this story goes, humanity decides to consume less meat in the future, or climate change forces humanity to eat less meat in the future. There's no other option out of this, the current situation is absolutely unsustainable.
If your burn down chart says you'll be broke in 5 months, then you can either spend less, or you'll be forced to spend less once you're insolvent. There's no way to continue down that path forever.
You are assuming too much, IMO. That's just too many people on Earth. So people will still burn forests if humans need to eat or if there is any chance of profit doing that.
Wood is likely the most sustainable material you could use for furniture - most of it is not from tropical rainforests. There's FSC (https://fsc.org/) certification for sustainable wood materials.
You can by sustainably produced tropical hardwood furniture. What sort of person prefers to have the non-sustainable option, if quality is the same? Well, I suppose it's cheaper.
It's largely for export, so those of us in countries who import Brazilian meat could put tariffs on it until we're no longer incentivising the destruction of the rainforest/planet.
Consumers will soon adapt to higher meat prices by either accepting them or using the countless (traditional + modern) recipes which require less or no meat.
The #1 importer for Brazilian beef and soya is actually China. China accounted for 85% of Brazilian soya exports and 45% of beef exports in 2019/2020. Aside from China, European countries actually rank higher as importers than the United States.
Not necessarily; fatalism never solves any problems. The article just highlights that historically the problem has been ignorance. We treat the Amazon as this vast ocean of un-mapped green where all sorts of people can hide; entire tribes of native Americans reside there that have had little or no contact with the modern world. We simply don't know what is going on there in very large detail.
Well, thanks to modern mapping, now we do. Formerly easy to hide and illegal activity like burning a bit of forest to get some farm land now stands out and we can track what happens or happened to bits of land. That's basically what the article is pointing out is actually happening. A few bits of information in there:
- Forest regeneration is slow but significant; up to 40% of forest thought to be lost over the past decades has in fact regrown. It's a slow process that takes up to 4 decades to fully restore bio diversity. But it's possible and happening at pretty significant scale.
- The whole process is basically driven by poor land management, ignorance, and incompetence. Farmers mismanage their soil, thus exhausting it and then burn more forest to solve their problem while abandoning their old land, which then starts regenerating if left alone.
- Mapping provides authorities better insight where this is happening or has happened and allows them to step up attempts to crack down on this to both protect regrowing forest and put a stop to new attempts to burn forests. Simply scaling up that effort could go a long way to fixing the problem. Farming by its very nature is very local. If authorities show up within weeks of you burning a forest to start growing stuff, it gets a lot more risky. Burning forest is the lazy option; it's only convenient if you can get away with it. Mapping can fix that.
Fatalism solves problems of resource misallocation. You're better off putting in the effort to solve problems you can solve than putting in the effort to solve problems you can't solve. Assuming there's a limited amount of effort, fatalism will help you.
> If authorities show up within weeks of you burning a forest to start growing stuff, it gets a lot more risky. Burning forest is the lazy option; it's only convenient if you can get away with it. Mapping can fix that.
Mapping doesn't do shit if the politicians don't act - and Bolsonaro is hellbent on not acting in the interest of anyone but the rich people paying him off (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-49815731).
If the rainforest is to be saved, Bolsonaro must be removed one way or the other - and I'm not sure that it will be possible at all to remove that guy at the voting booth anymore. Personally I'd welcome some sort of intervention by one of the three-letter agencies - this time it could be actually for a good cause.
> Personally I'd welcome some sort of intervention by one of the three-letter agencies - this time it could be actually for a good cause.
Have you ever read a book by Hannah Arendt called Eichmann in Jerusalem? The whole point of the book is the sheer banality of evil -- that the bulk of evil is not the sensationalist stuff that makes up movies, but its boring, bureaucratic machinations and tacit complicity of civilians under the regime.
So all I can say about your idea is it is at best naive and at worst cynical. First of all, it's naive because it supposes that military intervention ever works when that flies in the face of history showing that nation-building (especially of the American sort) never works unless it's the kind that comes about indigenously -- if it was so easy to fix problems, why has American military intervention post WWII been an almost complete failure?
Second of all, it's cynical because it's easy to support such ideas when you're not the citizen who has to suffer through the consequences if things get worse. What would be your response if your idea simply doesn't work? "Better luck next time?"
> That would be a fine way to make things exponentially worse.
Things are FUBAR already. It can't get that much worse: entire countries are effectively run by drug empires, others are falling apart due to uncontrolled, rampant violence (often enough caused by criminals the US deported in the first place), and Bolsonaro is selling out the future of humanity.
I agree that the anti-communist interventions of the past were a catastrophe - but looking away now and leaving the poor and nature to pay the price for past misdeeds is not an option.
The US needs to legalize drugs to drain the cartels of their funding source, support the local legitimate governments that are fighting against cartel and gang violence - and ensure that the Amazon rain forest is not burned down any more.
They can get much, much worse. Unimaginably worse. There's no comparison between Venezuela and Brazil, for example. But even between Bolivia and Brazil or Peru and Brazil there's a steep difference in development and living standards. Foreign intervention would destabilize the country and potentially lead to war, human suffering, and devastation.
> entire countries are effectively run by drug empires
This is not true.
> Bolsonaro is selling out the future of humanity
I'm not even sure what you mean here, but it sounds inaccurate and an exaggeration at the very least.
Brazil is going through a bad patch, for sure. But it's still the biggest, most dynamic economy in South America, a stable democracy with relatively high HDI, and a nation of proud people with vibrant history and culture. The idea of foreign intervention sends shivers down my spine - it would absolutely, with 100% certainty make things worse, and would be potentially catastrophic for the country. I find it really amazing that someone can casually suggest this. Hasn't South America suffered enough?
Despite what these “studies” say, the Amazon is NOT near a tipping point of destruction. In fact, it’s not even close.
These publications fail to disclose that these fires are seasonal and will continue to happen without man-interference.
These so-called protection of the Amazon is part of an agenda rich countries have to keep Brazil uncompetitive. How about we start rebuilding green space in Western Europe?
How about we start planting more trees in southern California?
The link is no not a peer-reviewed research in Nature, it is a "News Feature" written by "a science writer based in
Manaus, Brazil."
The cites for the tipping point are two editorials written by the same team of two researches in Science Advances, these are editorials, not research articles.
The research article claims that with a 40% deforestation the rain reduction will cause problems, but in the editorial they use hand waving to reduce that to 20%.
I think this is the most telling tidbit, right at the top of the article:
> According to their findings, 12% of total carbon emissions from Amazon deforestation have been offset by Brazil’s secondary forests, making natural regrowth an underestimated tool for mitigating global carbon emissions and regional ecosystem collapse.
12% of carbon offset is better than 0, but still catastrophically low. Just means the the destruction of the Amazon rainforest is just slightly slower than previously thought.
I'm more worried about bio-diversity loss than carbon offset tbh. This is purposefully framing the issue in a way to steer the conversation away from what really matters.
And "really matters" is just an opinion. Can you say why carbon offset doesn't really matter or why bio-diversity loss really does? I'm genuinely curious.
It seems the carbon footprint of even losing the entire Amazon Forrest is actually small:
"In various modelling studies the risk of Amazon dieback gradually grows above2oC and becomes significant in the 3 to 5oC range, but will still take 100-200 years to fully play out..."
"The total Amazon carbon sink is estimated to be 150-200 gigatonnes of carbon (GtC), with a maximum forest dieback to savannah estimated to release 53-70 GtC and raise atmospheric CO2 by 25-33 ppm (which is enough to cause up to ~0.15oC of warming if none of the CO2 was re-sequestered)"
We are currently extinguishing biodiversity at a rate close to 100k years per year (that is, recovery-via-evolution of the biodiversity lost in any recent year will take 100k years).
Some of that biodiversity isn’t load-bearing (that is, we can do fine without it), but some of it is and we will be paying for it’s loss essentially-forever.
De-Florestation in Brazil was really hard to curb. A lot of it is caused by fake benevolence. A good example NGOs that take money to protect the amazon, the process goes like this : raise money / buy land / cut 70% of the land / replant / advertise the replanting / repeat ...
It is completely legal and the environmentalists are in favour of that. At some point they might own the whole thing. Problem is that this is the cause of the fires, these new replanted forests are nowhere as dense and humid as the new quick raising ones.
Current Government did two things, relaxed on releasing the amazon satellite data and curbed down the 70% allowance to 30%. That might make it less profitable for the NGOs and maybe the reason they only recently double down on the rhetoric.
This is a pretty big claim, or that NGOs cut down 70% of the land they buy. Do you have any links that contain news or evidence that this practice is widespread and the allowance change ?
They reported the arrest, they didn't say that it was justified. The volunteers were released and cleared some time after that, which you may also remember. Brazilian police is shockingly corrupt and largely aligned with the equally corrupt Bolsonaro government and this ridiculous arrest was an attempt to sell a narrative.
