Norway Becomes World’s First Country to Ban Deforestation | Hacker News Reader

Norway Becomes World’s First Country to Ban Deforestation

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192 pointsDoreenMichele19 comments

It may seem ironic that the ecological policy is enabled by riches derived from extraction of their sizable oil reserves.

Nonetheless this is the pattern we've seen repeat time and time again through history: the more surplus (energy, power, human effort, etc.) is available, the more people can improve their living conditions. And people indeed show strong preference to have nature in healthy, beautiful state. It's all matter of having strong, efficient economy.

Norway's Sovereign fund is very much the exception from surplus. Most countries have achieved far less future proofing. The pattern we see again and again is using a surplus in a very short-term, short-sighted manner.

Round about the same time as Norway was setting up their fund, the UK was deciding not to. UK's dividend from similarly sized oil reserves was nothing. It was all given away in tax cuts, realistically not much noticed. Effectively all spent on people buying a 26" CRT TV, a holiday, maybe a Sony Walkman etc.

Tax cuts and unemployment benefits for the massive numbers of people losing their jobs.

The population of the UK is considerably larger while they had less oil reserves and their oil is more costly to extract.

We'd have potentially ended up with a similarly sized fund but around a tenth per-capita. That would have been around $20k or $30k for every man woman and child - hardly trivial.

Certainly not a reason not to bother or feel we got anything resembling a benefit from the resource dividend.

Hindsight is always 20/20, the Norwegian fund was setup because the country went bankrupt and needed to save its pensions a similar fund in the UK would’ve been about half of the total endowment the Norwegians had with 12 times the population it’s not that clear if it would’ve made any difference in the long term.

This is about a Norwegian government policy to not procure the products of deforestation.

Some countries limit the actual deforestation directly: for example, Article 5 of the Bhutanese constitution from 2008 provides broad environmental protection and mandates that at least 60% of the country shall be forest at all times.

Clickbait titles...

Limmiting procurement should incentivize non-deforistation where as a simple ban would likely just shift deforestation to other countries. But alas, the current title is more sensational.

https://qz.com/504370/norway-rewards-brazil-with-1-billion-f...

Like giving them a billion dollars, too?

> mandates that at least 60% of the country shall be forest at all times.

That's amazing. I wish more countries would do that. I'd like to see new "old" growth forests in Canada and the US. (We have three in Ontario, but Ontario is huge and there could be more)

Good for them. Currently in my country they are actively cutting trees thanks to a EU renewable energy policy that counts biomass as renewable energy, resulting in a lot of "sick" and "dangerous" trees getting cut.

https://www.princeton.edu/news/2018/09/12/europes-policy-tre...

Hopefully this will also apply to fodder for the farmed fish that is produced with soy from the rain forest but I highly doubt it. The farmed fish lobby here is strong.

Edit: Yeah I see this is from 2016. They are indeed still using soy from the rain forest while the government pumps out billions to "protect" the rain forest.

Soybean production can potentially continue without rainforest destruction, and fish farms are far from being the largest consumers of soya.

Legislation and expenditure to protect forest directly targets the heart of the matter while indirectly stifling all of its causal factors.

Need to put (2016) in the title. This is an old article.

None the less, good for us. Even though our valleys are becoming more filled with trees now that there is no livestock to keep it down.

Did they also ban buying timber from abroad, or did they only ban deforestation within their own borders? I hope it's not like US recycling that ended up sending most of the garbage abroad.

I'd think that timber planted for that purpose would not be counted as deforestation. Just like paper is made from Eucalypti which is rare to grow naturally or with other species.

China is paying big bucks right now for timber and buys more European wood since the trade conflict with the US. There are forests to protect.

The idea of banning logging of any kind to the average American might seem stupid, their thought process being "well, what else are we going to get wood to build new houses??". However, steel / aluminum construction is dropping in price every year and although concrete isn't much better, buildings constructed from it last one hell of a lot longer. IMO forests are far too precious to humanity to just cut down for housing materials. DISCLAIMER - I'm going to come off as some hippie-dippie tree hugger here, but I am NOT. Just your average developer with some weird hobbies, maybe I happen to like plants a bit more than some since I got into plant science / algae while doing research at UT Austin's plant science dept. in high school? I digress...

My biggest reason to support this kind of legislation comes from an experience I had while taking time off from college to work in the Bay Area. One weekend I decided to take a day trip to Big Basin National Park. This was in 2017 after almost two weeks of heavy rain, I was lucky I didn't get my shrimpy VW Jetta stuck in a washed out part of the road during the drive over the foothills on my way to the park.

When I arrived, the forest floor was surging with life, trees had fallen but new rivers had formed. I saw endangered species of mushroom, salamander and all kinds of other life that otherwise wouldn't have emerged from the duff covering the forest floor. I spent 7 hours in that park, eventually realizing a deer had been silently following me. For a while I was actually lost and although I'm not a religious person consider this three hour period taking in the forest as the closest thing to a "religious experience" I've ever had.

In simply terms I though, "how on earth could anyone experience this incredible place, trees higher than I could see, life surging from every orifice and think 'we should cut this down to build housing complexes'??"

I had a long reflective drive back, feeling refreshed in a way I'd never experienced going to any other national park. It killed me to pass logging trucks and signs for "active logging" as I made my way back over the foothills and actually almost ran out of gas because my expected route had washed out while I was hiking that day.

Forests are sacred. Why we cut them down is beyond me, if you're in the Bay Area please join a reforestation cause!

I'm going to get back to programming now...

>steel / aluminum construction is dropping in price every year

I'm not sure this is any better. Steel and aluminum production are both incredibly stressful on the environment. Brazil, for example, mines massive amounts of iron ore (for steel) and bauxite (for aluminum) in the Amazon, contributing significantly to the deforestation there. I don't know much about the process for steel production, but aluminum smelting is incredibly energy intensive. The result is large energy projects which themselves impact the environment. Hydroelectric dams are commonly used to supply the energy needs and can result in massive environmental side effects in places like Brazil. A common alternative to smelting near mining operations is shipping to countries like Iceland, which has exceptional energy production capacity thanks to its many renewable sources (like hydro) and offers cheap energy. While dams in Iceland have significantly less flora and fauna to disrupt, you're adding the emissions cost of shipping.

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