Amazon deforestation: Brazil's Bolsonaro dismisses data as 'lies'
bbc.com
bbc.com
Suggest to an American to fly less and over 99% will say, "But my job. . ." as humans fly more than ever. Not to dwell on flying, we could talk of miles driven, plastic discarded, air conditioning empty rooms, eating more beef than ever.
The scale is different, but the emotional response is similar.
An alternative: we could see ourselves as part of something greater than ourselves that benefits us all including ourselves. We want Bolsonaro to feel that way. We can do it ourselves and reduce our waste each by a good 75 to 90 percent.
As Frankl said, "We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
I see it as the reason why individual solutions will never work and why you need the government to step in to make sure those negatives externalities (aka killing the planet for our children) are properly priced in so that we subset those practices.
Left to themselves, individuals want to defect and get a free ride on the backs of those who cooperate. But if a critical mass of individuals cooperate—by choice, force, or persuasion—everyone wins.
—
It’s intellectually fine to be a libertarian and say, “even if the overall good is served by cooperation, there is a higher value in having the freedom to defect.”
But you are correct that on the balance, it takes a society working together to achieve certain large-scale good outcomes that demand widespread cooperation.
Whether those large-scale good outcomes are worthy of having less liberty is what certain debates are really about, even if people try to frame them otherwise, e.g. “Individual good, government bad.”
I mean, imagine a government actually trying to limit how often people/companies could fly/run planes, how much meat they're allowed to have, what kinds of cars were allowed, etc.
The immediate reaction would basically be:
A: Most of the population flat out ignoring them and their attempted guidelines, leading to bad press if they tried to enforce them.
B: The opposition having a golden opportunity to win over the current ruling party's supporters with claims they'll revert said changes after the next election.
C: Said main party's polling support crashing straight through the floor as most of their supporters abandon them.
D: Tons of bad press in general, especially if certain people/companies seem to be 'getting away with' behaviour they don't allow the rest of the population to indulge in. You can already see this (for good reason) with complaints about stuff like Davos and how all these politicians and actors/celebrities are taking private planes everywhere.
E: Their own party members jumping ship, especially if it's a larger/established party which went all eco intense.
F: If things got bad enough, outright civil war/revolution/military coup/riots/etc. And given the percentage of people who'd back such restrictions/law changes is so tiny, it probably wouldn't end in their favour.
The government stepping in would (if done as strictly as some articles/guidelines suggest), lead to a lot of civil instability and any political party implementing it basically collapsing.
So the options are basically either 'hope everyone becomes more environmentally conscious (unlikely)', 'get the government to step in' (unlikely, may lead to wars and revolutions, would sink their reputation), 'hope some sort of invention makes carbon capture much easier/resource efficient or makes clean energy super cheap'.
You're right that in general people don't like government policies that potentially lower people's standards of living. Gas taxes are usually very unpopular. But I think "hope everyone becomes more environmentally conscious" is more possible than you think. This is very much a generational issue and I think as the negative effects of climate change become more apparent, the public will begin to see the light.
In the US, it would not take a huge change in public opinion to make truly effective environmental policy more tenable. With the current trend, it may only take another decade for over 60% of Americans to believe that climate change should be a top priority: 44% already claim to prioritize it, up from 26% in 2010. Of course, some of these people may not actually like how environment-focused policies affect their lifestyles, but that may change as well.
The reason Amazon is being deforested is simple: is not that they hate the Amazon and want to destroy it. Is that doing this is very profitable. You get FREE land to raise cattle and grow soy. You can get rich(er) from day to night. With that money you buy your way with politicians, both in Brazil (easy) as well as in other countries who will turn a blind eye on this. And its not only people in Amazon getting rich, Americans are buying like crazy into the cheaper meat, wood, and soy. And Americans will find this great, because now you can get "hormone-free beef", cheap "earth-saving" soy products, and beautiful, cheap wood products. People in America peddling these products are getting rich and telling everyone that they're making their lives "better". This is what capitalist society calls a "win-win".
The problem there is that making more money is not good to everyone as they want us to believe, and in particular not good for the environment, or to the thousands of native people who will die or be dislodged from their native land, or to the several thousand people that will have to toil on land stolen by others. There is no way capitalism can prevent this, because it only benefits a certain part of society that decided to live under its auspices (most of them in rich countries) - Brazilians making cents per day have close to zero power in the market. Making more money is not good for the workers that will be squeezed for this profit to happen. It is not good for the kids that will grow without education because their families are forced to participate in this process. In other words, making more money does not solve problems, it only create more problems, even if these problems are going somewhere you cannot see or care about. The world needs to break this vicious cycle of money making before we can find a solution to these grave problems that cannot be controlled under capitalism.
And if you doubt the efficacy of said approach, just look at Texas renewable numbers. Texas is arguably the capital of the American oil industry and is a solidly red state. And yet it's gone from 6% Wind to 19% Wind in 10 years, with Dallas likely to be 100% renewable by 2030: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/a-snapshot-of-t... https://www.windpowerengineering.com/business-news-projects/...
It's a concept most environmentalists I encounter look upon as the dark side of the force, like if they used economics and human selfishness towards a positive end it would somehow take away their environmentalist virtue. Guess it's hard to be a martyr when you take away the sacrifice. Doesn't help that they usually look down on the individuals in question, and can't seem to understand why "pay more and do less so you can make a negligible personal impact on the problem, because it's the right thing to do." is a hollow argument for many people. Maybe that person in the concentration camp who gave his last piece of bread died, and maybe you don't want to be that person.
I call it environmental austerity in order to pay the environmental debt accrued through economic development.
Do you think an environmentalist would read this description and think, "that's me to a tee!"? If not, do you think you are more perceptive about the motives, beliefs, and strategies of environmentalists than they are themselves?
Your point would be better made without the dubious theories about the beliefs and motives of environmentalists.
You need look no further than any Hacker News discussion of climate change to see tons of comments of how people should stop eating beef, stop eating all meat, stop driving so much, stop flying, pay more for clean energy, pay more in taxes, even stop having children (at which I will never cease to /facepalm), all with the theme of "There is no way you have any valid argument against any of this, so if you refuse to make these sacrifice you're part of the problem."
I'm all for environmental regulation, I'd even be in favor of a carbon tax, but modern environmentalism has a huge messaging problem that makes both nearly impossible in the US outside of deep blue zones. It's way too moralistic and way too unwilling to adapt(ironic, given its cause). Maybe if environmentalists turned down the volume on climate change and talked more about good jobs, clean air, clean water, they'd make more headway. Find common ground and go with that, because in a functioning democracy we all move forward together (given a large majority) or not at all. And in my opinion anyone who truly cares about solving climate change should prioritize progress over virtue.
I live in the midwest and my friends still complain that the government forced them to switch to the new bulbs.
There's a lot of weird anxiety about doing things to help the environment from a lot of folks that makes them not want to do even things that benefit themselves.
It's a great example of poor environmental policy and you dismiss criticism as "weird anxiety". It's not weird to dislike other people forcing you to make choices that they think are for your own good.
Incandescent bulbs last months, LEDs last years and use 5x less energy.
> Thank God for decent LED lights in the last few years or the irony would still be pretty thick.
Do you think we would be better off using incandescents?
I think the main thrust of your point is that you don't think the government should be able to tell folks they can't use crappy bulbs. I think without government intervention LEDs wouldn't be where they are today, which is partly due to that weird anxiety I mentioned, and that's unfortunate.
Also you need to take into account the total manufacturing cost of the light. I believe that only recently have some LEDs (and not good ones with a decent spectrum) reached parity with incandescents in terms of TCO.
Finally, I would look at the market for computers and find how much government intervention it took to advance the technology in that industry. Why would the market for light bulbs be any different? Businesses had already switched to fluorescent for cost savings, why can't consumers be allowed to make similar cost/benefit choices?
I suppose I reluctantly wear the environmentalist label as that's how some see me. It's not how I would see myself.
A fix is removing all subsidy from fossil fuels and instead subsidising renewables along with increased insulation and combined community heat and power schemes. Except I don't see that as environmentalism, just common sense, whether considering an individual family and house, or a town or national scale.
How do you do anything about that? Somehow reality has become not just optional and uncertain in our policies, perceptions and opinions, but downright irrelevant. When there's no merit in even trying to be truthful and accurate, well... you get this.
What people care about is whether the politicians will instigate policies that are beneficial to them.
Bolsonaro ran with one of his main issues being law and order. In Brazil the crime rates are quite shocking (IIRC the murder rate is huge like 100s a day). It doesn't matter if he lies about the Rainforest if people see if cleaning up the streets.
e.g. There is a scare story at least once a week that is plastered over newspapers/news sites such as "Having a bacon sandwich could lead to bum cancer!!!!", when the headline is clearly salacious. The actual research probably had a sensible conclusion of "Those who have had consistently more red meat, have an increased chance of cancer". If you hear see the same story hundreds of times, you are likely to ignore it or even despise it.
The same happens with the populist politicians. Take someone that isn't as controversial as Bolsonaro such as Nigel Farage in my home country.
A fair description of his political stance is a Patriotic Thatcherite that is anti-mass-immigration. When he was first becoming well known (back in the mid-2000s) he was constantly branded a racist and a fascist (there was no evidence of this) in an attempt to conflate his position with the likes of actual fascists of old like Oswald Mosley.
Now Whether or not you agree with his politics isn't important. In these attempts to constantly smear him he has become one of the most effective UK politicians in recent memory. To many he can simply do no wrong because they will dismiss any criticism of immediately, disregarding its validity.
Also, how can you brand somebody as "patriotic" when his party is a US-based corporation with links to the Russian government and tax havens?
Sad to see this rubbish on HN. Farage plays to the same racist tendencies as Trump and Bolsonaro do, with constant dog-whistling. He's absolutely controversial and hardly effective: he still has no MP in the UK Parliament after 15 years of trying, and has accomplished absolutely nothing over two mandates in the EU Parliament beyond annoying even his own allies.
It's not the "smearing" that build his success, but a situation of sustained economic weakness of the white working classes that fosters a climate of anger against migrants (who are seen as cheaper competition). That BNP fella was similarly successful for a while. Also, Farage's support is built on social networks, where his messages are spread without a debate, let alone "smears".
> This would be the same Farage that made sure his anti-immigration message in the 2016 Brexit campaign had "the only prominent white person in the photograph obscured by a box of text": https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/16/nigel-farag....
You just did the very thing I was complaining about!
They are claiming that how an image was cropped and where text was placed somehow indicates racism. You are concentrating on nonsense and not actually making an argument against any of his policies or any of the assumption of the advert.
As for my descriptions of Farage. They come from other Journalists such as Brendan O'Neill (runs Spiked!). As for the rest of my description they are fairly objective.
> Sad to see this rubbish on HN. Farage plays to the same racist tendencies as Trump and Bolsonaro do, with constant dog-whistling.
When someone says "Dog whistling" that is the same as when someone runs out of arguments and says "Well you know it true and you aren't admitting it". It isn't an argument of any sort.
You just did the very thing I was complaining about, and I don't think you even knew you were doing it.
Most unfortunately, it's becomes impossible to make what we previously conceived of as an "argument" when one or more of the parties involved refuses to acknowledge the validity of objective reality (more commonly referred to as "facts").
No, you were not -- you were (and still are) trying to pass your biases (Farage "patriotic" and unfairly portraited while being "uncontroversial") as objective, by attacking straw men in how public debate arrives at objective conclusions about him. I pointed you at one of many examples of why that is not the case, and you doubled-down on it while completely ignoring the bits of my post that are inconvenient to your biases.
> not actually making an argument
Because there is no argument to make: Farage's "policies" are just a hodgepodge of badly-thought-out slogans designed to appeal to the worst instincts of the electorate. Like on Brexit, which he campaigned for but for which (like all "hard brexiteers") he has no practical or coherent plan.
The main problem with populists is precisely that their policies are unassailable, because they are completely devoid of details. They sell emotions, typically negative ones.
> When someone says "Dog whistling" that is the same as when someone runs out of arguments
As sad as it might make you, dog-whistling is a widely understood term in political debate, and there is little doubt that it is precisely what the likes of Trump and Farage do. (Well, to be fair, Trump has gone beyond that in recent days, turning to out-and-out discriminatory language.)
In my original post I said something along the lines of "He was less controversial than Bolsonaro" not that he was uncontroversial.
You didn't point me at anything objective. The best you linked me to a guardian article about an ad-campaign that claimed it was racist because one white person was removed from the photo. I think that sort of logic is ridiculous.
As for me ignoring parts of your post, yes I ignored parts of your post because I thought they were irrelevant to the point I was originally trying to convey.
> Because there is no argument to make: Farage's "policies" are just a hodgepodge of badly-thought-out slogans designed to appeal to the worst instincts of the electorate. Like on Brexit, which he campaigned for but for which (like all "hard brexiteers") he has no practical or coherent plan.
Well UKIP's manifesto of 2015 is a 76 page document according to the BBC:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32318683
I chose this because this is the last time I believe they fought a general election with Farage as Leader. So this would be indicative of his policies (as he would have had a fair amount of input in the process).
From the BBC summary it seems quite comprehensive. It seems to cover a similar number of areas as Labour's manifesto of 2015.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32284159
So I think your characterisation is quite unfair.
> As sad as it might make you, dog-whistling is a widely understood term in political debate, and there is little doubt that it is precisely what the likes of Trump and Farage do. (Well, to be fair, Trump has gone beyond that in recent days, turning to out-and-out discriminatory language.)
I know what the term means. However many of those that use the term do so as an accusation. They don't mention who they are whistling at and what terms they are using to do that.
> You didn't point me at anything objective.
Want more? https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/11465505/Nigel-Far...
Refusing to accept that Farage's campaigns are fundamentally based on discrimination, is just denying reality.
> Well UKIP's manifesto of 2015 is a 76 page document
Yeah, and no UKIP supporter would likely be able to describe any of it, except the bits on discriminating foreigners and closing borders. Because, frankly, that's pretty much the only thing they care about. Farage's latest outfit, the brexit party, smashes together old marxists and capitalist cronies, in single-minded pursuit of discrimination.
> They don't mention who they are whistling at and what terms they are using to do that
Because it becomes tedious to do that after a while. The targets of dog-whistling are almost inevitably minorities, because they are the ones who cannot be attacked directly without falling openly into discriminatory language - commonly known as "racist".
Well you've just changed the goalposts again. After being quite clearly confronted with evidence that doesn't support your assertions (a summary of a manifesto with a clear set of policies) you change the goalposts to the UKIP supporter being thick or bigoted.
Have you actually talked to many UKIP supporters? I've spoken to UKIP when they knocked on the door and they seemed like pretty normal people.
> Because it becomes tedious to do that after a while. The targets of dog-whistling are almost inevitably minorities, because they are the ones who cannot be attacked directly without falling openly into discriminatory language - commonly known as "racist".
Right so you have plenty of energy to throw endless accusations around, accuse me of all sorts because I don't agree with you but when asked for specifics it is too tedious. Okay with that I think I will leave you to it. Bye.
Yes, they are quite banal people, mostly. That means little - the worst political movements of the last century were full of very banal people, a certain Ms. Harendt even wrote a famous book about it.
> but when asked for specifics it is too tedious
I was explaining why most people in these debates cannot be bothered to go into detail. If we had to explain every term in the book, we'd end up reciting the opus of Bertrand Russell at every meeting.
Another subjective ad-hominem attack on people you don't really know much about.
> That means little - the worst political movements of the last century were full of very banal people, a certain Ms. Harendt even wrote a famous book about it.
Dropping names of someone that wrote a book isn't an argument. Doesn't address the actual tenor of what I was saying.
I notice that you haven't addressed the fact that you were completely incorrect about Farage and his policies. Let me remind you what your claim was, you said he had no policies. I showed you the Manifesto of 2015 (which is as substantive as their rivals).
> I was explaining why most people in these debates cannot be bothered to go into detail. If we had to explain every term in the book, we'd end up reciting the opus of Bertrand Russell at every meeting.
This is a ridiculous. You have spent more energy telling me why you won't do something than actually doing it.
I know Varoufakis, his parable was very different - he was ostracized after reaching power, by people who could not match his academic skills and felt threatened. The similarities with movements like Trump or Farage are barely skin-deep - Varoufakis does not enjoy the support of entire sectors of the media.
That said, I don't think I disagree with your greater point.
Yes.
I know that everyone's jaded by various neo-fascist leaders, but this stuff does need to be called out, else it gets normalised.
Respondents began to reply asking for additional information, how the claim could be verified, many simply asked for a source-others expressed concern for accuracy of information because they were potentially affected. Maybe one out of every few were “trollish” by popular definition. I read many of them. Very few seemed to be politically charged or even aggressive towards this attorney, they simply asked for more information.
Her responses were aggressive and antagonistic, calling respondents “trolls” and “enablers”. Even people asking in a considerate and mild mannered way because they were trying to inform themselves on the affair.
No facts ever came out. From the attorney or the local entity she claimed to have information on. She encouraged others to take the lack of information as proof that her friend’s claims were truth. Many did.
It was something to behold. An attorney was sharing what was effectively hearsay on twitter about a local business and actively combatting people asking for more information.
Strange times indeed.
Run that by me again.
How is denying something you know to be true a reasonable stance.
How is taking (or actively not taking) a course of action you know will harm the people you've been elected to serve, a reasonable stance.
This is pretty basic stuff for a democratically elected official.
:(
For most, it'll be brushed off and then moved on to the next new shiny thing in the news/outrage/propaganda cycle.
It almost feels like we're in an age with a kind of new post-modernism. Everyone can have their own reality and make up their own "facts" to fit. This makes science and philosophy irrelevant because there is no shared reality that can be investigated and no "fact" that can be disproven.
I'm firmly in favor of making a media consumption class mandatory for primary education. Essentially a mix of logic & fallacies, evaluating sources, and meta scientific news literacy.
Which is, if one thinks about it, the real problem at hand: when the political ideology of half a country requires complete and uncritical rejection of...yanno... the things happening in front of one's face, you can't actually fix the thing. People have to agree that it's broken first.
So, while I’d support a policy from high that guarantees everyone this type of education, a single computer lab teacher can have a major impact on their own.
I think the good faith available has rather remarkably drained out of even that, today.
There are other problematic sacred cows that are really hard to broach that similarly touch on information overload. We've got copyrights that allow rent-seeking behavior even where the value lies not in the creation, but in the shared social history, and in any case have durations that are out of whack with the encouragements needed to create. We've got a first amendment protection of speech that protects very valuable discourse and the ability to criticize, yet is only protects from the government, not the increasingly important non-governmental organizations (like but not exclusively social-media platforms). And it's a blunt tool too; it protects from imposed silence, but it does not protect from drowning out with noise. There's no framework for dealing with, essentially, really smart spam - and even if there were some countermeasure, the first amendment would likely render it illegal! And while I think it's perfectly reasonable for corporations to have a voice, I don't think people really considered the downsides of lobbying and other intentionally misleading messaging when reinterpreting incorporation to include first-amendment protections.
But suggest that the first amendment is flawed now, and people immediately jump to the conclusion that you personally must want to live in a Stalinist dictatorship.
I'm sure this would work out horribly.
But there are two conclusions you might draw from that: (A) that intelligence and education aren't helpful, or (B) that those making horrible decisions were being selfish.
Given the trumpian sentiment of "not paying my taxes makes me smart", and perhaps the fact that other people were even smart enough not to say something like that (but still to act on the idea), I'm thinking you need to consider (B) as a serious component here.
That would suggest that intelligence and education might still be useful - but only when dishonesty and selfishness is not a dominating risk. I suppose there are measures one might take to at least reduce those risks, since obviously completely eradicating those is unrealistic.
For instance, if the educated are good at serving themselves but pullign the wool over the electorate's eyes, then perhaps more audits would help. A culture of much harsher penalties for selfish leaders, even where the selfishness isn't illegal, might help. But perhaps also the electorate itself should be smarter too - and that's not entirely impossible in principle too; e.g. you could imagine a pyramid scheme of elections, not too different from the electoral college today - just with more levels (not just two), and with explicit decoupling of the elector from their vote (so no more "republican" electors or "democrat" electors - they too are free agents), and with the explicit aim of voting for people who you think you can most trust - intellectually, morally, and as a planner - instead of those you most agree with (since with multiple levels, that's kind of hopeless anyhow).
...So I'm not really serious with that last suggestion, but I do think we need to be exploring options. A disillusioned electorate mixed with manipulative, egotistical, untrustworthy politicians, spiced with lavish lobbying, no funding transparency, and media so full of noise the signal is hard to find - that's a recipe for serious food poisoning. It may seriously simply help to switch electoral systems every once and a while, even if there's no single best system - simply to shake loose the manipulative habits that settle in after a while.
There is a lot of ideology involved, which correlates rather poorly with intelligence. There are, for example, quite a few Republican politicians that aren't obviously stupid, who still spent decades denying first the existence of climate change, then the human contribution, followed by the risks and, finally, our ability to act against it.
Other example: when people say "Barack Obama was not born in the United States" it is not intended as a statement of fact, which is why no amount of fact-checking and birth-certificate-producing stopped people from engaging in that particular conspiracy theory. It is an expression of ideology.
And because every comment on such topic must end with George Orwell: In 1984 the highest achievement of ideology is the expression of facts that are obviously wrong.
It’s a veiled way of signaling they are willing to discriminate against certain races to other racists, while claiming plausible deniability.
I think this was the case before. Nowadays it's a different, worse situation. We have more means of knowing but people a proactively smearing information. It's a super impressive neurotic trend of "modern" societies.
Now what to do ? I don't know, but I wish. It's kind of a quest, find knowledgeable and courageous people to gather, find ideas and enact them.
Best series ever.
Not healthy for your organs and also not really helping with teeth.
Leaders have one real job, that is to reward (through jobs/money/political clout) people who help them. If they don't think telling the truth about deforestation or global warming will help their sycophants, they will tell lies.
[1] CGP Grey's Rules for Rulers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
In that case should they not at least project an aura of being in touch with reality.
On this issue voters either don't care, in that case they wont mind you telling the truth. Do care about deforestation but value jobs over environment, in which case you're losing their votes. Do care and value the environment over jobs, in which case they still don't want to be lied to, and the lying doesn't exactly pander to them. I cant think of many other reasonable political outlooks. So what is this? virtue signalling to some group? Is there a group so out of touch with reality that only lies sound reasonable? I don't know.
Voters in democracies around the world have made it overwhelmingly clear that they don't want that.
Their are plenty of people who will do and say anything (even if they don't believe it) for self gain. It's basic short-term vs long-term thinking. They stand to gain much in the short term and lose nothing in the long term because they'll all be dead when it comes time to collect.
Combine this with loose ethics/morals and we have a serious and intractable problem.
Truth is a terrible signal, if our group says that Dinosaurs died out 65 mission years ago, and humans rose about 100,000 years ago, anybody can pretend to be a member and agree with us. There is no cost to saying the truth.
And if your group’s beliefs are the same as every other group’s beliefs, there are no “switching costs,” so your members can leave easily. You have a really porous border between your group and the rest of the world.
But if we say that the Earth is about 6,000 years old, and humans rode dinosaurs, and there were unicorns, but they died because they didn’t board the Ark, and so on, well, you sound ridiculous to people outside of the tribe when you say that.
Saying that has a real cost, so saying that proves your loyalty to the group and by virtue of lowering your standing outside the group, drives you to seek your comfort and standing from the group.
I am not putting it rigorously, but it boils down to the fact that humans want to belong to groups, and groups that organize themselves around things that are untrue (or at least rejected by all other groups) generate more loyalty and more of a “we versus them” dynamic than groups that emphasize truth and uncontroversial beliefs.
So it doesn’t even have to be a belief that is self-serving to the group’s leaders (although it doesn’t hurt to have beliefs that the group leader gets all the money and all the young and comely followers as partners).
It’s enough to demand that the group’s members base their loyalty on their faith in beliefs rejected by everyone else.
(None of this disagrees with your point, after all, if a leader bases their power on the size and loyalty of the group, false beliefs are inherently protecting the leader’s power. You don’t need cults to see this. Most companies have a lot of beliefs that every reasoning person can see are false. They know that the diversity initiative is a sham in most companies. They know that “employees are our greatest resource” is said often, but the company behaves like a cobalt mine in the third world, and so on. But loyalty demands that everyone pretend these things are true.)
In democracies with bad leaders you might get "it needs more study" or "we can't afford it" or just silence. At worst opponents are labeled "misguided". But the new autocrats end all conversation by turning facts and those who believe them into conspiring enemies.
Source: https://oec.world/en/visualize/tree_map/hs92/export/bra/show...
2018 was a bit higher than 2017, but there is a clear downward trend. Honestly I would like to see more data points before crucifying Bolsonaro.
With those dates in mind, look at your data again.
Bolsonaro's presidency is on another level of pandering to illegal loggers and agribusiness, though. The current Minister of the Environment, Ricardo Salles, is openly hostile to anything relating to preservation. Including risking a free investment by European countries to the tune of about half a billion dollars
I would like to see the data for at least 2019 and 2020 before jumping to conclusions
The political elite alienated the population.
By spying, failing to prosecute financial criminals that decimated economies, stealing several billion dollars, failing to pro-actively prevent a human calamity in the Russia x US proxy wars in Syria, squabbling amongst themselves as the non-politicians gained in popularity.
Can you blame people who’s savings and jobs were annihilated by the GFC and saw no major arrests voting the incumbents out?
Can you blame the underprivileged domestic populations in Europe from turning right and nationalistic when they see spikes in homelessness, criminality and culture friction when their small towns are flooded with desperate immigrants?
Can you blame people voting out de-facto organised crime from power after they rob billions from a third world economy?
I don’t think it’s right. I think Bozo-naro is an embarrassment of a human being. But I empathise with the people who threw the previous job out.
Blaming the elites of old is a fallacy, because the elites of old are the elites of new. Brexit is a conservative issue, due to conservatives underfunding education, healthcare, fire brigades and the police and blame it on the EU and immigrants.
Trump is put in place by the same party that caused the GFC.
And Bolsonaro is probably even more corrupt than Dima et al. Yet people voted for him.
How, why? Because they were not aggressively authoritan. Trump openly flouts with totalitarianism. Let's see how Bolsonaro will fare.
(And I'm not trying to somehow wash the previous administrations clean. Clinton loosened the financial rules, he could have vetoed it, but I don't think that would have mattered, the lack of funding for competent oversight is the main point, and that was under Bush.
Similarly I don't have any love for the Labor govs in UK, but fiscal responsibility aka. let's underfund the stuff that only poors use is a classic conservative trope.)
Corrupt, incompetent or inconsequent politicians can not be rewarded with re-elections they need to be voted out. However when the population stops believing that any political party presents a credible choice we get populists. We get the “non-politicians”.
Of course they solve nothing. They’re worse than the established politicians.
Alas the re-election rate is astoundingly high. There's no consequence for being a sellout. Populism thrives on these imbeciles.
1) The economics of every process must take into account the cost of the environment. If it's not going to biodegrade, that costs. If it comes from an unsustainable logging practice, that costs. If came in a boat from across the world, that costs. Adding the cost of environmental consequences to all stages of production opens up the room for investors to sensibly bet on less damaging production methods. We will look back at this time and rub our eyes when we realise what an insane free-for-all it has been.
2) A global body needs to be created to handle environmental policy, probably balancing quality of life with environmental outcomes. This body should be elected, but independent from politicians. Just like monetary policy was been removed from the easily bendable hands of politicians, the environment needs to be too. This deals with i) the short term thinking required of politicians [elections] ii) the global nature of the problem.
I think some people have too much faith in the ability of politicians and bureaucrats to protect the environment.
A better solution would be decentralized decision making. Place ownership of the rain forest in private hands and let the market determine the most valuable use of the land. If a sufficient number of people believe the rain forest should be set aside for environmental preservation they will have the ability to act on that belief.
Letting politicians and bureaucrats decide will do nothing to preserve the rain forest or environment short- or long term.
Power corrupts - politicians and bureaucrats act on whims and pressure from special interest groups. It doesn't matter if the entity is a county, a state, a nation or the world.
Privatization is the solution.
Nor can courts. Who will uphold the correct fundamental rules of privatization? Who sets them?
Finally, it is the case currently that we have democracy, wherein the individual has power and domain via a vote and participation in discussions. Then we also have effective privatization, where pure financial acumen can make things happen, or stop them. That is the case currently. We do not need to increase the power of money such that more things can happen for us to be able to pay for the salvation of the environment. We can do that now. The suggestion to switch to privatization is to ask people to relinquish the former power and leave everything to those with the latter power. I don’t see the benefit. Especially as when I have done business, it has clearly been private money that has done stupid and greedy and inefficient things, and governmental structures prevented it for the benefit of all.
Government attempts to be a non-monetary contractual union that represents the mutual benefit of game-theoretical cooperation, in e.g. information sharing and consistency. It does work to do that.
I'm having difficulty unpacking the last part of your comment but I think the essence is that private individuals will act in ways you find disagreeable and that government can prevent that for the benefit of all. I would counter that a government is just as capable of acting in the same ways. Unfortunately in the case where an individual acts this way the consequences are limited to what that individual can do (and can usually be corrected by the courts) whereas when the government is the actor no competition is allowed and the only recourse is to challenge the power in periodic elections.
I find it much easier to believe that this satire, because were it up to the “Market”, the rainforest would be gone, and every river polluted. Short-term profits are incompatible with environmental protection. Just because a few men get rich doesn’t mean the result is what’s overall best for society. The “market” (quotes necessary because it’s so much more complicated than that) has decided that continuing to burn fossil fuels is what’s best, and look how that’s working out.
The incentives have to change. Making money hand over fist typically only benefits a select few, to the detriment of the many. How many more examples do we need?
Or maybe we should try to help people understand that it's futile to see in terms of human concepts (like profit) the entity which literally created our species. Perhaps financialization of literally everything we should hold dear is the problem? The value of human life itself has at times been boiled down to a dollar amount, but that doesn't mean you can go around killing as many people as you want as long as your bank account is big enough (oh, unless you're a corporation of course).
Why is it futile to understand our planet in terms of human concepts? What alternative means of understanding do you have in mind? Direct perception or revelation? Feelings?
I do agree with you that incentives have to change. Humanity absolutely depends on industry to survive and leaving precious resources like the rain forests in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats will ensure their destruction through corruption.
[0]: https://rebellion.earth/act-now/resources/citizens-assembly/
Oh wait... Sigh.
I'm pretty sure the standard term is "Fake news".
Bolsonaro is a fool with words, but has shown to be well intended. He'll probably come around on this particular issue (as it has already happened a few times during his government).
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/jair-bolso...
Then why start?
> Bolsonaro is a fool with words
On politics, I never saw a fool whose problem are just words. He is authentic, the real deal, dumb all through.