Fighting poverty accidentally stopped deforestation | Hacker News Reader

Fighting poverty accidentally stopped deforestation

bloomberg.com

235 pointspseudolus103 comments

I take a bit of issue with the "accidentally". Having been in the deforestation-stopping business for some time it has been blindingly obvious that most approaches that were being taken were completely futile until socio-economic factors were solved for.

For example we were building satellite technology to help environmental police patrol large rainforests to be able to focus on areas with offenders. One time we managed to find a hidden airstrip for drug trafficking which was cool. But most of the time the offenders were people who just needed to feed their kids - and look there is a mahogany tree just over there that will sell for $$$. So the cops will come, give them a fine, and then they will need the money even more. So the pattern continues.

Funnily enough (NB: this is hearsay) the forests were actually better off when the area was controlled by drug gangs as the people had a source of income from the cocaine.

The same phenomenon is easily observed in modern-day Romania. There's a clear inverse correlation between the wealth of a region and the deforestation in that area.

Also notice that the price of wood is fairly stable all across EU because it's an open market after all. But the wages in Romania are far lower than the EU average so that's why the incentive to cut and sell wood is relatively higher here.

In Romania there is the issue where people still have to use wood for heating because of no access to natual gas or not enough money to buy a modern heating system, isolate the home and pay for the has, in some regions the wood is cheap in others wood is expensive.

Buying coal should be an option, no? Coal is cheaper than wood.

Yes wood is expensive you get it legally but if you have a forest 1-2 Km near your home the wood can be free. Like people own the forest, you can't cut any tree, you need to do a request and a person will come and mark some trees for you to cut (there are some criteria for what tree you can mark for cutting down). So then the expanse is cutting, moving and storing this wood .

On top of this there are people without jobs that can just cut unmarked trees.

Coal prices is also not the same in all places in the country, if you are closer to the coal source the prioce is lower because of transportation costs.

Your note about the drug gangs reminds me of the Chernobyl Exclusion Area and how well plants and wildlife are doing there. The "environment" doesn't really care about humans. The environment can do quite well without humans, thank you very much.

Aside from the whole (alleged) "organised crime setting forest fires in the exclusion zone as cover for illegal logging operations" thing [1], which releases plumes of radioactive ash and ends up with contaminated wood in people's furniture and fireplaces.

But yes, when left alone nature does reclaim the lands rather effectively.

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/chernobyl-radioac...

There is one funny resemblance in place to a method ascribed to toddlers - diversion as a strategy. In this case it is diverting deforestation by having higher paying more economically advanced activities than raw resource gathering.

Admittedly a bit "gross" in the paternalistic/imperialist implications but the outcome would be preferred by both the natives and outsiders.

Which also fits in with worries of automation and unemployement and the ironic difficulty in finding good uses for the labor that can support the value. While there may be plenty of decent uses (picking up litter, etc) pairing the utility with a revenue stream is more difficult let alone with a good living standard.

I know of no more blatant example of this than the Haitian border. Dominican Republic side: all trees. Haitian side? grassland.

> Funnily enough (NB: this is hearsay) the forests were actually better off when the area was controlled by drug gangs as the people had a source of income from the cocaine.

Not a surprise. When animal hunting is legal, people breed animals for hunting. Some escaped extinction this way.

> Not a surprise. When animal hunting is legal, people breed animals for hunting. Some escaped extinction this way.

I could see this being true when the hunting is at least properly managed but in the past when it was allowed to go overboard animals did go extinct as a result. Especially when people were hunting for economic reasons.

Agreed, unregulated hunting for economic benefit nearly denuded the US of large mammals. I only wish people would view industrial fishing in the same way. The seas and their inhabitants need protecting.

True, does need to be managed rather than outright banned is the idea though.

We must act now, and let the billionaire class play the Most Dangerous Game. It's our only chance of survival!

Or maybe we let ivory tower IYIs make the choices?

> (NB: this is hearsay)

Also, heresy.

Little known fact: Germany was exporting wood around the beginning of the 15th century up until the point where over 80% of all forests were gone. You could say that almost all forests we have today are somewhat artificially grown.

That is why, by law, forests have to be maintained and regrown if you want to harvest wood. The earliest established Forstordnung was done in 1442 in Speyer and soon after the Kurpfalz and other states/Fürstentümer adapted it. I think the latest state to adapt it was Sachsen around 1560, but I would have to look that up to be certain.

Nonetheless I think this speaks volumes on how much some countries are behind when it comes to their established laws.

Scotland lost almost all of its trees before Johnson's famous tour in 1773:

> "From the bank of the Tweed to St. Andrews I had never seen a single tree, which I did not believe to have grown up far within the present century. Now and then about a gentleman’s house stands a small plantation, which in Scotch is called a policy, but of these there are few, and those few all very young. The variety of sun and shade is here utterly unknown. There is no tree for either shelter or timber. The oak and the thorn is equally a stranger, and the whole country is extended in uniform nakedness, except that in the road between Kirkaldy and Cowpar, I passed for a few yards between two hedges. A tree might be a show in Scotland as a horse in Venice. At St. Andrews Mr. Boswell found only one, and recommended it to my notice; I told him that it was rough and low, or looked as if I thought so. This, said he, is nothing to another a few miles off. I was still less delighted to hear that another tree was not to be seen nearer. Nay, said a gentleman that stood by, I know but of this and that tree in the county."

Commercial timber (pine) is now quite common. Reforestation was policy after the First World War, when there was huge demand for wood for trench boarding.

A boom in commercial timber growing in Scotland did harm in a number of places, including the Flow Country:

https://www.theflowcountry.org.uk/flow-facts/flow-fact-4/

Fortunately some groups are trying to rewild the Highlands:

https://treesforlife.org.uk/

It's even worse in the UK - we call those original forests "ancient woodland", and there is not a lot left:

https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/trees-woods-and-wildlife/ha...

Even these have usually had some human intervention, such as occasional felling of oak trees for timber, even if the whole wood wasn't cleared.

"Hambacher Forst" was the last large ancient woodland in Germany, but then RWE got permission to dig up the lignite and burn it. Quite sad.

Most trees growing in Germany grow very fast. In areas with rainforests trees are much older and the ground on which they grow is very different from the ground in german forests. Once deforested it takes decades to just recover the ground, not to speak of the trees.

Our trees in Europe can be very old if we let them, but the ground is different because it is young. The glaciers of the ice ages have given us great soil which still contains a lot of nutrients (and which is also still replenished from degrading minerals), while the big tropical forests are mainly located on depleted soil, so the nutrients are in the plant matter and easily lost if you remove it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loess

(On that topic, this is also interesting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta)

Trees grow fast in the rain forest too, and in rain forests and germany alike, it takes a long time to become an old growth forest, which stores a lot of carbon in the soil and organic layers.

I heard that rainforest soil is actually pretty poor, which to me sounds weird given how much grows (and dies / falls / decomposes) there.

Your comment intrigued me, so I looked it up--I found it pretty interesting, so thanks for the inspiration.

Looks like one of the main factors is due to the soil acidity being similar to the pH of the plant roots. Also, while there is a ton of dead organic material in the soil, the high temperatures and precipitation causes it to decompose so rapidly that most of the nutrients are lost.

Finally, the clay particles in the soil are poor for trapping the minimal nutrients remaining from the decomposing material, and what is trapped is frequently washed away from the precipitation.

Which is why you have a bootstrapping problem bringing back the forest. The soil is only poor because there is such a vibrant ecosystem that nutrients are constantly getting absorbed into living material as fast as they can be retrieved from dead material. The vibrancy consumes everything rapidly. But if you destroy the forest, you destroy the stored nutrients.

But as to raw material, surprisingly little of the physical bulk of trees actually comes from soil. It comes from the air! This is where the Carbon in the CO2 -> O2 process comes into play.

I think you are talking about the acidification of soil caused by pine trees. I've heard the same thing but a quick search suggests that this might be mostly rumour.

Certainly large mono-cultures of conifers are bad for numerous other reasons.

It's no rumor. Pine trees do acidify the soil, but a pH of 5 (which is typical) is not a problem as there are many other plants that are happy to thrive (and even require) a more acid soil. Blueberries are one such example.

I didn't commission a study or anything but the first page of results on Google suggested that pine needles are acidic because they prefer to grow in acidic soils but they have no method of acidifying the soil by themselves. Also pine needles can form a dense mat which tends to exclude other species.

Germany obviously old trees until they remove 80% of them...

If you look at a satellite image, you quickly see that there just isn't that much space left to nature. That is true for most of central Europe. Doesn't mean it isn't green, but pristine forests don't exist anymore. There are some spaces left to itself now, but they were still touched by human cultivation.

Pristine is a very high bar. There is archaeological evidence of semi-settled early agrarian existence where they would slash and burn an area to farm it and then once the soil depleted move on to a new segment of the surrounding forest and abandon their old settlement to be overgrown and renewed. Wasteful but the cycle was fully sustainable.

Even without human involvement we would see some "normal curves" to tree diameters via attrition of the oldest for varied reasons - but their ring count would be higher.

Much of the US has also been logged. For example, in Michigan, an uncut piece of forest has been made into a significant park:

https://www2.dnr.state.mi.us/parksandtrails/Details.aspx?typ...

(The park is quite large now, the old growth is 49 acres (~20 hectare)).

We've seen substantial reforestation in the last 100, without much in the way of laws requiring it. Vast public forests often have limited cutting, but it's more under-management and ad hoc resistance. Large private land management companies of course replant, because they want predictable harvest.

In the US, in New England, this basically is a side effect of (a) no one wanting wool anymore and (b) Manifest Destiny making the West available for grazing cattle.

New England was something like 80% cleared at some point, largely to graze sheep for their wool. Besides the fact that the wool market these days has mostly been reduced to hats and scarves, the abundant grazing lands in the West (and the slightly-too-short grazing season in New England) largely prevented the re-purposing of the pastures for other livestock. So nowadays, the land is 75% re-forested.

The way I heard it, soldiers returning to New England from the civil war told stories of actual topsoil, and many farmers packed up and left for greener pastures... literally!

Yeah, the soil up here gets marked as "of local agricultural significance", which means it is technically worthless in the grand scheme of things but people still plant orchards, vineyards and pastures on it.

“You know, I have often thought that at the end of the day, we would have saved more wildlife if we had spent all WWF's money on buying condoms.”

- Sir Peter Scott, Founder, WWF (1909-1989)

Turns out it's more about economic development and education - most women who are financially secure don't want to have 10 children.

That doesn't seem to be the case if you look at places like Egypt, where birthrates are not falling despite the country being relatively developed. A lot more of it is cultural and social, and whether people care about their overall impact on the environment.

Besides, we don't really have the time to wait until 2100, when some nations may advance. We need to link foreign aid directly to widespread family planning for African and West Asian countries.

fertility rate in Egypt is 3.2 kids per woman, it was 4.6 in 1990[0]. It may not be falling fast, but it's still falling, or am I missing something?

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/EGY/egypt/fertility-ra...

That assumption often fails sadly without social security they want a big family just to ensure they are able to support them in old age or can't exactly expect all of them to survive. A k model does improve quality of life and environmental impact though.

Probably been posted a lot before but always worth a watch. https://youtu.be/hVimVzgtD6w The Great Hans Rosling. His book is well worth a read as well.

That's a great quote.

In a lot of countries, you have to be married to even get family planning advice, so that's a hindrance.

The US has its own problems with requiring current prescriptions ($$) for anything, including the pill.

(For non-US readers, a doctor's office visit without insurance is typically $100 in SF, if you can find one with a patient list opening. Plus filling the prescription.)

Refillable natural gas containers would also help reduce deforestation. They're commonly used in SE Asian homes, but should be expanded to areas still cutting down trees for firewood.

That's not entirely accurate. San Francisco, and the rest of California, changed the law in 2016 so that properly trained pharmacists are allowed to prescribe the birth control pill. That training is part of the standard curriculum for new pharmacists, and training is available for pharmacists who got their license before that became part of the curriculum. Anecdotally, I will also say that Planned Parenthood of California is pretty decently funded and are able to offer IUDs (Mirena) and Depoprevera (the shot) at a reasonable price, with and with-out insurance.

This practice is not limited to California, either. Washington DC and nine other states - Colorado, Hawaii, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee, Washington, and Utah – allow pharmacists to prescribe birth control.

https://www.goodrx.com/blog/heres-how-to-get-birth-control-w...

Interesting, what other medications are US Pharmacist's allowed to prescribe? (Your Link won't open outside of the US)

Antibiotics is one of the few reasons I do doctors visits every few years when I have a particularly bad inflammation of something, besides this I rarely get sick enough to need a doctor.

That's a big improvement, but there is some fine print per pharmacy:

https://www.cvs.com/content/pharmacy/womens-health/faq

It gets better, whatever that link gives is inaccessible from outside the US, but notes “CVS.com® is not available to customers or patients who are located outside of the United States or U.S. territories. We apologize for any inconvenience.

For U.S. military personnel permanently assigned or on temporary duty overseas, please call our Customer Service team at 1-800-SHOP CVS (1-800-746-7287) if you need assistance with your order.“

Which part of that page are you calling fine print?

It does say that the pharmacist has to be there to prescribe the birth control and things like that, but that isn't something I would call fine print.

> a doctor's office visit without insurance is typically $100 in SF

Wait, really? That's less than I usually pay with insurance (in the US, on a High-deductible plan).

You don't need a prescription for condoms anywhere.

There are plenty of free clinics in SF.

All kinds of hormone-based drugs generally require prescriptions. There's exceptions you can find but they only seem to have really weak effects from what I've seen.

I came across a charity that gets a “double” or triple in a similar way. They build stoves for people who are currently cooking on open hearth. Those people then use less fuel, make less carbon dioxide, take less from the forest, and have vastly better respiratory health.

https://guatemalastoveproject.org/

Proves that there's a lot of low-hanging fruit still that can have a much bigger impact than e.g. buying an electric vehicle.

The problem is that we need to do both. We can’t escape climate change if everyone on the planet is driving a large gas guzzling SUV. So we need to both change to electric cars and also do things like this oven.

In addition, it’s bad to say to developing countries “well, you have to make this change for the good of the planet, but we don’t have to make any change, even though we produce much more CO2 than you do.”

Both are the same thing essentially - improvements to the efficiency at the cost of upfront capital above and beyond "the norm" for such tasks. There are other variables in play too - stoves that boost fire efficiency are tech available centuries ago while electric cars are still progressing and have R&D baked in. Stoving everyone up would hit its limits for enviromental improvements before electrification of cars.

It is a matter of proportion of use as a whole that they become comparable. A single wooden shack with a camp fire produces less air pollution than a coal power plant and a single concrete tenament but ironically if you have enough campfires concrete tenaments with coal fired electric burners and heat it becomes the cleaner and more efficient option compared to many wooden shacks and firea even before you start adding scrubbers.

How so? I don't see any comparative numbers.

If you're interested in comparing numbers, there's a great breakdown here: https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions

It doesn't compare exactly what you're asking but it feels relevant

Don't those masonry stoves store a lot of heat in them?

How does that work over the summer?

Not OP but have at least a bit of cursory experience.

Masonry stoves get warm but when properly built they aren't insanely hot outside of the inside, the stove tops, and the chimney. Most of the excess heat after finishing cooking will dissipate through the chimney.

Also insulation in most of the houses these are being built for isn't great. Because of this, the stove won't keep the house from cooling off at night. During the day people are out and about so it isn't too much of problem then either. Also it's probably cooler overall since less heat is lost to the environment compared to what they replaced.

It's by no means a perfect solution but comparatively to what they were using before, it is leagues better.

My vague understanding is that the draft also helps -- the fire pulls the (hot) air out through the chimney, and fresh air gets pulled into the house to replace it. The house may not be any cooler than the outside, but it at least isn't (much) hotter.

This culture spends all day cooking so the alternative is an open hearth burning inside the house all day. I was told by the representative of the charity that a stove is so popular that other families come to the one who has the stove and cook with them.

South Korea is another example of fighting poverty that stopped and completely reversed deforestation.

Korean peninsula in general went through extreme deforestation under Japan, especially during the WW2 era and Korean War, as supply of coal was cut off from the civilian population and redirected to war effort by Japan and Korea. In order to get fuel supply that was needed to cook food and heat homes, local hills were cleared of trees by locals.

If you watch video footage of the Korean War 1950 - 53, the hills are completely devoid of trees. The trees are missing because they had all be cut down for fuel.

If you talk to any older Korean men who were teens up until mid 1960s, they all remember walking 1 - 2 hrs one way up into the hills to collect firewood, piled mountain high on their A-frames (in Korean, jigae).

Once South Korea started getting better off, they went to coal, oil, natural gas, and then electricity for fuel source.

The South Korean government "Korea Forest Service" ministry is completely focused on restoring the depleted forests. And they seem to have done reasonably well.

there’s a nonprofit called “Carbon Offsets to Alleviate Poverty” where you can buy carbon offset credits that are implemented by paying impoverished people in various parts of the world to reforest their land. I’d love to see a comparison of whether that was ultimately more or less effective than UBI at the two goals of reducing poverty and averting climate change

A well-researched good write-up comes from Founders Pledge [0] recommending an "intergovernmental organisation of more than 50 rainforest nations which works to promote environmental sustainability while creating opportunities for economic advancement within tropically forested developing countries."

[0] https://founderspledge.com/stories/climate-change-executive-...

I currently use TerraPass. Are these guys audited by third parties or something like that? Generally work in the US is more trustworthy since it's theoretically verifiable here.

Care to share why? I'd like to help, but the trouble is how am I sure that the money goes to the pockets of people who need it and not to some CEO's holiday?

tax-exempt 501(c)3 nonprofits in the US are required to file IRS form 990[1] which sheds some light on the financials of the organization. it doesn't mean that the organization is run efficiently or puts money to good use, but it does increase transparency[2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_990

2. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/

Yeah, to be clear, I'm not demanding it of you. If you just happen to know of something then I'm hoping you'll share.

And yes, but slightly more. I want to know that the carbon credits are real, i.e. that I'm actually offsetting.

India's birth rate in villages plummeted when TV was introduced to them. These kind of effects are not that rare.

There's a strong correlation between wealth, education, quality of life, and child birth rate. Tl;dr, improve people's lives and birth rate drops.

Which may cause its own problems (e.g. in Japan), but there's a lot of countries that aren't there yet.

> Cash payments to people in impoverished areas led to a 30% drop in tree loss

It did not stop deforestation. It only lowered the rate of loss. Which of course is a significant improvement but still not sustainable.

"Accidentally"? Bring up google maps and look at the forest cover of Haiti vs. the Dominican Republic. You don't really need the border drawn as a line.

This may be a dumb question, but is there a field of study of unintended consequences?

Complexity Theory / Santa Fe Institute folks might be in this domain. Jordan Hall recommends this book for starters: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/thousand-years-nonlinear-hist...

Game theory is concerned with what will happen in interactions between actors with certain strategies and goals, so unintended consequences tends to come up a lot.

Public choice theory and social choice theory are related disciplines which concern themselves with the outcomes of various political and social mechanisms for making collective decisions based on individuals preferences and behaviors.

In many cases, that's economics.

I would say emergence and emergentism come to mind which captures many of these sort of ideas: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

Oh and systems theory also comes to mind for more rigorous attempts at study: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory

Closest I can think of is failure mode analysis.

> For local communities, selling timber and clearing land for cultivation is an income stream of last resort.

There's also another problem that affects places like Brazil: deforestation for cattle ranching.

I don't quite understand the headline. This seems like a rather obvious outcome.

The big question is: what are the limits on it? Helping the poor in Indonesia (and Brazil) would diminish deforestation, but would it do the same if you were helping the poor in the US? Ukraine? My guess is that it would do barely anything about deforestation in the US, but I have no idea about Ukraine.

What deforestation in the US? The forest area in the US has been stable since ~1900, and the volume of forest has been increasing in the last decades.

I don't have good recent data about Ukraine, but it also seems to have increased the amount of forests e.g. in the period between 1990-2010. https://rainforests.mongabay.com/deforestation/2000/Ukraine.... ; this would match the general trend of the rest of Europe of an increase in forests.

Yes, but people still cut down trees. The question is how much faster forests would spread since there would be less deforestation.

Cutting down trees does not generally decrease the area of forests in the first world - it decreases the volume of forests, it's essentially "harvesting the crop" because the same plot usually is replanted, and it often is required to be replanted. A reasonable mental model to think of most first world forests is as an equivalent to a wheat field, with the difference that ist's harvested and replanted not once a year like wheat, but once every 20-30-50 years depending on the tree species. Cutting down more trees is the equivalent of harvesting early, cutting down less trees is the equivalent of letting it grow some more before the inevitable harvest. It's not wilderness, it's something that's managed and taken care of.

Also, forests don't spread on their own. Well, they do in some untouched wilderness, but if I think of e.g. a central european landscape, there's no free space for them to expand to - in general, all land is owned by someone who wants some return out of it, so a forest ends right where something else starts, almost all usable land is productively used if it's not a national park or something like that. A place can be a forest only if people let it be a forest - and that has nothing to do with cutting down trees, it's about the fact that seeds can't grow into saplings if someone's doing something with that land.

A forest can spread only in two cases - either someone intentionally plants one (the most common scenario, but it relies on the expectation that in a few decades it will be allowed to harvest the 'crops'), or it's a result of decrease in agriculture, as some pastureland or farmland got abandoned because it was worthless to work it, and it overgrew with trees over the years. But such abandoned land is relatively rare, because even if it does "simply" get overgrown with trees, then it's profitable to take proper care of that forest (ensuring sparsity of trees, etc) so it usually gets done.

So if we don't cut down trees, or cut down trees slower than they grow, then (assuming no changes in agricultural land) forests don't spread, the trees just grow taller and wider. Forest area remains stable, forest volume increases - e.g. the current USA situation. And, of course, no new forests would get planted, because it's not practical to do so if you expect that you'll be prohibited to harvest it once it's grown. There are more forests in Europe than before because it became more profitable to plant and cut down trees rather than use the same land for e.g. pastures, so forests got planted - they did not spread on their own.

You're missing the point. The claim in the headline states that fighting against poverty helps with deforestation. My argument is that this is not absolute. It helps fight against deforestation in (some) poor countries, because poor people there cut down forests for wood and farmland. This doesn't happen anywhere near as much in first world countries. The question about those countries was there to ask about the magnitude. I was trying to underline the point that there are more variables at play than just poverty.

> This seems like a rather obvious outcome

it was not an obvious outcome. if it were obvious, you'd have the answer to your question.

I think it was an obvious outcome that “some people who have more money don’t have to sell wood anymore,” since there’s much less deforestation in developed countries than in developing ones. The specific outcome of how much and where is very much not obvious.

Environmental Kuznets curve

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve#Environmental_Ku...

And the best way to increase per capita income is to implement pro-market policies, that provide rights to private property and the freedom to contract:

https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer_why_the_world_needs_cha...

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bill...

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-glo...

Not a popular insight in the western world these days, alas.

Compare https://www.econlib.org/socialism-the-failed-idea-that-never...

https://archive.vn/4gTqu

This is a great example of economic harmony in nature. There has been a big debate in environmentalism whether rising incomes naturally produces more concern for and protection of the environment.

The implications of that question are, very, very important.

Also an example of UBI in action.

UBI requires a country to be pretty wealthy though, have a steady, reliable source of income such as natural resources or healthy trade.

Look into the Environmental Kuznets Curve and the Demographic Transition.

No shit. It also stops crime, a lot of early and unnecessary deaths.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending upon where one lives), fighting poverty is like fighting pandemics: some places try it, and others declare it difficult* and leave it untried.

* "difficult" being the charitable interpretation of the people who will argue, at length and in print, that having poverty or having an endemic or having brutality is somehow better than the alternatives.

(in my country, it's considered shocking news that, unemployment having reached almost 4%, thousands of people showed up for food handouts during the pandemic. It's considered ongoing news that we still have double digits, about 1% of peak, of new virus cases per day. Both public mass shootings from this century are considered national tragedies)

> How Fighting Poverty Accidentally Stopped Deforestation

This is garbage -

When know by fighting poverty, which is increasing wealth, it's good for

The environment, all the social rights, IQ, crime, happiness, almost all issues the rich first world people think are important. Because the people targeted become better off and can afford to worry about these issues as well.

This is why good people fight poverty, and the bad people jump ahead and fight for the things that come after poverty, because that's what makes them personally feel good.

Then why are rich people bigger meat consumers and bigger CO2 emitters than poor people?

They burn coal instead of wood. In practice both are equally unsustainable but deforestation is an issue with higher visibility.

Strange answer. Most importantly, they consume a lot more energy, be it from coal or from wood.

They consume more because they have more money to consume with; that's not the focal point of the article though, it focused on deforestation specifically. CO2 emissions is a different challenge, albeit related to CO2 emissions and sequestration.

Ow really? So how much more does GDP of US need to improve so that it can stop its environmentally irresponsibly behaviour?

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