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> But whatever method we chose, it should not ignore the actual people living there, their intelligence comparable to our own and their fight for survival.

A couple of years ago I attended a talk on lemur conservation, and this was one of the key points they brought up. Habitat loss from slash-and-burn agriculture is a huge problem for lemur populations, but from a conservation point it's not effective to visit Madagascar and tell people not to do it. To the Malagasy you're just a rich tourist telling them off for living without offering any help.

So instead they focus on education. Two of the initiatives they mentioned were teaching people more effective methods of cultivating food (such as setting up fisheries), and providing them with plans for more efficient wood-burning stoves.

Good idea in general, but the details matter. Teaching people how to make efficient wood burning stoves could fall prey to the Jevons Paradox.

Ideally you would enable some other type of stove. They may lack the infrastructure for natural gas or propane, of course. But I'm sure heating can be accomplished without chopping down trees at all. Through solar, for instance.

> But I'm sure heating can be accomplished without chopping down trees at all. Through solar, for instance.

In a perfect world, yes.

But this is the problem with conservation work in poor countries. 1.7% of US energy generation comes from solar [1], so going to Madagascar and saying "hey, you should be using solar instead of chopping down trees" rings a little hollow.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

I can also understand why a developing country might not take kindly to environmental regulations. Developed countries destroyed the environment for decades, but now want to restrict others from doing the same. It might feel like they crossed a bridge, then burned it behind them.

They get the benefit of all the hard work developed countries have done before them. Many countries have skipped right past land lines for instance and gone straight to cellular.

Should they also be forced to go through all the innovations and advances developed countries have in order to utilize them?

It seems to me it's perfectly OK to tell smaller countries times have changed get with the program, but we have to do it in a compassionate and understanding fashion as the OP mentioned.

Yes and no. People said the same thing about wireless phones 20 years ago.

Solar in a country with poor infrastructure means distributed generation becomes possible. Most places in the US have robust power grids, but even then conservation and point generation is the cheapest way to add marginal capacity!

That should be a guiding star of policy. Electricity is an almost magical force that opens doors.

IMO people are people. I’m fortunate to live in the US and be able to have the education and opportunity to use my abilities in a productive way. My grandfather was probably smarter than me in IQ terms, but drove a garbage truck and shoveled coal to support his family. (He taught himself calculus on that truck to help my uncle study.)

There are millions of people like my grandpa. If we figure out how to elevate them to their potential, we all benefit.

That statistic is for solar electric generation. A better alternative would be solar water heating, which is cheaper to install and more efficient.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_water_heating

Don’t forget all the rich-world subsidies for solar that bid up prices and make them less economical for those that can’t afford to subsidize.

how would subsidies on solar energy end up raising its price?

If the US gives 50% rebates on panels for US installation, the manufacturers of the limited good (panels) will charge more money because they can.

If you’re Madagascar, you’re SOL.

You might argue that subsidies create an industry of overproduction that’ll eventually crash the market, but that’s definitely not the initial state.

Just as if you’re a gas station and the government gives you a subsidy for every litre you sell, you’ll use some of that subsidy to pay more and sell for less in your local market and still have higher margins than your competitor.

For cooking, parabolic mirrors might work quite well. A bit bulky and dependent on weather, but very powerful, low maintenance and cheap. You could still use the efficient wood stove in the rainy season.As long as you don't burn it faster than it regrows wood is a fantastic CO2-neutral fuel that they already have access to.

These guys have ovens and roasters: https://lytefire.com/en

Rocket stoves can use pretty much any dry woody detritus, though not whole logs. They aren't useful for baking, but much nicer for boiling and pan frying.

Exactly. We know that the existence of the forest is extremely valuable in its natural state — for carbon capture, biodiversity, etc, but we expect to reap its rewards without paying for it. The forest is just as much a natural resource as the oil underneath Saudi Arabia, for example.

FTA:

> "The real problem is cost, because natural palm oil is extremely cheap...”

These kinds of statements are infuriating to me. It’s only cheap because we don’t pay for the negative externalities. If there were a monetary value associated with the forest, destroying it for a monocrop wouldn’t be so cheap. Markets are extremely useful things. We should use them.

> We know that the existence of the forest is extremely valuable in its natural state — for carbon capture, biodiversity, etc, but we expect to reap its rewards without paying for it. The forest is just as much a natural resource as the oil underneath Saudi Arabia, for example.

From this HN thread of two months ago:

Egypt has managed to plant trees in the desert usi...

check out the influential book - The Forest and The Sea by Marston Bates - that I mentioned:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24820550

There are programs that approach deforestation from that perspective. The one that comes to my mind is REDD+

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

These are not uncontroversial, but I think the idea makes sense.

This point was also made in David Attenborough’s recent climate documentary: the point is not about palm oil but about rainforest protection. If there is no protection, and if people can’t make a living another way, the forest will be cut for whatever makes money. The most tragic example i’ve seen is rainforest turned into those wood chips they put around potted plants. Is that a high value commodity? No. But it makes >0 money and if the value given to the wild forest is zero, then it will happen.

The solution should be fairly simple. Give wild forest a >0 value by paying people for keeping it wild.

I mean of course it's not a new idea and apparently it's very difficult in practice but it seems like the obvious response to that logic.

That would mean paying millions of "backwards" tribal communities millions and possibly billions of dollars which we can't afford (/s) - Governments everywhere

Unfortunately, unless they're a voting group the government can maintain control over, nothing will be done. On the contrary, we have government ministers and bureaucrats around the world likely engaging and actively playing a role in the deforestation of rainforests.

Unfortunately, the situation for many people living "there" (in Malaysia and Indonesia, primarily) is that their land is taken from them by palm oil conglomerates, and then they are forced into low-wage labor on the plantations. They went from self-sufficent to conditions that look like forced labor. The AP presented extensive reporting on this 3 months ago: https://apnews.com/article/indonesia-slavery-asia-malaysia-o...

Isn’t loss of rainforest in Indonesia now due to large agrobusinesses cutting it down to build enormous plantations of palm oil trees? Deforestation in Madagascar is largely driven by dirt-poor subsistence farmers cutting down neighboring patches of rainforest in order to plant rice (and also Chinese firms logging precious woods for the furniture industry), but I thought Southeast Asia was a different case.

The massive palm oil plantations of Malaysia and Borneo are not being planted by poor locals, but by wealthy landowners.

But the point is, poor locals are productively employed earning more than they would doing something else.

(additionally, small farmers make up 40% of Indonesia's palm oil production)

https://snv.org/update/smallholder-palm-oil-farmers-can-farm...

That's one way to look at the problem ( we need to get people to stop destroying rainforest by giving them their livehood), another way is that once there is no value in destroying the rainforest, people will stop doing so.

In this regard, coming up with a palm oil substitute is very valuable, because it takes away a major reason to destroy the rainforest.

And now, since they can no longer drill the rainforest for a ( relatively easy) living, they have to drill their brain, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Big South East Asia countries are generally cursed with natural resources[0], they have oil, timber and whatnot, and yet their GDPs dwarfed compared to Singapore and lag behind in virtually all the indexes measuring good living like corruption index, a tiny SEA country with absolutely zero natural resources.

Stop people from destroying the rainforest comes first before giving them their livehood, not after.

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

That's pretty much what has happened with the coal industry though. Coal is only used as a fuel because it is cheap, not because we need it [0]. And it's cheap because of goverment subsidies and political power, to continue providing coal miners in Wyoming earning $20/hour a job.

[0] ...as a fuel. Yes there are other industrial uses of coal, but it is mostly used as a fuel.

Depends on the type of coal.

I’m sure the coal we’re burning for heat isn’t the kind good for steelmaking which has a much higher value/ton.

The resource curse also exists in software. I've seen so many comments that try to justify excessive RAM usage with "RAM is cheap". It's only "cheap" if you don't waste it. Otherwise your consumption will increase to match whatever is available even if the additional value the additional consumption provides is close to zero.

Clearly you did not read the OP's comment very well

Even if you make the rainforest value 0, the land is very rich and fertile, so if the native plants have a value of 0, they will be removed and replanted with cash crops of some kind unless you resolve the economic reality

So you're saying that Malaysia and Indonesia should become tax havens?

The massive corruption and whatnot in these places is precisely what allowed Singapore to thrive (apart from being lucky enough to be located at a strait). Singapore essentially eats away at their GDP to sustain itself. Almost all of the tech scene in Singapore is largely talented folks from Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, etc. moving away because SG has a lower tax rate and a very lighthanded bureaucracy.

If corruption in these places was to vanish and doing business made easy (via free zones for instance), Singapore would return to stagnation.

Just wanted to plug https://www.coolearth.org/, which takes this approach

I've been donating to this organization for several years. For the amount of money they raise, they seem different from other conservation-focused charities in working with people on the ground to find means of income that drive conservation economically. It's a thoughtful model that isn't just helicoptering money in (like direct giving), but actually getting involved with communities and raising their standard of living.

If it's individuals doing the cutting, this would be a correct diagnosis. My understanding is that it's rather large corporations in weak legal regimes that are the main driver of this. Incentives for them may be different.

Theoretically yes, most of the time has nothing to do with locals. Local reservations were kicked away after fighting with government forces and interests affiliated with the respective government. If they had to give a larger payoff to the government party to save their land they would need a bit more than 1k. Locals can simply not create an economy of scale to support sustainably and consistently the palm oil conglomerates, we are talking deforestation the size of countries.

An ecologist Willie Smit and his foundation worked on something called the village hub, which is very cool! It started with harvesting juice from sugar palm trees and then goes through a whole plethora process that makes use of it in wide varieties of ways. [1]

1. https://youtu.be/xtWp84htc18

Judging from comments from the rest of the thread, it looked like big palm oil plantation owners are doing this, not small time locals.

E. F. Schumacher's work and writings such as his highly influential book, Small is Beautiful, about Appropriate Technology, are relevant here.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._F._Schumacher

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful

Mentions of him on HN:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

One by me:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635882

He was influenced by Gandhi, among other people. Gandhi had done a lot of work on appropriate technology, like on charkhas (hand-operated spinning wheels), khadi (indigenous handloom cotton fabrics), in India, with a view to self-sufficiency of the people, apart from (but also related to) his more well known work on the non-violent feeedom movement which resulted in India's independence from Britain.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi

Such work started decades ago. If people research what has been done in their fields in the past, they can sometimes avoid rediscovering or reinventing a lot of wheels.

I agree with your comment, and it highlights for me a challenge I have seen in cleantech VC. For VCs coming from tech, there is often an implicit assumption that new product innovation is the solution. When dealing with climate change, however, new product innovation is often secondary to policy solutions.

If palm oil farming becomes less profitable, then local people will transition, and some of them will transition to ecotourism or other forms of economic activity that are less damaging. I'm not sure that you need to sound so negative about developing artificial palm oil.

Jane Goodall has made the provision of supports and options for local people one of the core parts of her conservation efforts for chimpanzees and other wildlife.

I agree with you. We must focus on the underlying problems. I still think this helps underline our biggest problem. Our planet just can't support this many humans. We are selfish destructive creatures and demand will only go down with less of us. It is true with pollution, our oceans, our air, etc.

This is just not true. The massive demand is artificially produced because of the logic of our economy. People don't need a whole new wardrobe and new smartphone each year but there are few long-lasting options on the market. People shouldn't have to own two cars per household so everyone can get to school and work on time but cities are designed to encourage the sale of cars. This is the underlying problem. We could make the world a lot less wasteful and easily support all the human life in a sustainable way. It just requires a drastic political and cultural shift. But we are told that humans in their nature are going to be this way -- even though there is plenty of evidence to the contrary -- so that you never demand that things change. So please stop reinforcing this idea.