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Comment by stanmancan | Hacker News Reader

The hard problem here is that you’re right; but who are we to tell them they can’t do the same things that North America and Europe did to survive and prosper? We have released ungodly amounts of green house gasses and clear cut millions and millions of acres to build our cities and factories. Who are we to finger point any day “yeah we did it and life is great but you can’t because we beat you to the punch and did it first and now the worlds fucked.”

Instead we have to have better solutions at hand to offer them that make more economical sense than clear cutting the rainforests.

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I guess we know more about ecology and climate change in 2021 than in the 1600s? That's why.

Exactly. It is not a good argument 'we used to do the same'. We did that because we were ignorant of the consequences. So we can pay brasil to stop it instead of send in the army, but letting them do it because we used to is just weird.

That doesn't change the fact that we have to be able to offer them a better solution other than "you're forever stuck in poverty because we don't want you to use your natural resources while we live a lavish life after destroying all of ours".

Don't get me wrong; I do not under any circumstance support what's going on there. But it's also not fair for whole countries to be stuck in poverty because they're slow to the game.

Why not have first world countries adopt portions of the rain forest? Pay the Brazilian government annual fee's for them to protect the rain forest from being clear cut. The government can use the money collected to pay people who would normally be farming the land to do something else. There's a lot of trust that the Brazilian government spends the resources as intended; but that's another problem.

TLDR; telling them they can't do it from our ivory tower is not going to work so if that's the plan then we better be offering them alternative income sources that don't require clear cutting.

I'm not saying they need to be stuck in poverty, I'm saying the Government of Brazil, the UN etc, should stop this from happening because we know of the dire consequences of it.

If Brazil requires financial assistance, so be it. They shouldn't be allowed to destroy the Amazon rain forest because stupid people did it back in the gold rush.

At least we’re on the same page because I never said they should be able to.

In France the forest covers a bigger part of the territory than before the industrial revolution. I think it’s the case in several western countries.

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