Brazilian Amazon lost 18 trees per second in 2021
batimes.com.ar
batimes.com.ar
The Amazon should be preserved, but to do that the world is going to have to pay. You can't tell a country you can't progress like the USA it is hypocritical.
Western governments pay part of their GDP for NATO, but defending against ecological collapse might be higher priority.
Governments tax citizens by force all the time. If it’s going to be used for anything, it should FIRST AND FOREMOST be used to coordinate large scale activity to mitigate negative externalities. And there’s no bigger one than the ecosystem collapse we are starting to see around us.
(Printing more money btw will only accerate consumption. There is very little thought to sustainability in most human economic systems.)
With my realist hat on: that money will disappear as quickly as dodgy ngo can write empty “project proposals”. Trees will be planted, press fotos made, and trees will die. 70 years of “development aid”.
> Why do governments not start an international reforestation / ecological fund and pay some of their GDP into it
We need to get our governments to work together and get things done, as they did with the Toronto Protocol but over and over. The United Nations can work to implement software-like release cycles of more and more mechanisms that facilitate cooperation between countries, even as they bicker.
Sadly, I do not think such solutions will be implemented top-down, and the bottom-up ones may take too long. But we can try !!!
As someone born in Brazil, I don't see why it's hard. Please criticise away. My country should be learning from the mistakes of others, not repeating them in order to favour some higher political caste.
To quote flaviojuvenal below, "Brazil had no trouble to grow in 90s and 2000s while reducing Amazon deforestation.". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32152630
Yeah, that's a very hard sell, when your country is in such a shameful state, your economy is hanging by a thread that's agriculture, and without it your currency would be so messed up you'd be unlikely to be able to pay for the device you're typing that on. When you pledge for your own country that's suffering from hunger to reduce agriculture, you're part of the problem.
Import oriented agriculture/livestock is not really serving the local economy or making the country grow. Like other poster said, "Brazil had no trouble to grow in 90s and 2000s while reducing Amazon deforestation".
People used to eat meat in Brazil every day, now even some middle class people had to reduce due to prices. The same goes for gas. That's because the economy changed heavily to favour primary sector exports at the detriment of every other activity.
Agriculture and Livestock were benefited at the detriment of every other sector.
EDIT: I wouldn't be able to even dream about buying the device I'm currently using if I were still working as a software engineer in Brazil, dude! I had to immigrate, as have about >60% of the co-workers I had in the last 10-ish years. The economical bullshit you're currently defending was shit even for people in well paying positions. However I was lucky, as my parents were immigrants themselves and I have foreign citizenship due to that. Some people weren't as lucky!
This might work in aggregate, but doesn't really help the average Brazilian, nor makes the country become developed. If the economic measures are only favouring the primary sector, the "vast majority of goods made in [my] country" is only making money for an extremely small part of the population. Plus, these measures are causing shrinkage of other sectors that actually would help the population richness grow.
What is happening only favours people in the primary sector (which isn't really employing that much people despite continuous growth) and richer countries buying cheaply for us.
Hypocrites who want Brazil to keep being a giant farm/ranch of the world selling cheap stuff are a problem as big as the country's government. Go away with your colonialism.
The countries pointing fingers at Brazil all did the same to become more developed and to make their population richer, they just want to stop Brazil from doing the same so they can keep the prices of commodities they sell higher.
They cheated but now don't want you to do the same in order to keep other countries in check, I mean, Europe is burning more and more coal, they are just a bunch of hypocrites.
Fun fact: That "newspaper*" that published the article is from Argentina, which is destroying the "Chaco" region as we speak and burning large areas of wetlands to increase the area for growing cattle, a market in which it's competing with Brazil.
Even thought the article is from another source, the BA Times belong to a company aligned with the Argentinian government which supports Lula in Brazil.
It's even worse in my opinion, because people here actually do seem to think that "the west" has it under control nowadays, which is one of the dumbest things I learned recently.
There are so many factors which were omitted in order to create that misinformation, but there is only one thing you can trust the industry to do: suppress any information which could negatively impact them, even if it could very well become an existential threat ...
My point is that what made US/EU rich isn't what Brazil is doing. And even if it were, what makes a country rich pre-1900 won't exactly work in 2022. Brazilians could buy machinery from other countries. They don't have to go trough some mini industrial revolution again.
It is hypocritical from rich countries to ask Brazil to stop deforestation if that means halting its economic development. If the rich countries really believe that preserving the environment is more important than the economy, then they need to either (a) pay underdeveloped countries to preserve their forests or (b) sacrifice their own economy and spend their own resources to re-grow their forest land. Ideally both.
The number of people working in the agricultural sector has only shrunk and will keep shrinking due to mechanisation/automation. The general population won't see the benefits of the primary sector growing, unless we have a Soviet-style wealth redistribution.
My point was not that the current model is a good one, but rather that its problem is not one of generating wealth but rather one of distributing it, which you just demonstrated as well.
I guarantee you, I was not defending the current focus on developing /latifúndios/ at the expense of everything else.
A lot of people assume I'm being a radical and saying Brazil should stop exporting meat/soy/etc. I'm not.
What I'm saying is that Brazil needs is a plan that's not simply "keep fucking the country even though it's not really working".
I'm not a fan of people from richer countries saying "Brazil should keep doing what it seems to want to do", because this is also way too favourable to them.
I think it's kinda easy to find common ground, but everyone should be allowed a voice. With the "shut up, let Brazil destroy forests, we did it too", the only people that seem to be getting a voice are politically-correct privileged people from rich countries (who want to keep taking advantage of Brazil), criminals in Brazil destroying the forest and the corrupt current Brazilian government.
Also, countries like brasil don't export commodities just because they want, there 's a web of tariff to keep producing countries from industrializing those products.
Sorry for the pun, but Brazil isn't really reaping the benefits of agricultural automation to compensate for the issues being an exclusively primary-sector exporter causes. Automation scales very well. Also notice that I'm not saying Brazil shouldn't keep doing what it is doing, I'm saying that other more developed-country-ish sectors should be expanded too.
> Also, countries like brasil don't export commodities just because they want, there 's a web of tariff to keep producing countries from industrializing those products.
If that's the case, then saying "Brazil needs to import primary sector stuff before they grow fo' real like us" is even worse :) They want Brazil to suffer before it has a chance to become a developed country.
Also, I don't know where you are from, but brazil has a healthy agritech industry selling know-how and technology to other countries.
I'm from Brazil but I have lived abroad for a while. And what I said before doesn't negate the fact that Brazil has a healthy agritech industry. This industry still doesn't make up for the problems caused by the current policies. And one thing doesn't really negate the other. We don't have to kill the primary sector for others to develop.
Brasil has >70% people working in the service sector. The percentage of people working in agriculture has actually shrunk since the Lula years. Mechanization and automation will guarantee it keeps shrinking.
The current economic measures are favouring only the primary sector to the detriment of others.
I'm not even calling for ceasing imports of agricultural stuff, all I'm saying is that the current madness is already making the people poorer.
And also, it is not the amount of people working that determines how to enrich the country. It is the overall output. Brazil has nothing but the agro sector at the moment. To build a stronger industry, they need to come up with the resources from somewhere. And agro is as good as any of the alternatives.
I'm not suggesting people move to the services sector.
The number of people working doesn't matter. What matters is that the country gets through agriculture the resources needed to invest in the other sectors.
Europe/US/etc letting Brazil keep doing what it's doing is mostly helping Europe/US/etc at the expense of Brazilians and the environment.
What I am saying is that the rich countries need to quit their double standard. The EU keeps putting absurd trade barriers to protect their own farmers. The US subsidizes their corn farms, effectively killing the Brazilian industry for biofuels. European NGOs are financed to disparage Brazil's investments in hydropower, while depending on Putin for gas and coal.
So, yeah, agro business is far from ideal, but now is the only feasible alternative for Brazil to come up with any chance of development, and they will also work against that? I'd be more than willing to listen what they have to say if they were setting the example...
> What I am saying is that the rich countries need to quit their double standard. The EU keeps putting absurd trade barriers to protect their own farmers. The US subsidizes their corn farms, effectively killing the Brazilian industry for biofuels. European NGOs are financed to disparage Brazil's investments in hydropower, while depending on Putin for gas and coal.
Oh, I agree with all that. That's an important post.
> So, yeah, agro business is far from ideal, but now is the only feasible alternative for Brazil to come up with any chance of development, and they will also work against that? I'd be more than willing to listen what they have to say if they were setting the example...
I guess my whole point is that foreigners saying "we did it before to grow, Brazil should do it too" is nonsensical, hypocritical and very self-serving, precisely because of your second paragraph. At the same time, I'm ok with foreigners telling Brazil to stop cutting trees because it opens the door to us at least replying with something like the second paragraph.
Even if the government was aligned on keeping the Amazon as it was, they have their own enforcement struggles. Once an illegal developer has razed a plot of land, there's not really much the government can do to stop them. The damage has already been done. Even worse, by the time the government is even aware of a particular section of illegally cleared land, it's already been sold off, developed, and has people living in it. The only option now is to either:
1. Grandfather in the illegal land
2. Forcibly evict and ruin the lives of people who bought into the illegal purchase so that the scarred land can remain fallow for decades
Overwhelmingly Brazilian courts have chosen #1 over #2. Enforcement is too far behind land development to make any sort of "pay to save" scheme work.
Due to its inequality, I'd venture that a chart compared median income levels would put us below most African countries. Brazil can be an amazing place to live if you are already wealthy (and if you are willing to live surrounded by private security and completely removed from the reality of the population at large), but no one in their right mind would risk trading their lives with that of the median Brazilian.
Alternatives that don't lead to future death of entire ecosystems and the impoverishment of large sections of the world's population.
We love to point the finger at Brazil and other developing countries, while profiting for centuries from deforestation of our own territory.
Maybe we should simply plant 18 new trees per second in the West?
Ideally wealthier countries would purchase/subsidize these areas so they don't need to be logged
They can be mad that other countries got rich in the past, or they can put their big boy pants on and preserve something that is just as critical to them (probably more so critical to them) as everyone else in the world.
Like another poster mentioned, when Brazil was growing, deforestation was shrinking.
The meme that the Amazon has to be destroyed for the country to grow is quite new. Please stop spreading it. I got people there.
Brazil had no trouble to grow in 90s and 2000s while reducing Amazon deforestation.
> Brazil had no trouble to grow in 90s and 2000s while reducing Amazon deforestation.
Thanks for putting it into words in a way I couldn't.
I'm not sure its accurate though. The marginal rate of forest coverage loss seems to have dropped substantially since 2008.
By the way the president from the first of those years is running in the next election. There's still hope.
We certainly now know the impact of deforestation, and that it affects the entire planet.
It is also not hypocritical unless you personally cut down a tree, or unless you believe in the collective responsibility of nations. I don't think 'the Brazialians' are responsible for killing the Amazon -- it's probably a minority of people and we shouldn't care which nation they belong too. This is a serious global problem, and it accidentally happens in some country. Neither collective blame nor collective shame will help. This problem must be criticised.
What are US or Europe citizens, NGOs and governments doing to restate their forests to, at least, their pre-industrial magnitude? Recover your environments before lecturing and chastising us third world humans.
The root cause is illegal occupation and settlement of land. People invade other people's land, often federal land, they cut down all of the trees, they burn it down, so they can clear it to set up makeshift camps. They then split and sell the land. Once there are people living on it, it's pretty much a lost cause due to how loosely enforced private ownership of land is, specially federal land. Also, it's a lucrative business, and involves corruption in all levels. People affected by it, like loggers who lose their property and livelihoods can hardly do anything, since the invaders will often get violent and the State wont do anything.
Essentially I am saying that people abandoned by the state should consider taking the defense of land back into their own hands when they experience violence, as was summarized here:
People affected by it, like loggers who lose their property and livelihoods can hardly do anything, since the invaders will often get violent and the State wont do anything.
Any further sources?
Illegal farmers and loggers have no interest in preserving the forest. They can just completely destroy some area, then move around to another one and start it all over again. Even farmers don't want to spend too much time in the same place if they can help it, the soil in the Amazon isn't that good for farming after a few harvests.
I live in the state of São Paulo, far from the Amazon forest, and the vegetation here requires a lot of work to be tamed. If you leave an empty allotment 2 or 3 months without any care, you will get knee height grass and all sorts of "exotic" plants coming out of the ground. The Amazon is orders of magnitude more aggressive than this one.
So once you stop the illegal activity, the forest will come back. The problem is not the forest, but the people -- indigenous or not -- affected by the illegal activities. Recently we saw headlines about the murder of two people in the region, an activist and a journalist. So many others have died when they crossed paths with criminals. This is a humanitarian problem before an ecological problem.
The forest is on the edge of becoming a net carbon producer for the first time. This doesn't simply reverse when it regrows from some saplings. Its capacity to create clouds to replenish water is already heavily compromised. When that stops this simply doesn't reverse. When you burn sections without first clearing it of its animal populations they perish, destroying the ecosystems that often needs animals to help germinate new trees. The mercury used for illegal gold mining doesn't just go out of the river and back into the bottle. Billions of animals die from these actions and the results will be irreversible.
To call the Amazon unstoppable, to say that the humans that are dying is the real problem, smacks of the ignorance that has led us to this point.
Forests in general are stable - _carbon neutral_, unless disturbed. Oceans are where most of the Earth oxygen is converted from CO₂.
The real reason why Brazil needs to save the Amazon, for South America, is water supply - rain forest induced water evaporation is main source of water for the Río de la Plata basin - where several of the biggest and developed cities in the South America are.
But if those cities dry up then what? Economic loss? Not everything is reducible to a price tag.
The species in Amazonian ecosystems have as much of a right to exist as any other, including humans. Brazil should save it because it's the right thing to do.
Recent research points out that the Amazon (and in fact most Earth's supposedly wild) rainforest is a elaborate example of centuries of forest bio-engineering, and it doesn't simply recover if abandoned; decaying into desert instead. Further bio-engineering would be required to repair it to it's "original" state.
Since then he works on trying to come up with solution that doesn't lead to the two groups trying to lynch each other.
As a Brazilian, I would be completely ok with that. We can handle people telling us those things.
Well, that's your view, and you have the right to have it. But, it's likely that the majority doesn't agree.
Besides, if you ask me, outsiders that tell a country to not cut down their forests for economic/monetary purposes should pay for that privilege. That's not to talk of the arrogance of outsiders telling someone what to do.
Another reason I'm fine with criticism is because the people saying "let Brazil deforest, we also did it" are the ones being favoured by Brazil fucking up the country. Europeans/Americans/Chinese are enjoying cheap Brazilian primary sector imports to the detriment of the rest of the Brazilian population.
I also completely disagree that in 2022 Brazil will turn into a developed country by being a colony.
Would you? Because this would absolutely escalate from words to actions. I could foresee this leading to quotas that if they're not met carry economic sanctions with them. That doesn't improve Brazil, does it?
Sovereignty means that nobody outside of Brazil gets a say without offering something major in return.
I happen to believe that it does.
In the worst case, we get to keep the forest.
> Sovereignty means that nobody outside of Brazil gets a say without offering something major in return.
First world countries used to give us money for keeping the forest but the current government (prior to 2019, "the annual donations to the Amazon Fund have amounted to nearly $1.3 billion" [1]). We could get back to that.
However I also happen to believe that, at best, the deforestation part is not important for Brazil's economy at all.
Several others have mentioned [2][3] (and I agree with them) that the deforestation part is actually damaging to the economy and to the livelihood of law-following Brazilians, and is borne out of illegal activity.
The current government could just start following the (Brazilian) law and the issue would disappear. Ah, but police is expensive, you say. Well, they could have used the 1.3 billion from EU/US. Maybe a new government will be able to get that back, one can only hope.
[1] https://gizmodo.com/big-donors-are-pulling-out-of-brazils-am...
1) Boycott or put drastic tariffs on Brazilian meat and soy, aka the products that are made out of the areas which were former rainforest. The problem: China won't give a fuck about Western sanction and Bolsonaro and his goons will happily sell to them (aided by the fact that China still has issues with pig fever in their domestic meat production).
2) Pay off Bolsonaro and his goons. That stops the destruction, but provides a fascist dictatorship with even more money.
3) Hope for Lula to win in the elections in October. The problem: Bolsonaro may manipulate the election to stay in power, either in front (by having Lula arrested or preventing him from campaigning, public debates etc.) or afterwards (outright vote manipulation). Or he might legitimately win despite his current lag in the polls, which makes the situation even worse than it already is.
4) Have the CIA do what they have a lot of experience in: get rid of Bolsonaro and his goons, either by abducting him and hold him to trial in the US similar to drug barons or by permanently eliminating him. That would be the cleanest way and send a signal to other criminal destroyers of nature, but without a whole lot of effort the resulting power vacuum may destabilize the region even more than it already is.
My point is, sometimes intervention is needed to stop massacres. Certainly worked for my country back in the days.
(And after yesterdays shameful meeting with the embassies, I only say this half-joking...)
I don't like the idea either, but given the corruption and deadlock of the UN, I prefer the role being taken up by the US instead of Russia or China.
There are several economically viable solutions, but Brazilian government should be interested in pursuing them, rather than only pursuing things that only benefits the current friends of the government (such as deforestation).
US/EU/etc forcing Brazil to get its shit together would be BETTER for the population. We don't need the deforestation to progress. Quite the opposite.
If Brazil were to wage a war on another country, would it be fine just because Europe/US also did it in the past?
This is a very weak argument for something that is so damaging as letting the forest be destroyed for what is virtually zero economical gain to the population.
Such as? The sheer scale of what Brazil feeds to the rest of the world would hardly accommodate for "several economically viable solutions".
2020 paper about the issue: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2003270117
You can't simply tell a third-world country to halt a major part of their economy.
Brazil being a major exporter of only primary sector goods isn't doing the population of the country any favours.
> If people from other countries really want Brazilian economy to get off the ground, they should want Brazil to export processed and manufactured goods, or other sectors.
> Treating Brazil like a big farm is doing neither Brazil nor the environment any favours.
> The "We should't criticise Brazil" is not only hypocritical, it's also counter-intuitive.
It's not about halting a major part of its economy. It's about not fucking up the rest of the economy only to accommodate a sector that isn't doing that much good for the greater part of the population.
China/EU/US actually love the cheap meat. The "let's not criticise" is as self-serving as it gets.
There is no moral reason not to intercede here, if suitable compensation and incentives are provided.
What "we" did in the past means environmental protection should be subsidised by the west, but our history doesn't let Brazil's government off the hook.
The economic improvement "under" Lula was mostly due to international factors (the boon in the price of commodities) which is why it collapsed under Dilma (Lula's protegé).
Instead of using the economic surplus that fell into his lap to invest in infrastructure and industrialization, Lula used it to fund the largest corruption scheme in our history.
Edit: trickle down economics has no basis in reality either.
Just compare him to Temer, Bolsonaro and the entire Bolsonaro clan, which bought off Moro, is weakening protections for the rainforest (benefiting his associates), and is systematically dismantling anti-corruption institutions.
https://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2020/10/13/transparenc...
Just because the investigations haven't begun doesn't mean they're not coming.
It's a weak argument given the responsible alternatives to explore that benefit more people. The government deserves criticism.
Lula and Dilma spearheaded the biggest infrastructure investment in Brazilian history, both in absolute and relative terms. There was corruption, but the claim that it was the largest corruption scheme is laughable, a talking point of dumbass bolsonaristas.
> we should offer economically viable solutions rather than pointing fingers
If people from other countries really want Brazilian economy to get off the ground, they should want Brazil to export processed and manufactured goods, or other sectors.
Treating Brazil like a big farm is doing neither Brazil nor the environment any favours.
The "We should't criticise Brazil, let them do what we also did before" is not only hypocritical, it's also counter-intuitive and very self-serving!
Our early industrialization contributed massively to global warming. It allowed us to become extremely wealthy, but also we incurred a "carbon debt" to the rest of the planet, since our atmosphere is a shared resource.
Now that others are trying to industrialize, we should repay that "carbon debt" to offset the cost of allowing them to industrialize cleanly, since we had the benefit early on of not having to worry about our impact on the environment. The gains that we made early on were at everyone's expense.
Brazil isn't a developed country and many people live under the belt of poverty. So, what are they supposed to do? In addition, corruption has made their life miserable. This is such a hard problem to solve.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/617492/beef-and-veal-exp...
It's not a hard problem - we know good governance is the solution, as it has been in the past. The incompetence and corruption of the current government are costing Brazil far more than the opportunity cost of not exploiting the forest. Doing so is such an inefficient solution, providing temporary gains for a few while leading to enormous hidden costs for literally everyone in the future.
So sure, there should be import tariffs or bans on Brazilian beef, even sanctions on loggers, miners and ranchers etc. but the next significant step is to get this government out.
1. Who are we (US, Canada, China - heavily developed nations) to criticize?
2. Bolsonaro is bad mkay
I think the root of the problem in both situations is people in power both in the government and out of it who do not seek sustainability and often are susceptible to corruption or influence. In both situations, the profits did not go to your average human.
And if no, then why not? Do people think a politician with his fancy suit is going to step his foot into the swamp to try and meet halfway?
These assholes are literally destroying the world and the human race is none the wiser....
I sometimes wonder what would happen if rather than trying to evolve on a technological level, humanity evolved to protect and harmonize this world.
Holy shit it's not even funny the level of ignorance that permeates topics of destroying the Earth.
The thing is, in the end, its often poacher/miners shooting at unarmed people, often in the middle of the jungle, far away from the effective jurisdiction of whoever else would care. And the very insitutions that could oversee and act to prevent violence have been sistematically dismantled by the current fascist-in-chief, either by removing key people or by being financially strangled.
But hey, at least now you won't lose your license for speeding and buying ammo is easier than ever.
There is. People just get killed and everything is swept under the rug.
Specifically, I would like to question if Brazil can or even should be trusted to handle the Amazon forest in a responsible manner. Over the past decades, objectively, it has shown that the country, or maybe primarily its government, doesn't: The forest is continuously decimated, ever faster, with full and open support by the government itself.
Considering that the Amazon is of broader concern than just Brazil's jurisdiction alone, would it -- and I'd include other, similar areas around the globe here too -- make sense to move administration to a more responsible body, the UN for example (not specifically the UN, but you get the idea)?
This may sound offensive to you for all kinds of reasons, especially if you're Brazilian, and I sincerely apologise for that. But please consider that maybe the challenges ahead of humanity as a whole require new solutions, new ways to think about who "owns" land?
I would suggest something like a global conservation fund responsible for guarding critical "infrastructure" of our planet. At some point, we will need to take action to prevent earth from becoming inhospitable, and this requires steering. Merely admitting defeat to greedy human nature doesn't seem to lead anywhere.
You’re just describing imperialism one step removed.
Saying we need structural change, but not more top down control, isn’t throwing my hands up and admitting defeat to greedy human nature.
I’m no expert in what’s happening on the ground in the amazon, but the story used to be clearing amazon to raise cattle to sell to mcdonalds. Idk if that’s still the case, but i’d be willing to bet that the thing driving deforestation is resource extraction for global markets.
It’s temping to try to police brazil’s extraction, but the far less paternalistic and colonial thing to do would be to police our own demand for what they’re cutting down the rainforest to provide.
The difference here being that it's not about taking control of the developing world, but saving resources humanity as a whole requires to keep earth habitable for us - this affects everyone, poor or rich. It's just that Brazil, right now, has a very unfortunate combination of a corrupt government, very valuable resources, and responsibility for the integrity of the forest.
> It’s temping to try to police brazil’s extraction, but the far less paternalistic and colonial thing to do would be to police our own demand for what they’re cutting down the rainforest to provide.
That isn't mutually exclusive. At the very least, there should be sanctions put into place until Brazil starts actually trying to prevent extraction, not actively supporting it. But I could still see a global organization responsible for keeping core areas intact.
That’s not an accident. Not misfortune. That’s a result of western colonialism. I’m no expert in brazil, but its history includes colonial governments, CIA backed coups, and IMF influence.
It doesn’t have a bad gov because whoops we elected a bad guy in 2019. It has a bad gov because throughout its entire history western govs and corporations have been exercising influence to be allowed to pilfer its resources.
There is a snowball's chance in hell that anybody would willingly agree to this. Any kind of scheme you can come up with is guaranteed to cause more issues that will harm Brazilians.
Other people telling you how to live your life is a recipe for disaster. One that we've seen over and over again.
The problem is that this logic extends to most very large countries in the world.
Are you gonna also appropriate Russia, Canada, China and United States of America land? Who is gonna police all of that? Does the rest of humanity have the collective firepower to stop, say, "just China" and "just the United States of America" from ruining the environment? I don't think this is feasible.
Bolsonaro's election received heavy support from the international (and national) finance sector. They projected a higher gain under his government. And most of these people are from developed countries.
People from rich country may not be really aware that the commodities come from somwere. The recent Russian war sure made this more clear. Developing countries are locked in that role.
If a country like Brazil, Russia or China reduces significantly its exports, everyone living costs rise. This is obviously true for high technology goods, but while you can survive with no smartphone, you can't with no food and energy.
I'm talking about this most obvious stuff to make this point: rich countries exports their poverty. USA still has a firm hand on the entire continent, and will not let it go, Brazil included.
As someone from Brazil, I really hope BRICS+ continues to grow. While the G7 can easily suffocate small dissidents, a entire block can not be. Sanctions against Russia stared to make European governments fall, what happens if you sanction half the world population?
I'm reserving judgment in the Russia's war in this post, becase most of these implications don't depends on who is right.
Then it's gone. Forever.
No. In fact, evidence suggests most of the rainforest was in fact laid by humans. It's artificially mostly made of trees with edible produce like açaí and brazil nut.
When the forest loses the capacity to create clouds, it is game over. It will never be the same again, and that's just one of many of non-linear effects at work.
It's mostly being used for agriculture.
Apparently the global human mass excluding humans themselves who comprise 0.01% of the global biomass but including our constructions in concrete, asphalt, aggregates, bricks, plastic & glass exceeded the global biomass back in 2020. The same report claims that this anthropogenic mass doubles every 20 years. I wonder what the thermal capacity of all this is let alone other manifest concerns.
We've taken strong conservation and violent prevention measures before against ecological practices of sovereign nation states that are detrimental to our lives.
Perhaps the only 'successful' part of the US "war on drugs" was coca eradication [1], including the use of biological warfare (pests), herbicides and crop burning. We probably would have napalmed the Afghan poppy fields, but in the end the Taliban did it for us.
The ivory trade is almost extinguished, let's be honest, not because we stemmed demand but because we were prepared to shoot the poachers. It's no secret the SAS operated "free-fire" in those parts of Africa, also training locals on "man hunting".
And I think they got fucked anyway, both of them. They thought it was a good investment because it was such a shitty thing to do to something so beautiful, thought the secret to luxury was cowardice (and it is), but guess what the promise of shitty person heaven where all the shitty people are so shitty to everything except you because you're so special so much in common with them, say the same things, have the same ideas, know the same people, have the same passwords what a coincidence, bump into each other in the strangest places, twins, so that means...uh...nah you know what, it's a better lesson learned the hard way. Getting fucked is critical to learning how not to get fucked. Walkthroughs are uh...well police departments have websites, there's books on the subject. And you can't con an honest John. Well there's a limit to that, you also have to be informed, you need both. And entertain moral dilemmas, moral experiments, or like play-act with friends, that will help out a lot. And good alternatives.
Course the hard part is finding an alternative to that if you are conned. One way is to choose your second best choice. Not your first choice. Second choice. So then if the second choice starts getting shitty, stops whispering when you come around the bend, hey oh shit, guess the second choice school, say we're talking about Harvard 1 Yale 2, so Yale, really was second rank! I thought the 2 meant it was just as good, just another numeral from 1 to 10, like different days of the month! Wow, shit, wouldn't want to have to transfer to Harvard, that would suck, that was my first choice! Say I couldn't make it at Yale, damn!
Fertilized, less land is required to grow equivalent quantities of crops.
Petroleum products, especially natural gas is a raw material as well as fuel for nitrogen fertilizer production.
Higher petroleum prices mean higher fertilizer prices. Higher fertilizer prices mean higher food prices.
Scarcity increases prices. Worldwide food production is down for many reasons: weather, war, disease, lack of workers, inflation, and cost to fertilize. Expect prices to rise, significantly more than they have.
24 hours per day X 60 minutes X 60 seconds X 20 trees per second = 1,728,000 trees per day = 8640 people required
This certainly seems feasible - we just need the economics to justify it.
I live in Italy, the Po Valley I live in was a marshland with lots of centenarian trees. Since Roman times marshes have been drought and most of the forests were chopped to make room for agriculture (and to build Venice, which sits on millions and millions of trees).
I recently went to Portugal, where most forests have been chopped and substituted with huge eucalyptus or cork oak monocultures.
The same goes for France, Germany, etc.
We destroyed our environment so we could have progress. Now we understand that the environment is precious and must be taken care of, so it's up to us to pay other countries to preserve their environment. This money will eventually be used to buy "progress" and end on our pockets once again so it's not even a bad deal economically speaking, it just takes the will (which is lacking almost anywhere).
My father is Brazilian and I lived there for almost ten years, from mid 90s to mid 00s, and indeed Brazil as a country is not that poor: if you could split the GDP equally amongst the population. Since this is not the case in reality there are millions and millions well below the poverty line and this is what makes a country a poor country, a country where a lot of people are poor.
When you have a lot of poor people many things go out of control, and also taking advantage of poor people is a piece of cake for those at the top of the money pyramid.
Deforestation in Brazil will not stop unless farmers and locals that live around the Amazon (or other green areas such as the Pantanal or the now almost destroyed Mata Atlântica) get paid to not touch it, help it regrow and pursue different agricultural styles or different crops. The Brazilian government doesn't have the money to do that even if corruption went to zero and private entities will not act since in most cases they are the ones fomenting deforestation.
The only hope for South American forests to thrive is foreign intervention: local governments won't act, local corporations won't act and most of the local population is simply too poor to care.
This meeting between Bolsonaro and Al Gore seems like a comedy sketch:
- We integrate advanced agroforestry restoration systems
- Provide people living here with greater self-sufficiency and economic prosperity
If you don't see an issue here, then imagine if you were talking about the USA. Should other countries "get rid of" the US president if they don't like his policies?
If there's 100M iphones in the world that retail for around $1000 each, that's $100B dollars. We could have invested that money into building some kind of park that welcomes visitors. No, instead we chose as a society to take pretty photos for instagram for fake internet points.
The environment created us, we created economics. It's an artificial concept that will never capture the true value of nature.
Then investing at the economic value would be profitable, and people should clearly do this.
Not everything reduces to a price tag.
That's 0.004% - huge.
1. Assuming 1 tree per 100 square feet.
And I have no idea about their attractiveness, nor why my having a better argument would be dichotomous to their unattractiveness.
It's our demand for goods that is causing this.
>"Domestically FED and raised"
??
>Also, the feeding animal 10KG to get 1KG looks rather wasteful?
Depends heavily on what animal product you are producing. Obviously we won't be eating beef all the time. It also depends on what kind of farmland you have available, and what uses those crops have.
Where I am (Wales, UK), the combination of the farmer' lobby and the "Welsh culture and heritage" lobby has meant that largely unprofitable sheep farming has been subsidised, and what should be productive wooded hillside makes lamb that no-one wants. I'm not saying that raising animals is always the best use of land.