How can this be true when our rate of deforestation is accelerating? The state of deforestation is nothing to celebrate, it’s horrific as far as I understand it.
“By most metrics we’re better off than the 90’s”
Except for economic metrics and people’s material well being??
This sounds like Steven Pinker stuff.
https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation
Same thing for the acid rain.
Where are you getting this from?
In any case, tropical deforestation may be accelerating, but perhaps temperate reforestation is accelerating even faster.
According to this link the rate of deforestation is decreasing. But still, they say there is less forest now than there was in 1990.
"Since 1990, it is estimated that 420 million hectares of forest have been lost through conversion to other land uses, although the rate of deforestation has decreased over the past three decades. Between 2015 and 2020, the rate of deforestation was estimated at 10 million hectares per year, down from 16 million hectares per year in the 1990s. The area of primary forest worldwide has decreased by over 80 million hectares since 1990."
Which we also need to do soon because the longer you wait, the wider the band around the Tropics where fungally dominated ecosystems cannot thrive.
Not that we shouldn't have people working to slow tropical deforestation, but we can't and shouldn't put all our eggs in that basket.
https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-...
Then you change the topic to talking about how it's not proven that capitalism is good.
It's not interesting to be on this side of such a discussion.
https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-...
Where Pinker looks at some arbitrarily defined numbers to decide that extreme poverty has gone down, and capitalism is the reason, Hickel criticizes those poverty numbers for being artificially low due to a poor selection of the poverty line, and points out that most of the reduction in poverty happened in china, where the system Steven Pinker argues for is not being used.
Finally anyone who is paying attention to the economics of people in just the USA for example must know that real wages in the USA have been stagnant for the average person since 1980, while living costs continue to rise. So the average person is NOT better off than they were in the 1990's, they are actually worse off.
People like Bill Gates LOVE Steve Pinker because Pinker provides an excuse to say the status quo is fine and everything is great. But in reality time is not a linear path towards nirvana, and real people are currently stuck working Uber and Door Dash to try to survive while in the 1990's they could have had a steady job. I'm struck by this notion that in the 1990's the janitorial staff at Apple were Apple employees who got treated with respect, but now they are contractors working for a company Apple has hired. So things are great for the engineers at Apple but in the 90's success for those people also meant success for the janitors. But we have managed to break that off so those people no longer get to see the gains that others see. We are stratifying the world more.
Things are not better for the average janitor.