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Comment by makerofspoons | Hacker News Reader

Definitely the better choice to preserve the Amazon- hopefully the international community takes this opportunity to pursue programs to pay Brazil to conserve it before the next Bolsonaro.

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Paying to conserve the Amazon is just blackmailing yourself. Every year you're going to have to keep paying otherwise "oh no, they'll cut down the Amazon". Then once it's been going on a while, they'll start demanding more, or "we'll cut down the Amazon, and you don't want that, do you?" Unless Brazil develops some intrinsic motivation, then it is at risk. So the solution is to make the Amazon so compelling that Brazil wants to keep it.

That is true. But it's cheaper to blackmail yourself while being safe to research the forest looking for new drugs and chemicals than it is to open the intelectual properties that could benefit the Brazilian industries in preserving the forest I guess.

I don't know, Brazil under 1st Lula term grew from increasing PRC commodities demand. Even anti-PRC Bolsonaro had to give away to pro-PRC trade industrial pressure. Reality is Brazil is one of the few geopolitical actors that can provide PRC with soy/beef/petro/iron currently provided by western bloc which PRC wants to reduce dependency on. That means more extraction from Brazil.

There were more acres of deforested land per year in the Amazon during Lula and his successor Dilma's terms, than in Bolsonaro's term.

Source ? Also, have you seen the former ministry of environment Ricardo Salles in the April 22, 2020 video of the ministries meeting with Bolsonaro ?

Parent comment is partially correct [0] (deforestation was higher under lula but lower under dilma), though it leaves out important context that the rate of deforestation fell precipitously during lula’s term, and rose during bolsonaro’s tenure.

[0] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/145988/tracking-ama...

Durante o governo Lula a Amazônia era completamente ignorada, ficava nas mãos de garimpeiros e madeireiros. A mídia brasileira é sustentada pelo governo, como esse atual(Bolsonaro) não dava dinheiro eles usavam qualquer coisa para falar mal. Nossas leis(brasileiras) de controle ambiental são mais rígidas que as da Europa atualmente, em parte graças ao governo atual.

Obs: Não apoio nenhum dos dois

That's a lie. There were plenty of actions[0] that the Lula mandate did to control the illegal wood being sold as legal.

Bolsonaro still gave money to the media. It just selected the religious conservative ones to give money to.

[0]: https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ambiente/2022/10/o-que-foi-o-p...

hahahahahahaha usar a folha.uol como fonte? Wikipedia é 70% mais confiável

Though it doesn't explicitly say so in the guidelines, HN is an English-language site. Even if English is not your best language, most of us read bad English better than we read good Portuguese.

What is this obsession with the Amazon? There are far more important things to worry about here. This is a profoundly unequal and violent country. We don't have universal basic sanitation. Right now it's descending into chaos, people are already protesting the election of this socialist by closing down major roads. It looks like Lula supporters are going to meet them head on in the streets and it seems like they are armed, ironically. All this is happening right now and uncomfortably close to my home.

But all people talk about is the goddamn Amazon?

Many of us believe we are in the early days of a synthetic biology revolution which could be as big as the computer revolution. Incidentally, by changing how we think about data and its tendancy to proliferate, this would probably be a good thing for opinions on copyright law you've expressed elsewhere.

And in that context the Amazon represents a treasure of potentially valuable genetics. It's really hard to quantify how valuable because the industry's not there yet, but it feels like a sunken pirate ship we can't quite salvage with the current state of the art, but have a collective interest in seeing remain where it is. Poor sanitation, endemic inequality and political strife are familiar problems. In that respect Brazil gets mentally filed somewhere between Haiti and the US, and the cost-benefit-analysis of fixing these problems feels straightforward. The cost-benefit-analysis of paying people not to farm the Amazon is not straightforward, we have no idea what the upside would be. So we imagine it's very high, but with no way to monetize that treasure today we can't find the funding... so we obsess.

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