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Comment by cedws | Hacker News Reader

The most frustrating thing about the climate change discussion for me is that everybody's focused on the high effort, low impact changes. There are millions of hectares of rainforest being torn down every year... maybe we should turn our attention to that?

SAF will allow us to stop taking carbon out of the ground, but it does nothing to take carbon out of the air.

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I think most of us would love to preserve the rainforest, but lack the tools to do it. We are therefore working on parts of the problem that are still very real, very consequential, and that we can control.

Solving climate change requires switching the infrastructure of humanity's heaviest industries, that produce at enormous scale, and are the product of centuries of optimization.

Doing this without a heavy green premium requires technology and innovation, allowing the replacement solution to be cost competitive. Otherwise, the lack of economic competitiveness will prevent new methods from replacing the old at any reasonable scale. We've already seen that policy alone (i.e., taxes) can't make it happen across all the sectors at the necessary speed, due to being vastly unpopular.

Ironically, saving the rainforest is high-effort (requires Brazil's voters to elect leadership dedicated to it) and low-impact.

Replacing fossil fuels with renewables is the most attainable and impactful tactic at this point.

Is Brazil the only country with rainforests still standing?

Anyway, we should be working on artificially "hardened" cellulose. As well as ivory-like calcium-carbonate. I never heard about anybody working on those, but they clearly are in demand.

> Is Brazil the only country with rainforests still standing?

No, but 60% of the Amazon is in Brazil. The next-highest country is Peru at 12%, and the rest are much smaller.

Brazil is also the most egregious destroyer of rainforest in the world, and it's not even close[1].

"Saving the rainforest" is equivalent to "regime change in Brazil".

1. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/deforesta...

You could imagine sanctions on Brazilian beef. Either a blanket ban or something targeted at particular producers. I doubt it would happen, but that's a different plan.

> Brazil is also the most egregious destroyer of rainforest in the world

Yet on that graph it has about the same color as every other country, way apart from the extremes.

Look at the numbers, not the colors.

The numbers that say "yeah, Brazil is the one with more forests standing"?

(But then, that link does answer my question upthread.)

I honestly can't tell if you're from Brazil, trolling, or not understanding the data.

Brazil has destroyed more than 3x the forest than the next-highest country, and the forest it's destroying is considered the most ecologically important. It doesn't matter how much is still standing. The rate at which it's being destroyed tells us which country's behavior needs to change.

This is similar to burning fossil fuels. We don't say, "Look at all the oil the US hasn't burned yet!" We say, "The US is the largest consumer of oil." We don't care about the damage they could do but haven't done yet. We care about the damage that's happening.

Now as it turns out, Brazil has already destroyed enough of the Amazon that it's now a carbon emitter rather than a carbon sink[1], so the task is not just to stop Brazil from destroying the Amazon, but actually to reforest it over time, which is even more challenging.

1. https://research.noaa.gov/2021/07/14/deforestation-warming-f...

> Brazil has destroyed more than 3x the forest than the next-highest country

And yet, the rate of destruction is well within the average for every country (what the graph measures).

I can only conclude that you don't perceive a difference between percentages and absolute values and there is no point trying to find common ground here.

Unfortunately millions of hectares of rainforest is also mostly irrelevant compared to the amount of CO2 going into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels.

You have to take into account not just the annual sequestration of carbon dioxide by rainforests, but also the carbon already stored within them that is released when they decay or burn. A lot of the land being deforested is used to make way for livestock which adds insult to injury. Moreover, the deforested land accelerates the greenhouse effect by absorbing more energy from the sun.

Why is the land being converted to meat production? Surely the problem is one of economics, development and poverty more than anything else? Give the people that live there better options and the deforestation will take care of itself.

The filthy rich (and constantly growing richer at the expense of everyone else) who are doing it have zero interest in giving the people that live there anything more than they absolutely are forced to give in order to be allowed to rape the planet for more profit. Giving the people that live there better options is the last thing they want to do, as then those people would have no incentive to give up their land and rights to make those rich people richer.

Right, but is anybody willing to pay for this? Not taking down the rain forest is opportunity cost. Who is going to pay for this?

Because the things that would actually work are political suicide because it would decrease the amount of "score" the plutocrats can accumulate in the "I'm richer than you".

Well, feeding the captured atmospheric carbon into stable material synthesis (carbon fiber and diamond, basically) is a more-or-less permanent removal mechanism. Over the long run, steady-state is most desirable when it comes to the global atmospheric composition of course.

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