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.
Replacing fossil fuels with renewables is the most attainable and impactful tactic at this point.
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.
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...
Yet on that graph it has about the same color as every other country, way apart from the extremes.
(But then, that link does answer my question upthread.)
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...
And yet, the rate of destruction is well within the average for every country (what the graph measures).