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Comment by ljd | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that it's seen as aid.

If countries like Norway feel that standing trees provide a service to them, they should pay to keep them up.

It's not charity, the trees are providing a marketable good by processing CO2 emissions.

While I'm not an environmentalist, I do believe in markets as a way of solving larger problems and I think it would be interesting if a market was built on resource preservation.

For instance, if a type of tree processes more CO2, they should be worth more than one that does not and that can be expressed in whatever this marketplace would be. If I had more connections at a government level, I might be interested in such an idea but as it stands now the sales cycles would be too long to get a market like that going.

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Because it's a public goods problem. If one country pays, all countries benefit equally, and the country that pays generally spends more than its benefit from that payment. So each country is better off not paying, regardless of what everybody else does, even though we'd all be a lot better off if everybody paid.

The problem, of course, is not in the fact that clearing Carbon CO2 emissions from the air. It's the fact that it might be worth more - in dollars - to cut those trees down and sell them. Perhaps not in this case, but certainly in other cases where countries have tried to sell protecting their own territory environmentally and balanced that against the worth of the resources on the market.

Thus the dollar worth of clearing CO2 emissions doesn't clearly align with the self-interest of doing so over buying trees to make paper and other goods. (The self-interest, of course, is in not dying in the future from some climate change related disaster.

That's why worldwide governmental intervention is needed to make sure the dollar value of keeping those trees up aligns with actual self-interest.

But as the threat becomes imminent, the appearance of "externalized" cost diminishes and the value on protecting those resources increases and they are no longer external.

We're already seeing this as several big companies and funds are suddenly putting real money into "green energy."

It'll always be harder for for-profits and bottom-line driven funds to pay to not have action, but nations are now apparently doing this. I wonder how much of that is accounted for in known corruption. (In the U.S. we call it lobbying.)

Edit: trying to clear up the "externalized" sentence. What I mean is that "external costs" aren't so external at a certain point.

> But as the threat becomes imminent,

You have too much faith that by the time people view the threat as 'imminent' there will be anything that can still be done.

I wasn't really referring to the generally people, I meant "imminent to businesses."

Algae processes more CO2 than trees. You could convert the forests into logging land and just set up massive platforms on the ocean that manage algae. Maybe not even that.

CO2 isn't the only issue, of course. Biodiversity is another good reason to preserve the rainforests, and algae can't make up for that.

Besides naturally-sourced pharmaceuticals, what objective benefits do biodiversity offer humans?

Isn't that enough? Highly biodiverse environments like tropical rainforests are treasure troves of thousands of fascinating species that we don't know much about yet. No doubt we still have a lot to learn from these environments.

Biodiversity sustains ecosystems, which, should they collapse, could very well take us with them. Due to the incredible complexity and interdependence of these ecosystems we simply don't know what the results of collapse will be. Maintenance of biodiversity is therefore a risk avoidance strategy.

Additionally, I'll mention that I agree with blaabjerg's response: it's worth maintaining biodiversity for the fun of it.

See, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_cascade

"Incredible complexity" is a handwave. If you can't give a specific reason then you have none at all.

You can use "incredible complexity" on literally anything. Everything is complex. Humans manage.

Yeah, I could use "incredible complexity" on something else like, let's say for example, climate and meteorology. But instead of being conservative about what we pump into the atmosphere, we could just dump in it like that's what it's there for. And see where we end up. I don't think it's at all unreasonable to draw a parallel with that and ecosystem complexity.

Corollary: I don't see how a broadly conservative approach to managing biodiversity can be discounted because it isn't specific enough.

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