We seem determined to undermine all attempts to save ourselves. It makes me very depressed sometimes, when striving to be better as an individual, to see things like this happening. I truly do worry we don’t have a lot of time left.
Things like this strike fear in my heart and make me feel helpless to prevent our species from dismantling our ecosystem until it can no longer support us.
We are in the thick of it. Shame that politics moves so slowly in so many countries, and that money and economics comes above long term ecosystem health. I think if we recognized we are merely a species from that ecosystem, part of its food chain, maybe we would react better.
Reminds me of a friend who has this pet desire that 1/2 of all humans should vanish, this was before Thanos too. He just hates what humans do and wants less of them.
That's not interventionist tho. The same point of view framed as an intervention would be to come to America and burn our forests down.
But that's not an intervention, rite? That would be an act of war. An intervention is supposed to be for the greater good of the collective, as in win-win.
This is just more left vs right stuff. This is why Jesus invented day drinking.
In a sane world, the CIA would have already faked some bullshit, and taken the guy out, let us all get on with paying our taxes in peace.
A takeover seems messy. Wouldn't destroying infrastructure used by businesses that destroy the rainforest be sufficient? And if any country decided to do that wouldn't a military-enforced economic blockade to quench those exports be even less bloody and achieve the same?
Total war to save the planet is an interesting narrative, but it does not seem very efficient unless you have some cheap to deploy doomsday WMDs.
Even Brazil can't achieve a military occupation of the rainforest. It's enourmous, and by definition trackless jungle. Not to mention how ludicrous the idea of armed international environmentalism is. What would most likely happen is its destruction, Vietnam-style. The defenders would burn it in their retreat like Napoleon's defeat at Moscow.
The other day there was a thread on HN where most people agreed that Amazon should pay France more taxes because even though it’s an internet business, it benefits from things done by the French government.
Maybe developed countries should start paying a tax to Brazil and other Amazon forest countries so that they can preserve it. After all, most didn’t do a good job preserving their own forests, so demanding underdeveloped countries to do it is somewhat hypocritical.
This ^^! Most people do not appreciate what truly being poor is like. If the choice is development or preserving the rainforest, Brazilians deserve the right to choose for themselves
Except destroying the rain forests is gonna do absolutely nothing to help the Brazilian poor.
So I’m not sure what being truly poor has anything to do with this. This will be almost entirely about displacing the poor, poisoning their water, and rewarding corrupt cronies.
Decide for themselves to destroy/change world climate even more? I do not think so. It is their responsibility to keep the rain forests in good shape. I agree though, that they should get help from all over the world.
There are ways to develop an economy other than destroying all of your resources within a generation. Any country that does it is doomed to poverty, and it’s kind of hard to feel sympathy for anyone endorsing such short term thinking.
At least Norway does:
"Norway makes annual payments to Brazil as part of a long-term billion-dollar program to curb the loss of Amazon rainforest to slow global warming."
Because this (or other) fuel is still necessary right now. The way they use the money also benefits the whole country. Cutting down the Amazon is not necessary and merely benefits a small number of farmers.
Also Norway is taking steps to moving away from an oil based economy.
The comparison is invalid. This isn’t about ending existing means of supporting Brazilian society. These are about new measures that will (a) damage the rain forests, (b) almost certainly negatively impact ordinary Brazilians, and only enrich a few well connected folks.
The idea that killing the goose kind of growth will help ordinary citizens has shown to be false time and again in nearly every other nation.
Because that's literally how they fund their entire society? Even with the super high taxes, it's not enough to cover the level of social spending they are trying to maintain. Not to mention that it's also going into a fund for all pensions. In that way, it's great that the government kept control over the fossil fuels and that the money from them at least serves the Norwegian people.
In principle a nice idea, as we all depend on that forest, however, people like that would abuse this and extort other countries and demand more and more.
Bolsonaro is also simply wrong to claim that it is their forest, only because it is on Brazil ground. The whole world depends on it, so it must be a resource shared and kept up by all. Bolsonaro and people like him are holding such things like rain forest hostage.
Please send in the military or something to wrestle control over such a valuable thing from that insane person. We can not afford to be extorted by the likes of him on a global scale, when time draws near, where the future of the whole species will be decided.
Bolsonaro is not claiming the forest for Brazilians. He's claiming it for his party and his allies, and for criminals that have been taking advantage of that.
The poor from Brazil don't stand to get anything at all out of this.
Instead western countries should ban imports of food products that are produced in unsustainable ways. It would apply to everyone equally and remove one of the main economic drivers behind deforestation
This happens when other nations and unions stand by idly instead of immediately threaten sanctions against insane people like Bolsonaro. There needs to be so much pressure on the country, that they riot against people like him and rid themselves of people like him. The moment this guy talked about cutting down trees, other nations should have immediately threatened with heavy sanctions, to stop this thread right away.
Hard for USA to pressure with a nationalist right winger in power, same with Britain and many EU countries. So who exactly has the political will and clout to do anything?
It's bullshit anyway. I have this idea that Bezos should use his money from Amazon to buy a large chunk of the Amazon rain forest. I am sure right winger is happy to sell the land for slightly above the price of wood on it.
Not sure you're aware of how large and remote the Amazon is. Even if the drone battery life was sustainable, you'd still need to get physical enforcement to the location.
Brazil's southeast (which includes São Paulo - the most industrialised state and with 40 million people) gets humidity from the Amazon. They have had water shortages these last few years.
This government has given power to the greediest and most short-sighted elements of Brazilian society. They have always played a big role, but they now run unbridled and unashamed.
It's a pity things are going in that direction. But i don't think we are in position to judge the Brazilians over this.
I watched a short documentary about this issue recently on Youtube, and the journalists went to some really remote area and spoke with the mayor of town there. The guy was big supporter of Bolsonaro and he said something that is actually very true. He said US and Europe have no right to tell Brazil what to do with it's natural resources, because they have already used theirs to industrialise and develop and now want to prevent Brazil from doing so.
And as unpleasant as it sounds he is right. People in the western world can wipe their buts with toilet paper made from virgin pulp, but Brazil and other poor countries should hold should preserve the lungs of the planet.
That is the same argument Poland throws at Germany to justify the huge amounts of coal it uses and has little plans to reduce. At some point one has to ask at what cost the growth is justifiable and if dumping the same efforts into renewable technology isn't going to pay more dividends in the future when the world has moved on
Definitelely! There is no need for growth anymore, there is need for quality and sustainability. But the dominant financial and economics systems we have cam work only with growth.
Sowe have to keep growing all the time so that the finance industry can keep increasing numbers on paper.
Actually that argument was only ever used to make the miners - a very powerful group in Poland - vote for whichever political party was in charge at the moment.
The coal industry overall is not a source of growth, but a liability, costing the taxpayers around €2bln annually.
A looming energy crisis and increasing costs of emissions, finally made the current government give in, put their cronies where they wanted them and approve a lot of new offshore wind investments + create a subsidy program for solar power to the tune of €230mln.
I talked with some people from Silesia and even the miners see the writing on the wall - currently 20% of the coal used in Poland is imported, so miners as a group don't have as much leverage as they used to.
It's an absurd argument. You don't need to emulate the industrial age western countries went through to develop a country now that we have better ways to do it. It's no excuse for unsustainable logging and pollution.
I definitely understand that viewpoint (China and other Asian countries say similar things). And specifically for Asia, much of that pollution is technically originating in the west, we’ve just outsourced a lot of our pollution to Asian countries.
The environmental impact of industrialization needs to be built into the cost of goods. Capitalism can solve many of these problems, but right now pollution practically has no associated cost to the end price, which is why we use the cheapest materials that cannot be recycled.
America needs to change dramatically before we can make substantial progress here; we can be the world leader in this issue. But I guess I’m not that optimistic considering the politics right now.
> Capitalism can solve many of these problems
Do you really think so? I would say that capitalism and the economic models that support it are one of the main factors we are in this situation.
I’d like to think so hah, but I’m not 100% either. It seems it would be easier to integrate the true (or close) environmental cost so there is a negative profit impact, instead of twisting people/countries to do the right thing. Because right now we basically incentivize environmental destruction because it’s cheaper in an economic sense.
I agree with you that capitalism is the origin of many of these problems, though. Doesn’t mean it can’t evolve.
keep in mind brazil is in a state which even senators are fleeing and asking for asylum in europe.
a government official, elected or otherwise, will most likely side with the isolationist rhetoric, if only for votes next election.
The new questionably-elected president keep the appearance of defending a brave isolation that only he is capable of (Even though the coup in brazil was caused exactly because the previous government, corrupt or otherwise, was denying american companies access to new oil reserves already), when in reality he is eating in trump's hand. He just appointed his son, who until before the election was working as a fast food chef in florida, as the brazil ambassador in the usa.
So, yes, a country should be independent and look out for the people. But in this case it is only propaganda/fake news/disinformation. whatever political campaigns are called today.
> Even though the coup in brazil was caused exactly because the previous government, corrupt or otherwise, was denying american companies access to new oil reserves already
Just want to point out to non-Brazilian HNers that this view is as fringe as UFO believers or hardcore Breitbart supporters. No one serious in the country is making these claims that sound more like outdated communism than real facts.
To name one counterpoint: the US is oil sufficient thanks to shale / fracking so it doesn't care about Brazilian "pre-salt" oil which is really hard to extract....
The US is concerned about oil supplies everywhere in the world, because the US economy is driven by oil prices and the US net oil self sufficiency (though it's not self-sufficient in the oil it actually uses) has only slight bearing on this, since prices are driven by global market conditions.
Which is not to say that US interest in oil as the reason for the events at issue is a reasonable, evidence-supported belief.
Isn't it true the majority of oil used in the US is from the US now? We fell off in the 90s and 00s but I believe we are now amongst top producers again. I'm not happy about increased fossil fuel production but at least it takes some power from much less desirable hands like Saudis, Iran, Brazil, Venezuela, etc.
The thing is that the Amazon is not a good place for traditional agriculture. You can chop down the trees and grow crops for a couple of years and then you have to move on. We need a completely different approach to develop the Amazon.
Just a thing, we Brazilians see ourselves as westerns. Amazonia Soil is only rich at the surface, and it remains rich because of its fauna and flora. Because of that, the deforestation is very warming, it’s difficult to recover it.
Disclaimer: I am Brazilian and a raving anti-Bolsonaro protester.
If we follow that line of thought, we will always end up at the following conundrum: the planet cannot support the "affluent Western" lifestyle -- think typical Bay Area HN-er -- for all 7 billion humans (as far as I remember, I don't have the sources for that).
Who is going to draw the golden ticket?
I agree that Bolsonaro is an opportunist (like many politicians), and he spews a lot of abominable statements. Unfortunately, his views align with a large section of Brazilian society. A society that was, from the beginning, built on layers upon layers of opportunism, manorialism and slavery. A society that cannot condemn its slave trade past, nor its many dictatorships.
Bottom line -- yes, I think you are in position to judge us.
We can borrow against our future cash flows, there is plenty of underutilized capacity that could be used to transform the world to carbon neutrality.
But so far we have not made this choice, because our power structure is too short sighted. Why? Well, naturally there are true ignorants, some selfish folks manipulating the former group, and so we have ugly inefficient compromises.
Can you explain more in terms of the planet side of things? I get that you think the wealth can be generated, but I think the comment you are responding to is referring to how can the planet support that level of consumption?
There's nothing stopping us from using a lot more GHG-neutral energy. (Eg. nuclear, wind, solar.) We can then use the energy to power whatever processes we want (vertical farms are a lot more efficient than open fields and greenhouses, plus you can put them right next to population centers; beyond meat and impossible foods will be in no time better than the real thing; also if we really want we can simply put pastures under domes to capture the methane, we can put these pastures underground with artificial lights).
Look at how much unemployment there is around the world and how little inflation. This means we are nowhere near total economic output capacity. We can probably double our output if we want, especially if we start doing things on a big scale. (Big scale decarbonization, and eventual carbon capture to offset the remaining GHG emissions.)
Okay, so energy, food, transportation (full EV vehicles), what's next? Shelter. Prefab buildings. Arcologies preferably, because that leaves a lot of green space. After all instead of having an endless sprawl of 2-3 storey buildings it'd be quite better to have parks and ~100 storey ones. And affluent folks like high rises very much.
Standardization of processes drives down cost and increases quality. Yet, naturally, market players don't like that, because with fixed demanded quantity this simply shrinks the market, so they like to sell bespoke solution. (From power plants to housing.) But we are paying a lot more because we are not going big enough. (This applies veeery severely to transportation and other public works [eg power plants again]: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-... )
Furthermore, current UN/WHO predictions about the peak population is around 11-12 billion people, but most (I mean almost 99%) of the growth will happen in developing countries, in cities, and in particular in Africa. And we can make cities a lot more efficient than they are now.
So all in all, currently what stands in the way of providing an affluent Western lifestyle to everyone is global coordination toward cooperation instead of a zero-sum competition. (Every country wants to have strategic reserves of food, fuel, knowhow and so on. Which leads to every country inventing their own shitty stuff - see public works above, and protecting those incumbent interests, see subsidies of oil industry and for agriculture.)
I hope this starts to answer your question. If not, I'd like to know why. Thanks!
But we do have our "toilet paper made from virgin pulp". In fact, I'd wager that it's better than other countries I lived in. ;)
Brazil already have a rich and sustainable wood industry for decades. Extraction mostly in the southeast, in states like Espirito Santo, south of Bahia, Parana. Mostly eucalyptus and pinus. It is a 70-billion industry that is still growing, and is sustainable.
The extraction from Amazon happens on old trees in a non-sustainable way. Mostly trees affected by CITES, and probably exported illegally from Brazil.
This is not something that will change or economy in a scalable way. This will not generate jobs, and will be a compromise, because those trees take decades to grow.
There are laws in place and all we have to do is follow them, and the industry will keep up.
We just have a president that desperately wants to lax all regulations to appeal to his base, and that includes even stuff like traffic regulation.
So, yes, you are in a position to judge Brazil and Brazilians over this. We are not some small country full of poor people, but apparently we're in a fast track to become one. :(
Everytime there are news about Brazil the threads get a simple political view with shallow arguments.
I'm yet to see an article from nytimes and so on where they begin with basic and correct information instead of out-of-the-pocket made up numbers. Because numbers, in reality, are very different from this perspective that it's written. There isn't these increase in forests falling as this article implies.
There are no protections being slashed. this is totaly and complete BS. France is attacking Brasil because of the impact in a comer ial agreement. Why you don't go take care of your lives instead of gossiping in the web?
If an article is wrong and you have correct information, you're welcome to provide it, but please don't do it by calling names. Do it by neutrally stating facts. This will do a much better job of refuting the wrong article. Taking the threads further into flamewar helps nothing, and damages this place.
What if rich countries stop buying things that cause deforestation such as meat and wood? (now you throw me through the window).
When I read that foreigners (specially Europeans) are concerned about Amazon I simply laugh. They've been exploiting Brazilian's (and other colonies as well) natural resources since ever! They've got rich as hell by just doing that!! But now they are superior and know exactly what the world needs. Same old story.
80 comments
[ 3095 ms ] story [ 295 ms ] threadReminds me of a friend who has this pet desire that 1/2 of all humans should vanish, this was before Thanos too. He just hates what humans do and wants less of them.
I wonder if there's a scenario somewhere, already worked out, where this is not true anymore. A military takeover of the amazon basin.
Who's going to do it? Europe? Asia?
:crickets:
That land is ours! If we burn it all down, there won't be anything left for them to "protect", and we'll be able to build whatever we want on it
But that's not an intervention, rite? That would be an act of war. An intervention is supposed to be for the greater good of the collective, as in win-win.
This is just more left vs right stuff. This is why Jesus invented day drinking.
In a sane world, the CIA would have already faked some bullshit, and taken the guy out, let us all get on with paying our taxes in peace.
If we had just respected their sovereignty, we never would have gone there.
Total war to save the planet is an interesting narrative, but it does not seem very efficient unless you have some cheap to deploy doomsday WMDs.
Maybe developed countries should start paying a tax to Brazil and other Amazon forest countries so that they can preserve it. After all, most didn’t do a good job preserving their own forests, so demanding underdeveloped countries to do it is somewhat hypocritical.
So I’m not sure what being truly poor has anything to do with this. This will be almost entirely about displacing the poor, poisoning their water, and rewarding corrupt cronies.
Illegal wood extraction doesn't only kill trees. Those criminals have historically killed citizens in order to prevent being caught.
That's a false dilemma, though. There is nothing preventing us Brazilians from choosing both things, apart from wacko politicians.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-norway-brazil-amazon-idUS...
The comparison is invalid. This isn’t about ending existing means of supporting Brazilian society. These are about new measures that will (a) damage the rain forests, (b) almost certainly negatively impact ordinary Brazilians, and only enrich a few well connected folks.
The idea that killing the goose kind of growth will help ordinary citizens has shown to be false time and again in nearly every other nation.
Bolsonaro is also simply wrong to claim that it is their forest, only because it is on Brazil ground. The whole world depends on it, so it must be a resource shared and kept up by all. Bolsonaro and people like him are holding such things like rain forest hostage. Please send in the military or something to wrestle control over such a valuable thing from that insane person. We can not afford to be extorted by the likes of him on a global scale, when time draws near, where the future of the whole species will be decided.
Bolsonaro is not claiming the forest for Brazilians. He's claiming it for his party and his allies, and for criminals that have been taking advantage of that.
The poor from Brazil don't stand to get anything at all out of this.
Instead western countries should ban imports of food products that are produced in unsustainable ways. It would apply to everyone equally and remove one of the main economic drivers behind deforestation
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/28/amazon-gold-mi...
If leftists took the public position of wanting to destroy the Amazon he would be doing everything in his power to preserve it.
That's the world we live in today.
This government has given power to the greediest and most short-sighted elements of Brazilian society. They have always played a big role, but they now run unbridled and unashamed.
I watched a short documentary about this issue recently on Youtube, and the journalists went to some really remote area and spoke with the mayor of town there. The guy was big supporter of Bolsonaro and he said something that is actually very true. He said US and Europe have no right to tell Brazil what to do with it's natural resources, because they have already used theirs to industrialise and develop and now want to prevent Brazil from doing so.
And as unpleasant as it sounds he is right. People in the western world can wipe their buts with toilet paper made from virgin pulp, but Brazil and other poor countries should hold should preserve the lungs of the planet.
Actually that argument was only ever used to make the miners - a very powerful group in Poland - vote for whichever political party was in charge at the moment.
The coal industry overall is not a source of growth, but a liability, costing the taxpayers around €2bln annually.
A looming energy crisis and increasing costs of emissions, finally made the current government give in, put their cronies where they wanted them and approve a lot of new offshore wind investments + create a subsidy program for solar power to the tune of €230mln.
I talked with some people from Silesia and even the miners see the writing on the wall - currently 20% of the coal used in Poland is imported, so miners as a group don't have as much leverage as they used to.
The environmental impact of industrialization needs to be built into the cost of goods. Capitalism can solve many of these problems, but right now pollution practically has no associated cost to the end price, which is why we use the cheapest materials that cannot be recycled.
America needs to change dramatically before we can make substantial progress here; we can be the world leader in this issue. But I guess I’m not that optimistic considering the politics right now.
I agree with you that capitalism is the origin of many of these problems, though. Doesn’t mean it can’t evolve.
a government official, elected or otherwise, will most likely side with the isolationist rhetoric, if only for votes next election.
The new questionably-elected president keep the appearance of defending a brave isolation that only he is capable of (Even though the coup in brazil was caused exactly because the previous government, corrupt or otherwise, was denying american companies access to new oil reserves already), when in reality he is eating in trump's hand. He just appointed his son, who until before the election was working as a fast food chef in florida, as the brazil ambassador in the usa.
So, yes, a country should be independent and look out for the people. But in this case it is only propaganda/fake news/disinformation. whatever political campaigns are called today.
Just want to point out to non-Brazilian HNers that this view is as fringe as UFO believers or hardcore Breitbart supporters. No one serious in the country is making these claims that sound more like outdated communism than real facts.
To name one counterpoint: the US is oil sufficient thanks to shale / fracking so it doesn't care about Brazilian "pre-salt" oil which is really hard to extract....
Which is not to say that US interest in oil as the reason for the events at issue is a reasonable, evidence-supported belief.
If we follow that line of thought, we will always end up at the following conundrum: the planet cannot support the "affluent Western" lifestyle -- think typical Bay Area HN-er -- for all 7 billion humans (as far as I remember, I don't have the sources for that).
Who is going to draw the golden ticket?
I agree that Bolsonaro is an opportunist (like many politicians), and he spews a lot of abominable statements. Unfortunately, his views align with a large section of Brazilian society. A society that was, from the beginning, built on layers upon layers of opportunism, manorialism and slavery. A society that cannot condemn its slave trade past, nor its many dictatorships.
Bottom line -- yes, I think you are in position to judge us.
We can borrow against our future cash flows, there is plenty of underutilized capacity that could be used to transform the world to carbon neutrality.
But so far we have not made this choice, because our power structure is too short sighted. Why? Well, naturally there are true ignorants, some selfish folks manipulating the former group, and so we have ugly inefficient compromises.
There's nothing stopping us from using a lot more GHG-neutral energy. (Eg. nuclear, wind, solar.) We can then use the energy to power whatever processes we want (vertical farms are a lot more efficient than open fields and greenhouses, plus you can put them right next to population centers; beyond meat and impossible foods will be in no time better than the real thing; also if we really want we can simply put pastures under domes to capture the methane, we can put these pastures underground with artificial lights).
Look at how much unemployment there is around the world and how little inflation. This means we are nowhere near total economic output capacity. We can probably double our output if we want, especially if we start doing things on a big scale. (Big scale decarbonization, and eventual carbon capture to offset the remaining GHG emissions.)
Okay, so energy, food, transportation (full EV vehicles), what's next? Shelter. Prefab buildings. Arcologies preferably, because that leaves a lot of green space. After all instead of having an endless sprawl of 2-3 storey buildings it'd be quite better to have parks and ~100 storey ones. And affluent folks like high rises very much.
Standardization of processes drives down cost and increases quality. Yet, naturally, market players don't like that, because with fixed demanded quantity this simply shrinks the market, so they like to sell bespoke solution. (From power plants to housing.) But we are paying a lot more because we are not going big enough. (This applies veeery severely to transportation and other public works [eg power plants again]: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/22/new-report-on-... )
Furthermore, current UN/WHO predictions about the peak population is around 11-12 billion people, but most (I mean almost 99%) of the growth will happen in developing countries, in cities, and in particular in Africa. And we can make cities a lot more efficient than they are now.
See also: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/07/29...
So all in all, currently what stands in the way of providing an affluent Western lifestyle to everyone is global coordination toward cooperation instead of a zero-sum competition. (Every country wants to have strategic reserves of food, fuel, knowhow and so on. Which leads to every country inventing their own shitty stuff - see public works above, and protecting those incumbent interests, see subsidies of oil industry and for agriculture.)
I hope this starts to answer your question. If not, I'd like to know why. Thanks!
Brazil already have a rich and sustainable wood industry for decades. Extraction mostly in the southeast, in states like Espirito Santo, south of Bahia, Parana. Mostly eucalyptus and pinus. It is a 70-billion industry that is still growing, and is sustainable.
The extraction from Amazon happens on old trees in a non-sustainable way. Mostly trees affected by CITES, and probably exported illegally from Brazil.
This is not something that will change or economy in a scalable way. This will not generate jobs, and will be a compromise, because those trees take decades to grow.
There are laws in place and all we have to do is follow them, and the industry will keep up.
We just have a president that desperately wants to lax all regulations to appeal to his base, and that includes even stuff like traffic regulation.
So, yes, you are in a position to judge Brazil and Brazilians over this. We are not some small country full of poor people, but apparently we're in a fast track to become one. :(
I'm yet to see an article from nytimes and so on where they begin with basic and correct information instead of out-of-the-pocket made up numbers. Because numbers, in reality, are very different from this perspective that it's written. There isn't these increase in forests falling as this article implies.
Sounds like a bad move to me but it also sounds more like political spite than omg the rainforest is gone.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
When I read that foreigners (specially Europeans) are concerned about Amazon I simply laugh. They've been exploiting Brazilian's (and other colonies as well) natural resources since ever! They've got rich as hell by just doing that!! But now they are superior and know exactly what the world needs. Same old story.