* Consumers eating JBS beef and consumers buying exotic wood and consumers buying gold from illegal mining have flipped the Amazon Forest from Carbon Sink to Source.
This collective blamming becomes tiring when the actions are self-contained in a small group of people.
"Not all men"
Surely, the actions of a "small group" of people won't affect the global climate. Let's be realistic here.
Also, feel free to downvote if you feel personally attacked.
The thing is, they're still responsible for cutting down the Amazon.
The "responding to demand" is a complete cop-out. Stop blaming the consumer for the actions of the greedy.
I wouldn't be surprised if the consumer very often isn't even aware of the sources of the materials for a lot of the stuff they buy. And it doesn't help that the consumer is all too often worried about stuff that immediately affects them, leaving them no time or energy to worry about stuff that's they're not immediately aware of.
It's like blaming the consumer for the ridiculous amount of plastic corporations use for packaging when that's all that's available 99% of the time.
> It's like blaming the consumer for the ridiculous amount of plastic corporations use for packaging when that's all that's available 99% of the time.
Oh, that's a huge pet peeve of mine. In some places I lived it was impossible to buy produce without plastic bags because the stores force you to use their own bags. Also you have to put different vegetables on different bags. Otherwise you can't buy.
Sure one can argue that I could just boycott all the supermarkets in my city, but those people forget that I also have to fucking eat.
I didn't say they're not responsible too; my point is that none of us needs cheap beef or hardwood or gold (do we?) and it's widely known what these companies are doing, so we can't just shrug our shoulders and say "we didn't cut down the forest".
Agree about the plastic though, that stuff is almost impossible to avoid.
So people who hire contract killers are not to blame? I don't understand this argument - saying "it's not our fault the cattle/hardwood logging/mining companies cut down the Amazon" is nonsense, that's been widely known about for decades and we (collectively) just bought more and more of this stuff. It's their fault and ours.
Public policy is always the greatest factor for change at this scale. It’s extremely unlikely that you’ll effect change by individual action, even if you enlist a church-like following.
Sure, and (in countries with functioning democracies) public policy responds to pressure from the public. It doesn't tend to change in the face of public apathy.
Indeed; isn't life wonderful. We can still choose to ignore the noise, or treat it with skepticism, do our own investigation etc. We're not forced to listen. But yeah, sure, the media also share some of the blame - they're people too. These are problems of humanity's making.
Well, how will that public policy and enforcement come about? We live in a democratic society, so the only way the government will enforce anything is if people demand it. And for people to demand it they need to be aware of the issue and what's causing it.
If buying makes you an accomplice, wouldn't buying, say, Chinese or Israeli goods make you an accomplice to those regimes' human rights abuses? How far do you think customer responsibility goes?
If the production of those goods entails human rights abuses then yes, that's an analogous situation and buying those goods signals tacit acceptance of those crimes. I think applying that to buying anything (for example) Chinese-made is a bit more of a grey area (not to mention almost impossible to avoid now) but I personally try not to because a proportion of any money going in that direction ends up in the hands of the Chinese government.
Blame whoever you like. If we agree an activity is harmful, we usually pass laws to stop people doing it.
Other options can be applied, but only really if we don't agree, usually due to personal choice being relevant (some drugs, prostitution, seatbelts and helmets) or non-linear effects in both the utility and externalities (most pollution). Or both (cigarettes, alcohol, sugar).
I could be wrong, but I belief that the issue is bigger than that.
If you live in the US and drive a car or eat meat, you are likely to be co-responsible.
Soy culture is used to create a cheap protein feedstock for the meat industry.
Modern car fuel contains ethanol (10% in the EU). The ethanol is produced by having micro organisms convert biomass. The idea being that you use the short carbon cycle (already in the eco system) instead of the long carbon cycle (stuff that has been in the earth for 200My) thus effectively reducing carbon emissions.
Both of these are produced in Brasil, both have a footprint much larger than the gold or exotic wood markets (which are tiny, compared with meat and car fuel)
If you live in the U.S. and drive a car and eat meat, you are very unlikely eating illegally-raised Brazilian beef, or consuming illegally-mined Brazilian gold.
Most likely, you eat U.S.-raised beef and burn gasoline from oil that comes from the U.S. or Middle East. Surely you are adding to the global warming, but it has nothing to do with Amazonian forest being illegally cut.
In Brazil, most if not all cars run on ethanol [1]. The U.S. produce massive amounts of ethanol domestically [2] so, most likely, whatever gasoline you might be buying in the US, it's not using Brazilian ethanol, even though the U.S. does import some Brazilian ethanol [4], it's dwarfed by the domestic production [2].
U.S. beef is raised so efficiently that farmers manage to export it to Mexico an China, among other places [3], while receiving virtually no subsidies. You likely need to specifically look for gourmet Brazilian beef if you want to have a chance to taste a cow illegally raised on a pasture which used to be Amazonian forest.
You make it sound like Brazilian beef is some little boutique thing. We don't eat much of it in the US because we are a giant beef producer ourselves, but Brazil is the world's largest beef exporter, by a significant margin.
I'm not convinced even that's true. We eat a lot of beef. If we didn't, our beef producers would export a lot more, and there'd be less global demand for beef from Brazil. The only way that's not true is if Brazilian exports are significantly cheaper than American, but as the above poster mentioned, American beef producers are pretty efficient.
Yes, but it is in fact a mixture of gasoline and ethanol. To quote the Wikipedia article:
Blends of E10 or less are used in more than 20 countries around the world, led by the United States, where ethanol represented 10% of the U.S. gasoline fuel supply in 2011.[1] Blends from E20 to E25 have been used in Brazil since the late 1970s. E85 is commonly used in the U.S. and Europe for flexible-fuel vehicles. Hydrous ethanol or E100 is used in Brazilian neat ethanol vehicles and flex-fuel light vehicles and hydrous E15 called hE15 for modern petrol cars in the Netherlands.[2]
These are all commodities, the fact that you are being served by the closest producer does not mean that you are not generating demand that has to be compensated by someone else increasing their production. The world is connected together.
Also US-raised beef also occupies the area of destroyed forests. American beef didn't destroy the Amazon but it destroyed the environment anyway and is every bit as guilty of producing global warming.
That doesn’t seem to refute the idea that American consumption of Brazilian beef is trivial/niche. What share of Brazilian beef supply ends up on Wal-Mart shelves as corned beef?
> Modern car fuel contains ethanol (10% in the EU).
Here at Brazil, ethanol is produced from sugarcane. And sugarcane farming is actually illegal in the Amazon. The President tried to make it legal, but fortunately his decree was suspended by the Judiciary [1].
I don't doubt there may exist a few illegal sugarcane farms in the Amazon, but given how huge sugarcane farming is in southeastern Brazil, I don't think any Amazon sugarcane would significantly contribute to Brazilian ethanol production.
> Soy culture is used to create a cheap protein feedstock for the meat industry.
Soy is more of an issue for Amazon than sugarcane. But, just as you said, it is used to feed cattle, and the main issue resides in the cattle. Cattleman in Amazon usually adopt the extensive breeding system, so lots of area are required to breed cattle.
We all benefit from global economic activity. Do you earnestly not believe that part of the capital generated in Brazil (and of course all of other parts or resource extraction across the planet) eventually ends up as a dollar in an investment fund that a VC is going to use to fund the countless startups that employ HNers? Where do you think all the capital that drives our economy comes from?
On top of that destruction of environments around the globe is what allows us to have such wonderfully cheap products here in the US (and Europe). Those cheap solar panels that everyone is excited about are because they're being built with energy from burning coal in China (the biggest factor in the price drop was going from minimal solar pv production in China to 80% today).
One of the best methods of estimating CO2 emissions at an individual level is dollars spend. Highly paid technical workers getting paid from and buying goods from Amazon.com have an indirect but real relationship to the destruction of the actual Amazon.
It is also worth noting that the HN community has aggressively flagged and remove many of the climate change article that have made it do the front page. I used to immediately upvote any articles I found and just wait to see how many minutes they would last.
Not that placing blame does anything to solve these issues, but collective blame is appropriate if you really look at the systemic nature of all of these problems.
I spent the last 10 days in a hut on the edge of the Amazon and am in a hotel in Lima, waiting for my flight out of Peru. Seeing this story, I thought I'd add one brief first hand account.
The jungle was noticeably cut down since I had last been there 7 months ago. What had been just a hiking trail to our camp had been widened to the size of a road by all the tree clearing. The trees are pretty thin and not the best wood. I hear they're mostly used for making charcoal.
Next to where I was staying is land owned by a wealthy foreigner in Lima. She bought it to maintain it as jungle. But "ownership" is a funny thing. People moved onto her land and set up a community. It's what locals call an invasión. They had the backing of a politician, so the cops did nothing. The rumor was she was beating them in court and some people were going to jail. At the same time, a bulldozer was coming in widening the trail to the invasión into a road.
The land there is more like settling the frontier than buying a parcel in a suburb. People don't respect a barbed wire fence, no trespassing sign and a piece of paper. They will generally respect you living on the land. Residents visibly establish their ownership. Even the smallest town will have a giant sign welcoming you. Houses sitting on just two acres will have a sign and name (usually fundo something) and maybe even their claimed property borders on it. You need to reside in your home, or someone else might be when you get back.
I'm sympathetic to the tree-clearing locals. You're living in poverty, there are some trees sitting over there you can cut and sell, but you're not supposed to. Why? Because a foreigner in a big city has a piece of paper? Because some countries that exploited their own resources and launched themselves into modernity say you can't do the same? I get why you'd buy a machete and walk off into the jungle, then buy a chainsaw once you can afford it.
At the same time, I'd rather they didn't do that. I used to feel guilt about visiting the jungle. The boards that make our hut were cut from somewhere. Maybe the best thing to do if you love nature is live downtown in a city and send money to a preservation charity. But I also see the value of people who are stewards of the land. You have to cut down an acre to build the community, but that lets you protect many more. So I plan to keep visiting and keep supporting.
> Why? Because a foreigner in a big city has a piece of paper? Because some countries that exploited their own resources and launched themselves into modernity say you can't do the same?
Yeah, you pretty much summed it up. If you're some huge land owner but you're not actually using the land for anything useful, people will notice and they will occupy it.
In my country there are lots of these rich land owners. People whose lands stretch beyond the horizon. In many cases they don't even use it for anything. It's like unused memory that never gets garbage collected, a memory leak. Agrarian reform could redistribute this land but the powerful do not want to lose their domains. So people will just move into the land and start living there.
The house is on fire and the owners are debating the cost of water to put it out.
I think we're doomed, mostly because too many people want to believe we can fix this without losing quality of life, and won't accept anything less than that.
> Do people still think the solution is for everyone to reduce their individual carbon emissions?
It couldn't hurt. If people put more effort into reducing their carbon footprint and being mindful of the carbon externalities of their lifestyle they'd also probably vote for people and pay money to companies who seek to reduce the carbon footprint of industry and government too.
I don't know anyone that thinks that reducing is the solution. But, as our technology is, for now, it is part of the solution.
The hierarchy of the three R's is 1) reduce 2) re-use 3) recycle. That's for a reason. No need to manage consumption that never took place. Like the agile mantra, maximise the work not done.
There are several reasons why people focus on flying:
- 2% globally, but distributed very unequally over population
- much of flying can be prevented, most of it is elected (you can video conf that meeting or go on holiday locally, you can't not heat your house)
- flights are trending up, when we should be trending down (and are managing in other areas)
> I'm sympathetic to the tree-clearing locals. You're living in poverty, there are some trees sitting over there you can cut and sell, but you're not supposed to.
Might this be solved with direct financial subsidies of the locals and/or other investment? What is the COL and population count there?
Some people were talking about owning lots of land in case society breaks down, but owning large swathes of land you cannot actively defend is pointless for these reasons. You depend on government to enforce rules of law to keep people off vast amounts of land. And it gets exponentially harder to defend land the more of it you have.
This applies really to any resource though. Even your home could be taken away if the threat of punishment from a higher authority didn’t exist.
Good point. Unpaid externalities of security: large landowners' needs for land security are higher (than resident parcels), but they certainly don't pay more taxes per acre (indeed, sometimes less).
But at the same time, efficiencies of scale in many land-intensive industries cannot be realized without large areas being combined for a single purpose.
actually it becomes easier since the frontier length growth linearly and the surface proportionally to the square of some characteristic size of your plot.
The other thing is that you can't do it yourself starting from some point, so you must hire somebody or establish a community protecting the land while living on some portion of it.
I think the model of paying locals to preserve the land makes sense because of these concerns, of course you need to guarantee that some politician doesn't just pocket it all.
Totally makes sense. Maintaining the Amazon forest versus captializing off it financially by destroying it is an actual service to the world. Virtually a product! The product is a service turning CO2 into O2.
Except the bulk of deforestation is not caused by locals needing space to live, but by big entrepreneurs investing in wood trafficking, soy plantations and livestock production.
After setting up a space to live, the invasion kept cutting down more jungle to sell the wood and turn it into farmland. This is when they lost their support. I'm not a journalist, though. I saw the clearings and town myself. The rest is stories I heard by the fire.
If anybody really knows how much deforestation is of what kind, they are not sharing it very publicly. Much less the economic power of the people doing it, so one can claim they are "big entrepreneurs".
Anyway, that thing on the link you posted is not a forest, and really not the Amazon.
I don't think that was the point of the OP though. It was more that even with people trying to protect the forest through legal means of property ownership, there's an apathetic, and sometimes antagonistic government that won't enforce that, and will even go so far as to help those entrepreneurs against owners trying to protect the forest.
They put a road, start building the techo propio and extend chakras… and the forest is gone, hectare after hectares. With a new road , people get a promise for a job for some years - so they are happy - yet they won’t be any richer: it is just a way to survive a bit longer. Roads are sort of a scam, financed by government, chinese constructors and chemical companies.
I live in the upper Amazon in Peru and I believe the problem shouldn’t be justified by poverty - which is a consequence - but by wrong / missing education.
Private companies and governments push a narrative to exploit the land, promising quick money at the expenses of the forests and the future of the local communities. People are easy to deceive here, they really don’t know, they are busy with bigger daily problems (as violence and bullying).
Anecdote - My neighbor followed this idea with his chacra: he deforested 5 hectares and put all cacao. With the pesticides they had to put, the plants weakened soon and a plague affected the crop so bad, that after five years he lost all the plants. Now the land has been abandoned, and my friend is poorer than before. Chemical companies finally developed a new pesticide against that bug, and started selling again to everyone at cheap prices. Sadly he has not the money to pay some “peones” to help restoring the cacao plants.
On the other side, when there’s a forst to clear everyone from the village goes to slash and burn, destroy, kill and catch any living thing in between.
Sometimes I think this violent attitude against the forest started during with the colonial times, were the imposed religion thought the people that nature is meant to be submitted and exploited by the mankind.
Sometimes I think the violent attitude towards the planet… you picked the wrong scale.
I’d rather the technologically rich and educated take a sober look at their educated destruction of the planet rather than think they have THE philosophy to teach indigenous peoples.
This is just getting absurd. Rich countries concern themselves with the fiscal cost versus the real cost. But let’s ignore that discourse to ponder the poor education of the natives, making them oblivious savages.
I don’t really know about “civilized society” these days. Seems just as entitled to living in an epistemology that’s completely decoupled from reality, and believing it’s their universal duty to boast globally how unhinged they are. Sounds pretty colonial still. Missionary like. Literally less violent to each other today, but just as driven to bring on the end times through mindless consumption. Witness me; like and subscribe!
Good points… sure education doesn’t mean patronizing, and that “civil” vs “selvage” dichotomy is where it went all wrong - especially if is the bias comes from a society based on consumption and materialistic wealth. And i tell you social networks are the real plague here in this sense.
"The boards that make our hut were cut from somewhere". I had hoped that consumption of wood for construction is one of the best things we can do assuming the tree is mature and no longer growing and a new tree is planted in its place.
Unfortunately there is data that shows old trees are better carbon consumers than young trees which is surprising. I expected the carbon required for physical growth would be much higher than needed what is needed for its basal(?) metabolic rate once it is mature. But I missed the fact that most older trees are still growing.
Pacificforest.org is not exactly a neutral source, and that's a pretty confusing article (are they talking about sequestering in plant material, or respiration?). In terms of annual growth (which is a decent proxy for the amount sequestered from the atmosphere), trees peak (the culmination of the periodic annual increment), and then every year sequester less than the year before. See page 3 here [1]. There's a reason they mention 90 years as that's approximately the culmination of mean annual increment (the highest average growth over a rotation) for PNW douglas fir forests, which is what Pacific Forest Trust principally focuses on. A very old forest reaches statis and stops sequestering carbon all together, and as we see in the intermountain west, they can become very large sources of emissions as you lose forests to stochastic events like fire.
Carbon dioxide is good for trees. This will continue the planetary greening which has been occurring over the past few decades thanks to human activity. Trees are very good at adapting to and compensating for additional carbon dioxide. I look forward to further decentralization of forests and an overall greener planet.
BTW, the science behind planetary greening is that higher carbon dioxide helps plants to be more water-efficient. This allows them to grow in areas which would otherwise have been too dry for them.
People who are downvoting this are selfish tree killers.
Collecting carbon offset money in exchange for planting trees in suboptimal locations is pointless when nature already handles this by itself much faster and more efficiently than all humanity ever could... Also, unlike people, nature does it free of charge... No hidden motives.
Humans are the most wasteful and most arrogant species in existence. Look at any other species in existence, they consume very few natural resources by comparison. Why then do humans exist? Maybe nature needed us to increase CO2 levels to maintain the balance. It's arrogant to see ourselves as the center when in fact nature has always been at the center and will always be. We are mere pawns serving nature's intended purpose of balancing the ecosystem.
First, humans thought they were at the center of the universe and solar system, now they think they're at the center of the planet. Science will force us to keep conceding to how pathetic we are... Most people can't even control themselves, why are they trying to control the planet?
You're assuming that trees can always grow faster than humans can destroy them. That may be true for 8 billion humans at current living standards but if the population grows or the living standards improve humans will figure out a way to destroy those trees very quickly.
Even NASA concedes that the last 20 years has seen the planet become greener. Humans planting trees for reforestation have almost nothing to do with that trend. People are trying to claim credit for things they have nothing to do with. The surface area of the earth is absolutely massive. Humans likely occupy less than 2% of it. Even if all humanity was mobilozed to planting trees 24/7 with the most advanced machines imaginable, our labor would mean nothing compared to what birds could do on their own by merely shitting on new pieces of fertile soil and thus inadvertantly planting the plant seeds that they consumed a few hours earlier.
Birds do more for nature using only their assholes than humanity could do with their entire beings... The birds don't even need to think about it.
> Even NASA concedes that the last 20 years has seen the planet become greener. Humans planting trees for reforestation have almost nothing to do with that trend.
Are you sure, from nasa.gov itself:
> which is thought to be due to intensive agriculture to feed growing populations and ambitious tree-planting programs
> Birds do more for nature using only their assholes than humanity could do with their entire beings..
And what do humans do to birds ?
> Human activity is the greatest cause of bird extinction around the world. The top human causes of bird extinction involve: the increased human population, destruction of habitat (through development for habitation, logging, animal and single-crop agriculture, and invasive plants), ...
This article from NASA makes it absolutely clear that it's not human tree planting which has caused the greening:
>> From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide
The second point is just as dishonest. The number of different species of birds does not affect forestation. It's mostly about the number of specimens. The variety of species doesn't matter much since many different bird species exhibit the same behaviors. Many different species of birds eat fruits and seeds. Many birds carry twigs and sprouts long distances to use to build their nests. Birds are like forest planting drones which work 24/7 and can replicate themselves.
To me, the idea that Mother Earth is giving birth to something is very clear. I just don't know how that birth is going to end up. Will the child kill the mother? Will they both die? And what is being born? Maybe it's a space-fairing race of humans. Or maybe humans are just the eggshell that machine consciousness will break on its way out.
> In the immortal words of George Carlin, "The Planet is fine, the people are fucked"
It is well within humanity's capacity to, potentially permanently but at least for tens of millions of years, end the Earth's ability to host macroscopic life. Within a few decades, we'll likely have the ability to end the Earth's life-supporting ability period.
I get the message behind the meme. But unfortunately, our actions have consequences beyond our selves. It's easier to think we're just fucking our own when in fact we're doing much worse.
> We could not end Earth's ability to support life even if we tried our best at it
We’re within a few decades of a global superpower being able to deflect a large asteroid which would, after millennia or even centuries, impact the Earth with enough energy to melt the crust several kilometres down.
We don't even have enough nukes to wipe out the human race, let alone the biosphere. Building enough to would likely need more uranium than we can access with known technology.
That's the theory, but forests won't grow if they've been cut down and the ground is used to grow soy.
There are big re-greening projects going on in China and Africa to try and stop the encroaching of the deserts there though (due to deforestation and agriculture). They HAVE to add forests, else they'll get the same thing that happened in the US early 1900's, the Dust Bowl where a lot of fertile ground just blew away because there was nothing holding it down.
> "Evolution is cleverer than you are" - Leslie Orgel
Evolution also works at longer timescales than we do. Sure we may end up with 60 foot ferns again 10k years from now as plant life rebounds in the carbon rich atmosphere, but that doesn't help your grandkids.
This is nonsense. Evolution can radically change a species in just one generation if the selective pressures are strong enough.
For example, if the world governments sterilized every human on the planet except dwarves, in just 1 generation the average human would be half as tall. With strong selective pressure, 1 generation is all it takes for the species to change radically. Evolution doesn't care about your timelines. Again, it's cleverer than you are.
You're repeating easily debunked denialist talking points and claiming insight when people have studied this problem for decades and discovered that no, on balance, abrupt changes in CO2 are not good for our biosphere.
Every single point in that article reinforces my point... Aside from some hand-wavy warnings which try to appeal to people's emotions that it's not a reason to be complacent.
I don't know how you can read that article and come up with the conclusion that it's 'debunked denialist talking points' - That is 100% emotional appeal. There is no logic behind it. There are financial incentives on both sides. At the end of the day, you have to look at the facts.
You might be shocked to know that the products of this destruction are mostly not used locally but rather exported to much of the world, especially wealthy countries.
In the long run, presupposing a constant size of forest, this is approximately true, but
1 if you harvest sustainably and use the lumber for building long lived structures, it might be a sink in the timescale that's important for combating global warming.
2 these forests have been sinking a lot, stands to reason they could alternatively be expanding, which would make them a carbon sink for the duration of the expansion
It's worth mentioning that carbon deposits are not made uniformly, and in fact certain geological periods are known for having large deposits of carbon while others have almost none.
The headline is unnecessarily sensationalist. A mature forest is never a carbon sink. Trees can only store so much carbon before there is no more room for them to grow.
Obviously, burning a forest is still bad from the CO2-in-atmosphere point of view. Not because you have destroyed a carbon sink but because you released carbon from an existing carbon reservoir.
It was amazing seeing the effect of political action on the satellite data: e.g. areas that were deemed okay (or not) to cut down were almost immediately protected (with lit borders to stop law-breakers) or destroyed.
If Brazil becomes a failed state, of course the Amazon will be destroyed. We know this due to the millions of examples of the ‘tragedy of the commons’.
It’s an interesting thought experiment as to what it would take for the world to force protection with an external military force (e.g. this might be the only solution, but the chances of it happening are zero).
> It’s an interesting thought experiment as to what it would take for the world to force protection with an external military force (e.g. this might be the only solution, but the chances of it happening are zero).
Brazil would never tolerate that, nor should they.
On the other hand if you want to buy huge tracts of the Amazon and pay private security forces to protect it, that's doable.
Better though would be to make it in Brazil's interest to protect the Amazon. We all benefit from it being intact, so we should all chip in to create an economic incentive for the county of Brazil to maintain it.
> Better though would be to make it in Brazil's interest to protect the Amazon. We all benefit from it being intact, so we should all chip in to create an economic incentive for the county of Brazil to maintain it.
Something like this exists in the Amazon Fund. Unfortunately it seems like it has broken down lately:
> Better though would be to make it in Brazil's interest to protect the Amazon. We all benefit from it being intact, so we should all chip in to create an economic incentive for the county of Brazil to maintain it.
It's really a sad little pretzel of hell that we (supposedly) need to create economic incentives for every human on Earth to not squander their local resources for short term gain when it is in fact economic incentives that got that ball rolling downhill in the first place. But yeah, I guess we'll find a way to throw globalism and money at a problem created by globalism and money.
Someone above stated they were just near the Amazon, they saw someone's privately owned lot got invaded with bulldozers. I'm not sure if private ownership is the answer, the Amazon is extremely huge.
Its not enough to own it, you have to actually have armed security on the ground to protect it. People are killed in Brazil trying to defend the forest from illegal logging and clearing.
I think the state should take on that role, but there needs to be a strong inventive for them to want to protect it.
You can thank the current right-wing government for letting deforestation get completely out of control, just after the country had finally got it down to okay-ish levels around 2012-2016.
They’ve been systematically reducing funding, relaxing laws and enforcement, and pushing international preservation fund backers away. The rate at which things have degraded is insane.
I wouldn't claim Bolsonaro is right wing, he is just an arrogant corrupt scumbag who got to power. Unfortunately the world has seen quite a few of those recently, and the results are dire to say at least.
Everything right wing is just an universal bogeyman for the poorly informed consumers of leftist propaganda. It is merely an another slur, not anything related to political compass, just like fascist or nazi (but never socialist or commie, that's quite revealing)
Maybe you're not familiar with where he stands on the political spectrum, this might help:
- pro guns, open carry, stimulates violence often
- prejudice against the poor, believes in 'meritocracy' (aka they deserve it)
- believes in 'traditional family & church values'
- wants to privatize whatever he sets his eyes on
- wants to deregulate everything
- pro death penalty (a good criminal is a dead criminal)
- prejudice and violence against women (has threatened to rape a colleague in parliament, but would leave it alone cause she's ugly)
- prejudice against non-whites
- prejudice against LGBT (said he would pound his own son to death if he turned out gay)
- against all kinds of environmental protection measures (it hurts business!)
- still believes communists are around and trying to take over the country
- praises the military coup that terrorized the country from the 60s-80s, denies any wrongdoing at the time (thousands of deaths documented)
- publicly praised military personnel who have been convicted for torturing the country's last president during that time, said they should have done a better job
- would be happy to have the military back in charge, and runs the presidency like he has absolute power
- said the country should 'stop being faggots' when going against coronavirus measures
Not making any of this up. Sounds pretty 'right' to me.
I'm not familiar with the details of this topic -- Are actions by locals significant-enough/at a large enough scale to yield these results? I'm thinking of Native Americans' hunting v. colonizers' actions.
I’ve been wondering if climate change could disturb the environment enough to deplete/reduce the oxygen in the atmosphere. For example, if large enough tracts of forests/grasslands turn into deserts?
Not likely, since increased carbon dioxide would eventually result in more plant biomass, you'd wind up with a subsequent increase in atmospheric oxygen, and subsequently an increase in animal biomass.
If something catastrophic happened that suddenly killed an existing ecosystem and the air and water vapor currents in the local climate changed enough to prevent new growth you could wind up with something like that.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadThis collective blamming becomes tiring when the actions are self-contained in a small group of people.
The "responding to demand" is a complete cop-out. Stop blaming the consumer for the actions of the greedy.
I wouldn't be surprised if the consumer very often isn't even aware of the sources of the materials for a lot of the stuff they buy. And it doesn't help that the consumer is all too often worried about stuff that immediately affects them, leaving them no time or energy to worry about stuff that's they're not immediately aware of.
It's like blaming the consumer for the ridiculous amount of plastic corporations use for packaging when that's all that's available 99% of the time.
Oh, that's a huge pet peeve of mine. In some places I lived it was impossible to buy produce without plastic bags because the stores force you to use their own bags. Also you have to put different vegetables on different bags. Otherwise you can't buy.
Sure one can argue that I could just boycott all the supermarkets in my city, but those people forget that I also have to fucking eat.
Agree about the plastic though, that stuff is almost impossible to avoid.
I find it a lot harder trying to convince everyone to change versus forcing everyone to change through policy and enforcement through government.
Other options can be applied, but only really if we don't agree, usually due to personal choice being relevant (some drugs, prostitution, seatbelts and helmets) or non-linear effects in both the utility and externalities (most pollution). Or both (cigarettes, alcohol, sugar).
If you live in the US and drive a car or eat meat, you are likely to be co-responsible.
Soy culture is used to create a cheap protein feedstock for the meat industry.
Modern car fuel contains ethanol (10% in the EU). The ethanol is produced by having micro organisms convert biomass. The idea being that you use the short carbon cycle (already in the eco system) instead of the long carbon cycle (stuff that has been in the earth for 200My) thus effectively reducing carbon emissions.
Both of these are produced in Brasil, both have a footprint much larger than the gold or exotic wood markets (which are tiny, compared with meat and car fuel)
Most likely, you eat U.S.-raised beef and burn gasoline from oil that comes from the U.S. or Middle East. Surely you are adding to the global warming, but it has nothing to do with Amazonian forest being illegally cut.
In Brazil, most if not all cars run on ethanol [1]. The U.S. produce massive amounts of ethanol domestically [2] so, most likely, whatever gasoline you might be buying in the US, it's not using Brazilian ethanol, even though the U.S. does import some Brazilian ethanol [4], it's dwarfed by the domestic production [2].
U.S. beef is raised so efficiently that farmers manage to export it to Mexico an China, among other places [3], while receiving virtually no subsidies. You likely need to specifically look for gourmet Brazilian beef if you want to have a chance to taste a cow illegally raised on a pasture which used to be Amazonian forest.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_the_United_Sta...
[3]: https://www.fas.usda.gov/beef-2020-export-highlights
[4]: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_epooxe_i...
https://www.statista.com/chart/19122/biggest-exporters-of-be...
Blends of E10 or less are used in more than 20 countries around the world, led by the United States, where ethanol represented 10% of the U.S. gasoline fuel supply in 2011.[1] Blends from E20 to E25 have been used in Brazil since the late 1970s. E85 is commonly used in the U.S. and Europe for flexible-fuel vehicles. Hydrous ethanol or E100 is used in Brazilian neat ethanol vehicles and flex-fuel light vehicles and hydrous E15 called hE15 for modern petrol cars in the Netherlands.[2]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_ethanol_fuel_mixtures
Also US-raised beef also occupies the area of destroyed forests. American beef didn't destroy the Amazon but it destroyed the environment anyway and is every bit as guilty of producing global warming.
Here at Brazil, ethanol is produced from sugarcane. And sugarcane farming is actually illegal in the Amazon. The President tried to make it legal, but fortunately his decree was suspended by the Judiciary [1].
I don't doubt there may exist a few illegal sugarcane farms in the Amazon, but given how huge sugarcane farming is in southeastern Brazil, I don't think any Amazon sugarcane would significantly contribute to Brazilian ethanol production.
> Soy culture is used to create a cheap protein feedstock for the meat industry.
Soy is more of an issue for Amazon than sugarcane. But, just as you said, it is used to feed cattle, and the main issue resides in the cattle. Cattleman in Amazon usually adopt the extensive breeding system, so lots of area are required to breed cattle.
[1] https://www.conjur.com.br/2020-abr-21/juiza-suspende-decreto...
It‘s a maximum of 10%, but you almost never actually get that much. E5 fuel contains 0-5% ethanol, E10 contains 5-10%.
This collective blaming becomes tiring when the actions are self-contained in a small group of profit seeking investors.
On top of that destruction of environments around the globe is what allows us to have such wonderfully cheap products here in the US (and Europe). Those cheap solar panels that everyone is excited about are because they're being built with energy from burning coal in China (the biggest factor in the price drop was going from minimal solar pv production in China to 80% today).
One of the best methods of estimating CO2 emissions at an individual level is dollars spend. Highly paid technical workers getting paid from and buying goods from Amazon.com have an indirect but real relationship to the destruction of the actual Amazon.
It is also worth noting that the HN community has aggressively flagged and remove many of the climate change article that have made it do the front page. I used to immediately upvote any articles I found and just wait to see how many minutes they would last.
Not that placing blame does anything to solve these issues, but collective blame is appropriate if you really look at the systemic nature of all of these problems.
The jungle was noticeably cut down since I had last been there 7 months ago. What had been just a hiking trail to our camp had been widened to the size of a road by all the tree clearing. The trees are pretty thin and not the best wood. I hear they're mostly used for making charcoal.
Next to where I was staying is land owned by a wealthy foreigner in Lima. She bought it to maintain it as jungle. But "ownership" is a funny thing. People moved onto her land and set up a community. It's what locals call an invasión. They had the backing of a politician, so the cops did nothing. The rumor was she was beating them in court and some people were going to jail. At the same time, a bulldozer was coming in widening the trail to the invasión into a road.
The land there is more like settling the frontier than buying a parcel in a suburb. People don't respect a barbed wire fence, no trespassing sign and a piece of paper. They will generally respect you living on the land. Residents visibly establish their ownership. Even the smallest town will have a giant sign welcoming you. Houses sitting on just two acres will have a sign and name (usually fundo something) and maybe even their claimed property borders on it. You need to reside in your home, or someone else might be when you get back.
I'm sympathetic to the tree-clearing locals. You're living in poverty, there are some trees sitting over there you can cut and sell, but you're not supposed to. Why? Because a foreigner in a big city has a piece of paper? Because some countries that exploited their own resources and launched themselves into modernity say you can't do the same? I get why you'd buy a machete and walk off into the jungle, then buy a chainsaw once you can afford it.
At the same time, I'd rather they didn't do that. I used to feel guilt about visiting the jungle. The boards that make our hut were cut from somewhere. Maybe the best thing to do if you love nature is live downtown in a city and send money to a preservation charity. But I also see the value of people who are stewards of the land. You have to cut down an acre to build the community, but that lets you protect many more. So I plan to keep visiting and keep supporting.
Yeah, you pretty much summed it up. If you're some huge land owner but you're not actually using the land for anything useful, people will notice and they will occupy it.
In my country there are lots of these rich land owners. People whose lands stretch beyond the horizon. In many cases they don't even use it for anything. It's like unused memory that never gets garbage collected, a memory leak. Agrarian reform could redistribute this land but the powerful do not want to lose their domains. So people will just move into the land and start living there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landless_Workers%27_Movement
“If we all just conserve enough…”
Flying, for example, emits 2% of global emissions. That’s 100,000 flights a day, every day.
We’ve just spent over 2 decades generating at least 40% of our electricity with coal. The carbon footprint of that was incredible.
While we’ve been waiting for solar and wind to replace it…
You are worrying about subtracting 0.000000000001 from the 1,000,000,000,000,000,000
Telling people not to fly isn’t a solution
[update]
Anyway, I see my comment isn’t understood again. Enjoy another decade of incredible emissions.
I’m sure sooner or later people will finally get it.
Those windmills are still coming!!!
We simply cannot continue to wait for other, more emission-intensive actors, to act first.
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol
I think we're doomed, mostly because too many people want to believe we can fix this without losing quality of life, and won't accept anything less than that.
Oh well.
It couldn't hurt. If people put more effort into reducing their carbon footprint and being mindful of the carbon externalities of their lifestyle they'd also probably vote for people and pay money to companies who seek to reduce the carbon footprint of industry and government too.
We have to care before anything will get done.
The hierarchy of the three R's is 1) reduce 2) re-use 3) recycle. That's for a reason. No need to manage consumption that never took place. Like the agile mantra, maximise the work not done.
There are several reasons why people focus on flying:
Might this be solved with direct financial subsidies of the locals and/or other investment? What is the COL and population count there?
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/report/cool-earth/#2-what-do...
This applies really to any resource though. Even your home could be taken away if the threat of punishment from a higher authority didn’t exist.
But at the same time, efficiencies of scale in many land-intensive industries cannot be realized without large areas being combined for a single purpose.
Hard circle to square.
Things like this:
https://twitter.com/Diogotapuio/status/1395723721369919488
Anyway, that thing on the link you posted is not a forest, and really not the Amazon.
I live in the upper Amazon in Peru and I believe the problem shouldn’t be justified by poverty - which is a consequence - but by wrong / missing education.
Private companies and governments push a narrative to exploit the land, promising quick money at the expenses of the forests and the future of the local communities. People are easy to deceive here, they really don’t know, they are busy with bigger daily problems (as violence and bullying).
Anecdote - My neighbor followed this idea with his chacra: he deforested 5 hectares and put all cacao. With the pesticides they had to put, the plants weakened soon and a plague affected the crop so bad, that after five years he lost all the plants. Now the land has been abandoned, and my friend is poorer than before. Chemical companies finally developed a new pesticide against that bug, and started selling again to everyone at cheap prices. Sadly he has not the money to pay some “peones” to help restoring the cacao plants.
On the other side, when there’s a forst to clear everyone from the village goes to slash and burn, destroy, kill and catch any living thing in between.
Sometimes I think this violent attitude against the forest started during with the colonial times, were the imposed religion thought the people that nature is meant to be submitted and exploited by the mankind.
Sometimes I think the violent attitude towards the planet… you picked the wrong scale.
I’d rather the technologically rich and educated take a sober look at their educated destruction of the planet rather than think they have THE philosophy to teach indigenous peoples.
This is just getting absurd. Rich countries concern themselves with the fiscal cost versus the real cost. But let’s ignore that discourse to ponder the poor education of the natives, making them oblivious savages.
I don’t really know about “civilized society” these days. Seems just as entitled to living in an epistemology that’s completely decoupled from reality, and believing it’s their universal duty to boast globally how unhinged they are. Sounds pretty colonial still. Missionary like. Literally less violent to each other today, but just as driven to bring on the end times through mindless consumption. Witness me; like and subscribe!
Unfortunately there is data that shows old trees are better carbon consumers than young trees which is surprising. I expected the carbon required for physical growth would be much higher than needed what is needed for its basal(?) metabolic rate once it is mature. But I missed the fact that most older trees are still growing.
https://www.pacificforest.org/ee-old-trees-store-more-carbon...
BTW, the science behind planetary greening is that higher carbon dioxide helps plants to be more water-efficient. This allows them to grow in areas which would otherwise have been too dry for them.
https://theconversation.com/rising-carbon-dioxide-is-making-...
"Evolution is cleverer than you are" - Leslie Orgel
Water is also good for you, yet you don't live at the bottom of the atlantic ocean.
Collecting carbon offset money in exchange for planting trees in suboptimal locations is pointless when nature already handles this by itself much faster and more efficiently than all humanity ever could... Also, unlike people, nature does it free of charge... No hidden motives.
Humans are the most wasteful and most arrogant species in existence. Look at any other species in existence, they consume very few natural resources by comparison. Why then do humans exist? Maybe nature needed us to increase CO2 levels to maintain the balance. It's arrogant to see ourselves as the center when in fact nature has always been at the center and will always be. We are mere pawns serving nature's intended purpose of balancing the ecosystem.
First, humans thought they were at the center of the universe and solar system, now they think they're at the center of the planet. Science will force us to keep conceding to how pathetic we are... Most people can't even control themselves, why are they trying to control the planet?
Birds do more for nature using only their assholes than humanity could do with their entire beings... The birds don't even need to think about it.
Are you sure, from nasa.gov itself:
> which is thought to be due to intensive agriculture to feed growing populations and ambitious tree-planting programs
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/greening-of-the-earth-mitigates...
> Birds do more for nature using only their assholes than humanity could do with their entire beings..
And what do humans do to birds ?
> Human activity is the greatest cause of bird extinction around the world. The top human causes of bird extinction involve: the increased human population, destruction of habitat (through development for habitation, logging, animal and single-crop agriculture, and invasive plants), ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_extinction
This article from NASA makes it absolutely clear that it's not human tree planting which has caused the greening:
>> From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer...
The second point is just as dishonest. The number of different species of birds does not affect forestation. It's mostly about the number of specimens. The variety of species doesn't matter much since many different bird species exhibit the same behaviors. Many different species of birds eat fruits and seeds. Many birds carry twigs and sprouts long distances to use to build their nests. Birds are like forest planting drones which work 24/7 and can replicate themselves.
It is well within humanity's capacity to, potentially permanently but at least for tens of millions of years, end the Earth's ability to host macroscopic life. Within a few decades, we'll likely have the ability to end the Earth's life-supporting ability period.
I get the message behind the meme. But unfortunately, our actions have consequences beyond our selves. It's easier to think we're just fucking our own when in fact we're doing much worse.
We’re within a few decades of a global superpower being able to deflect a large asteroid which would, after millennia or even centuries, impact the Earth with enough energy to melt the crust several kilometres down.
We don't even have enough nukes to wipe out the human race, let alone the biosphere. Building enough to would likely need more uranium than we can access with known technology.
There are big re-greening projects going on in China and Africa to try and stop the encroaching of the deserts there though (due to deforestation and agriculture). They HAVE to add forests, else they'll get the same thing that happened in the US early 1900's, the Dust Bowl where a lot of fertile ground just blew away because there was nothing holding it down.
Evolution also works at longer timescales than we do. Sure we may end up with 60 foot ferns again 10k years from now as plant life rebounds in the carbon rich atmosphere, but that doesn't help your grandkids.
For example, if the world governments sterilized every human on the planet except dwarves, in just 1 generation the average human would be half as tall. With strong selective pressure, 1 generation is all it takes for the species to change radically. Evolution doesn't care about your timelines. Again, it's cleverer than you are.
Literally the first hit on Google for this phrase is exactly about this [1].
[1] https://theconversation.com/yes-more-carbon-dioxide-in-the-a...
You're repeating easily debunked denialist talking points and claiming insight when people have studied this problem for decades and discovered that no, on balance, abrupt changes in CO2 are not good for our biosphere.
I don't know how you can read that article and come up with the conclusion that it's 'debunked denialist talking points' - That is 100% emotional appeal. There is no logic behind it. There are financial incentives on both sides. At the end of the day, you have to look at the facts.
This sounds like something that you would read in a whitepaper for TreeCoin
The big deal with forests is they keep a large amount of carbon out of the atmosphere on a rotating basis. We really need that right now.
1 if you harvest sustainably and use the lumber for building long lived structures, it might be a sink in the timescale that's important for combating global warming.
2 these forests have been sinking a lot, stands to reason they could alternatively be expanding, which would make them a carbon sink for the duration of the expansion
Obviously, burning a forest is still bad from the CO2-in-atmosphere point of view. Not because you have destroyed a carbon sink but because you released carbon from an existing carbon reservoir.
Not never [1]. But never ca. 300 m.y.a.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mushroom-evolutio...
Although yes, if the old trees don't decompose (for whatever reason), then the forest becomes in fact a carbon sink.
It was amazing seeing the effect of political action on the satellite data: e.g. areas that were deemed okay (or not) to cut down were almost immediately protected (with lit borders to stop law-breakers) or destroyed.
If Brazil becomes a failed state, of course the Amazon will be destroyed. We know this due to the millions of examples of the ‘tragedy of the commons’.
It’s an interesting thought experiment as to what it would take for the world to force protection with an external military force (e.g. this might be the only solution, but the chances of it happening are zero).
Brazil would never tolerate that, nor should they.
On the other hand if you want to buy huge tracts of the Amazon and pay private security forces to protect it, that's doable.
Better though would be to make it in Brazil's interest to protect the Amazon. We all benefit from it being intact, so we should all chip in to create an economic incentive for the county of Brazil to maintain it.
Something like this exists in the Amazon Fund. Unfortunately it seems like it has broken down lately:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-environment-norway...
It's really a sad little pretzel of hell that we (supposedly) need to create economic incentives for every human on Earth to not squander their local resources for short term gain when it is in fact economic incentives that got that ball rolling downhill in the first place. But yeah, I guess we'll find a way to throw globalism and money at a problem created by globalism and money.
I think the state should take on that role, but there needs to be a strong inventive for them to want to protect it.
Maybe we should start fixing problems within our own borders first before resorting to fucking weapons.
They’ve been systematically reducing funding, relaxing laws and enforcement, and pushing international preservation fund backers away. The rate at which things have degraded is insane.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/12/brazil-accele...
Surely you jest?
If it walks like a duck and implements duck policies.
- pro guns, open carry, stimulates violence often
- prejudice against the poor, believes in 'meritocracy' (aka they deserve it)
- believes in 'traditional family & church values'
- wants to privatize whatever he sets his eyes on
- wants to deregulate everything
- pro death penalty (a good criminal is a dead criminal)
- prejudice and violence against women (has threatened to rape a colleague in parliament, but would leave it alone cause she's ugly)
- prejudice against non-whites
- prejudice against LGBT (said he would pound his own son to death if he turned out gay)
- against all kinds of environmental protection measures (it hurts business!)
- still believes communists are around and trying to take over the country
- praises the military coup that terrorized the country from the 60s-80s, denies any wrongdoing at the time (thousands of deaths documented)
- publicly praised military personnel who have been convicted for torturing the country's last president during that time, said they should have done a better job
- would be happy to have the military back in charge, and runs the presidency like he has absolute power
- said the country should 'stop being faggots' when going against coronavirus measures
Not making any of this up. Sounds pretty 'right' to me.
I guess "could" can be safely replaced by "will".
I'm not familiar with the details of this topic -- Are actions by locals significant-enough/at a large enough scale to yield these results? I'm thinking of Native Americans' hunting v. colonizers' actions.
If something catastrophic happened that suddenly killed an existing ecosystem and the air and water vapor currents in the local climate changed enough to prevent new growth you could wind up with something like that.