> 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…
We could not end Earth's ability to support life even if we tried our best at 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. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/12…
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.
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 t…
You need to read some Paulo Freire. 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’…
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.
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…
"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 high…
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.
We could not end Earth's ability to support life even if we tried our best at it.
Not even with all-out nuclear warfare?
> Not even with all-out nuclear warfare?
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.
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…
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.
No. We cannot fix things with money. Stop giving money.
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…
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. Things like this: https://twitter.com/Diogotapuio/status/1395723721369919488
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.
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. https://www.statista.com/chart/19122/biggest-exporters-of-be...
He’s just saying that if you’re an American, you probably don’t have much hand in the destruction of the rain forrest via consumption.
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.
Everything has to happen simultaneously. Carbon emission reduction on a personal, community, city, state, country, supranational entity, global level. We simply cannot continue to wait for other, more emission-intensive actors, to act first.
Yes, 25 years after the Kyoto protocol a lot more impossible things need to happen “at once” https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol
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.