Maybe countries criticising Brazil should raise down their suburbs and plants even more trees there.
Brazilian Amazon lost 18 trees per second in 2021
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Re: Brazilian Amazon lost 18 trees per second in 2021
#42Interesting comments below. Just some food for thought.
Fertilized, less land is required to grow equivalent quantities of crops.
Petroleum products, especially natural gas is a raw material as well as fuel for nitrogen fertilizer production.
Higher petroleum prices mean higher fertilizer prices. Higher fertilizer prices mean higher food prices.
Scarcity increases prices. Worldwide food production is down for many reasons: weather, war, disease, lack of workers, inflation, and cost to fertilize. Expect prices to rise, significantly more than they have.
Re: Brazilian Amazon lost 18 trees per second in 2021
#43As consumers of Wooden furniture and so much new housing construction happening around the work, we all are to be blamed too. We need to invent alternate to wooden furniture.
Timber is a red herring. Beef is the real problem.
Re: Brazilian Amazon lost 18 trees per second in 2021
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
This of course applies to all environmental issues, both foreign and domestic. There would be a lot more partnership and a lot less animosity if we universally adhered to your notion. We might actually get something done!
There is a good talk by an economist who basically said he was all exited to learn about optimal solution to those problems and then he went to a meeting where farmer were basically fighting people who wanted to reintroduce wolf. And he realized nobody cared how the optimal solution. Since then he works on trying to come up with solution that doesn't lead to the two groups trying to lynch each other.
Well, this is a common problem. Most of us don't care about each other if there are costs. We mostly care about self interest due to inner greed.
Re: Brazilian Amazon lost 18 trees per second in 2021
#45The United States once had one of the largest forests on Earth. The Eastern Forest covered almost everywhere east of the Mississippi. 2,560,000 km2 of forest. Now it is largely gone. Replaced with farmland and sprawl. So it is hard to criticize. Even areas that are now heavily forested like Vermont were clear cut almost entirely by the turn of the century. The Amazon should be preserved, but to do that the world is g…
Why do governments not start an international reforestation / ecological fund and pay some of their GDP into it so that it would make economic sense for Brazil, Australia and others to preserve their forests, kelp, reefs etc. These carbon credit half measures are pitiful.
Western governments pay part of their GDP for NATO, but defending against ecological collapse might be higher priority.
Governments tax citizens by force all the time. If it’s going to be used for anything, it should FIRST AND FOREMOST be used to coordinate large scale activity to mitigate negative externalities. And there’s no bigger one than the ecosystem collapse we are starting to see around us.
(Printing more money btw will only accerate consumption. There is very little thought to sustainability in most human economic systems.)
Re: Brazilian Amazon lost 18 trees per second in 2021
#46If we really care about what happens in Brazil we should offer economically viable solutions rather than pointing fingers and accusing them of doing something that we did in the past for a long time.
> we should offer economically viable solutions rather than pointing fingers
Re: Brazilian Amazon lost 18 trees per second in 2021
#47If we really care about what happens in Brazil we should offer economically viable solutions rather than pointing fingers and accusing them of doing something that we did in the past for a long time.
Agree. Imagine outsiders telling you that half your country is untouchable. I wonder if some future carbon credit system could pay them for the carbon sequestration that the Brazilian Amazon provides.
And those countries really aren't making their own cities much much much denser and replanting trees in freed up space...
Re: Brazilian Amazon lost 18 trees per second in 2021
#48The United States once had one of the largest forests on Earth. The Eastern Forest covered almost everywhere east of the Mississippi. 2,560,000 km2 of forest. Now it is largely gone. Replaced with farmland and sprawl. So it is hard to criticize. Even areas that are now heavily forested like Vermont were clear cut almost entirely by the turn of the century. The Amazon should be preserved, but to do that the world is g…
> So it is hard to criticize. Even areas that are now heavily forested like Vermont were clear cut almost entirely by the turn of the century.
As someone born in Brazil, I don't see why it's hard. Please criticise away. My country should be learning from the mistakes of others, not repeating them in order to favour some higher political caste.
To quote flaviojuvenal below, "Brazil had no trouble to grow in 90s and 2000s while reducing Amazon deforestation.". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32152630
Re: Brazilian Amazon lost 18 trees per second in 2021
#49The United States once had one of the largest forests on Earth. The Eastern Forest covered almost everywhere east of the Mississippi. 2,560,000 km2 of forest. Now it is largely gone. Replaced with farmland and sprawl. So it is hard to criticize. Even areas that are now heavily forested like Vermont were clear cut almost entirely by the turn of the century. The Amazon should be preserved, but to do that the world is g…
two wrongs do not make a "right"
Re: Brazilian Amazon lost 18 trees per second in 2021
#50The United States once had one of the largest forests on Earth. The Eastern Forest covered almost everywhere east of the Mississippi. 2,560,000 km2 of forest. Now it is largely gone. Replaced with farmland and sprawl. So it is hard to criticize. Even areas that are now heavily forested like Vermont were clear cut almost entirely by the turn of the century. The Amazon should be preserved, but to do that the world is g…
Same goes for Europe.
We love to point the finger at Brazil and other developing countries, while profiting for centuries from deforestation of our own territory.
Maybe we should simply plant 18 new trees per second in the West?