Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Indonesia reports reduced deforestation, triggering carbon payment from Norway

norway.no

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 234 posts

Re: Indonesia reports reduced deforestation, triggering carbon payment from Norway

#61

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

peanutz454 wrote: post #44
fghtr wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reference: http://www.kimnicholas.com/uploads/2/5/7/6/25766487/fig1full...

I find this difficult to believe! One transatlantic round trip flight is about 60% as bad as living car free? Assuming you do not travel at all - right? But you will travel. You will cycle to work, and you will burn more calories, and you will therefore eat more food, ending up contributing just as much too increasing emissions!

This got me thinking: do the environmental cost calculations for food waste include calories consumed in excess of daily requirements?

What about alcohol consumption?

Is confectionary, eg. chocolate, lollies, ice cream, considers food waste for environmental purpose, given they are highly processed and completely uncessary from a nutritional perspective?

Re: Indonesia reports reduced deforestation, triggering carbon payment from Norway

#62

Post by UpperBodyEimi »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #58
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Institute a carbon tax and it'll vanish into someone's pocket while the manufactured goods still have the same emissions.

Use some of it to subsidise insulation and better standard buildings, cleaner air and power, better railways etc. Fund a UBI. I'm fascinated at downvotes for this suggestion. What's actually wrong with spending part on lower impact infrastructure and part on a replacement for a broken welfare system?

What does UBI have to do with carbon emissions?

Re: Indonesia reports reduced deforestation, triggering carbon payment from Norway

#63

Post by SomebodyIsWrong »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #58
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Institute a carbon tax and it'll vanish into someone's pocket while the manufactured goods still have the same emissions.

Use some of it to subsidise insulation and better standard buildings, cleaner air and power, better railways etc. Fund a UBI. I'm fascinated at downvotes for this suggestion. What's actually wrong with spending part on lower impact infrastructure and part on a replacement for a broken welfare system?

> > Blanket tax everyone.

> Give that money back.

Uh, what?

Re: Indonesia reports reduced deforestation, triggering carbon payment from Norway

#64

Post by porpoisely »

Considering all the money norway got to pay indonesia came from selling oil, this is really nothing more than a billion dollar PR exercise. Not to mention that in a globalized world, the deforestation will ultimately get shifted somewhere else.

Just like europe loves to pretend it is lowering emissions when it's just shifting manufacturing to china, norway loves to pretend to be environmenally friendly with its oil money.

If europe or norway truly cared about emissions or the environment, they'd end global trade and drilling for oil, but they aren't going to give up their luxurious first world lifestyle are they?

Edit: To everyone downvoting, how about this scenario. We give norway $1 billion for them to shut down their oil rigs? Surely norway will sacrifice their economic wealth and prosperity to help the environment right? Or do we only expect that from poor countries?

Re: Indonesia reports reduced deforestation, triggering carbon payment from Norway

#65

Post by kaybe »

CalRobert wrote: post #59
peanutz454 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this difficult to believe! One transatlantic round trip flight is about 60% as bad as living car free? Assuming you do not travel at all - right? But you will travel. You will cycle to work, and you will burn more calories, and you will therefore eat more food, ending up contributing just as much too increasing emissions!

"just as much" This part of your statement desperately requires citation and supporting logic. Among other things to consider - Compare moving a ~80kg person and a ~13kg bike at 18kph vs moving an 80 kg person in one-300th (ish) of a ~300,000 kg plane (call it 1000 kg of plane per person) at 960 kph. 777 GTOW is ~335,000 kg Now considering that drag is roughly proportional to the cube of velocity, and compare 18kph o…

You get to discount the drag of the plane since at cruising altitude you only have 1/3rd of the pressure.

edit: But then again emissions at that altitude have a larger warming effect..

Re: Indonesia reports reduced deforestation, triggering carbon payment from Norway

#66

Post by [deleted] »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #52
wil421 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Europeans killed off most large animals like Aurochs and Bison, and a few predators including Tigers, Lions. They also killed off most of the forests. When I was in southern Germany I did notice how cultivated the land was. There were a few patches of trees but they didn’t look like old growth forests. Even the hills were cultivated into farmland. Costa Rica is a good example of developing a country who wants to…

> They also killed off most of the forests. Yeah, keep this in mind; big parts of Europe are hundreds of years after a gradual deforestation. Europe, mostly Western, is highly cultivated. Mind you, thanks to that we're also very efficient in agriculture - NL, despite being one of the smallest countries in the world, is also the second biggest agricultural export country in the world.

[deleted]

Re: Indonesia reports reduced deforestation, triggering carbon payment from Norway

#67

Post by vegardx »

porpoisely wrote: post #64

Considering all the money norway got to pay indonesia came from selling oil, this is really nothing more than a billion dollar PR exercise. Not to mention that in a globalized world, the deforestation will ultimately get shifted somewhere else. Just like europe loves to pretend it is lowering emissions when it's just shifting manufacturing to china, norway loves to pretend to be environmenally friendly with its oil m…

The only take-away from this is that Norway should just sit back and relax, no matter what you do, it will be wrong.

Less than half of the exports from Norway are oil. It accounts to less than a quarter of revenue. See: https://www.norskpetroleum.no/en/economy/governments-revenue...

Re: Indonesia reports reduced deforestation, triggering carbon payment from Norway

#68

Post by iguy »

mihaifm wrote: post #60
duopixel wrote: post #16

When I first moved to Europe I was struck by just how domesticated the land is. I can sleep in the open without being afraid of snakes, scorpions, spiders, wolves or bears. Even when land is "wild", the larger mammals will be rabbits, deer, wild goats and such. Excepting natural parks, hunters are the only predators. At least in Spain, a tremendous percentage of land is put at the service of mankind. The dehesas give…

What I don't understand is why there doesn't seem to be any initiative in Western Europe to reintroduce large fauna like bears and wolves. It is very convenient indeed to hike through the Alps without any fear of bears, but in this context it's almost hypocritical of Europeans to talk about conservation in Africa when their own fauna has been wiped out, without any effort to repopulate it.

There are many such programs, although wolves are controversial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_reintroduction#Europe

Hypocritical seems a bit strong though. The extinctions in europe happened a long time ago, those people are dead. Conservation may stand in the way of a particular guy's dinner but it's not like shooting all the gorillas is the key to Uganda getting to first-world living standards -- the advice that they are worth more alive than dead is probably sound.

Re: Indonesia reports reduced deforestation, triggering carbon payment from Norway

#69

Post by geezerjay »

porpoisely wrote: post #64

Considering all the money norway got to pay indonesia came from selling oil, this is really nothing more than a billion dollar PR exercise. Not to mention that in a globalized world, the deforestation will ultimately get shifted somewhere else. Just like europe loves to pretend it is lowering emissions when it's just shifting manufacturing to china, norway loves to pretend to be environmenally friendly with its oil m…

You've missed the whole point of the carbon payment system.

The whole point is that it isn't realistic to assume that it's possible to quit oil overnight, buy it's very possible to mitigate its effect by converting some externalities to a concrete price tag and thus creating incentives to abandon the use of at least some fossil fuels and to compensate those who contribute to invert the tendency.

Post reply on HN