Indonesia reports reduced deforestation, triggering carbon payment from Norway

How about this, if indonesia told norway to go to hell, cut down their forests, got rich and then in 20 years paid Laos $1 billion to spare their forests. Would we celebrate indonesia as great environmentalists? Of course not. We'd call them hypocrites, especially when the deforestation just moved to cambodia instead.

At the end of the day, this exercise is just wealthy european neocolonialists trying to feel better about themselves as they keep a underdeveloped country poor. While norway gets to destroy their and other countries resources to enrich itself, they use that ill gotten wealth to dupe poor countries to stay poor.

How about this, lets shift wealth instead. Tax all of europe X amount of money and shift that wealth to indonesia and ASEAN to achieve an equal living standard? This way, indonesia and ASEAN won't touch their forests or resources and their living standard will be equal to that of europe? Now that would make a real difference.

Of course it would mean europeans living standard would have to decline, but europeans (especially norwegians) are such environment loving saints right? They are willing to sacrifice right? Or are they greedy like the rest of us and want others to sacrifice while they themselves enjoy the good life?

Or how about this, we give norway $1 billion to shut down their oil industry? Do you think the norwegians would agree to that? Of course not.

Obviously no consumer choice driven solution is going to work. The costs have to be included in the goods and services if we want any actual reduction.

Since when is it okay to steal money from Norway's taxpayers who disagree with this nonsense and then send it to one of most corrupt countries in the world?

And yet the total CO2 contribution of the world-wide aviation industry is 'only' 2%.

Based on that chart I would say having (more) children is by far the worst culprit. By now I'm really 100% convinced that the only way to save the earth is if everyone everywhere around the globe stops getting more than 2 children per couple, preferably not more than 1, so the world's population can shrink down back to somewhere around 1/10th of what it is now.

I'm 100% serious about this, and it makes me sad and angry nobody is actually really talking about this. Nothing we can do like eating less meat or skipping a holiday will help if the world's population doesn't shrink by a significant factor. It's a very unpopular opinion to have, because everyone likes children, they are the future, they are god's gift, it's a human right to make babies, bla bla, etc. But reduced to cold hard facts, there are simply way.too.many.people.

Yes I know this would absolutely kill our debt-based economies and probably significantly reduce the standard of living in many places, at least in the short-to-medium term, but that's a different topic. Completely destroying the earth will have much worse effect on the economy and standard of living anyway.

While we’re doing that, maybe there should be a high speed rail from LA to San Fran!