8 ms·
'Football pitch' of Amazon forest lost every minute
- astazangasta 7y agoAmazingly, no mention of the Intercept revelations that Bolsonaro won because of judicial corruption by the judge Sergio Moro, who eliminated Lula from the election, and much more as part of his Lavo Jato investigation. I.e., this was essentially a coup. Again. The DOJ also had their hand all over Lavo Jato. Guess that Pink Tide had to be turned. https://theintercept.com/2019/06/17/brazil-sergio-moro-lula-operation-car-wash/ https://theintercept.com/2019/06/17/brazil-sergio-moro-lula-... https://fair.org/home/these-revelations-really-show-the-election-was-fraudulent/ https://fair.org/home/these-revelations-really-show-the-elec...
- andrenth 7y agoAre you really that naive, or actually ill-intentioned? I’ll assume the former. If you actually read these leaks, you’ll see there’s absolutely nothing that even indicates any kind of corruption on the part of Moro or any of the attorneys. What you have is an unverified leak by a political activist that likes to pretend he’s a journalist, who’s married to a politician from the far left whose party would love to bring down a legally elected government. Think about it. Who are the parties interested in voiding the Car Wash operation? This is the largest anti-corruption operation in the world. Who benefits from taking it down? There is no shortage of proof against Lula, Cunha, Cabral and all the other politicians in jail. Do you want them free? Why? Please don’t spread misinformation here, because unaware people might buy it due to not understanding the situation. Believing in a conspiracy against Lula is akin to being a flat-earther. Not even he believes in that crap.
- andrenth 7y agoThe downvoters don’t like to see it mentioned that Glen Greenwald is a liar. The evidence is clear though. In this specific case, he has produced fake evidence, by implicating in his “leak” the names of people who weren’t event involved in the Car Wash operator, not to mention faking timestamps to try to prove something that never happened. The real coup attempt here is being done by the method of greenwalding [1]. [1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=greenwalding https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=greenwalding
- dang 7y agoPlease do not do political flamewar on HN. It's not what this site is for. Personal attacks, which you did in the parent comment, will particularly get you banned here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: we've had to warn you about this repeatedly, yet you've continued to break the site guidelines. That eventually leads to getting banned on HN. I don't want to ban you, because you've posted good comments as well, so would you please fix this?
- andrenth 7y agoSorry, it’s just that the original comment is so completely nonfactual that I cannot attribute it to anything other than naïveté or ill motives. But I should have articulated that in different words. I do think that the original post should also be warned against political flamewars, because if a post like that goes unreplied, someone might think it’s true without questioning it.
- dang 7y ago> I cannot attribute it to anything other than naïveté or ill motives You've articulated this perception nicely. We all feel it, but it's a cognitive bias that we project onto others. I've been trying to convince HN users of this for years: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20opposing%20view https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... I did reply to other comments in this thread, but in general it's too high a bar to expect mods to reply equally to all violations, for the same reasons that cops can't give speeding tickets to all speeders: they don't see all of them, and issuing a ticket takes a lot of time.
- scythe 7y agoDo you know why reputable news organizations were unimpressed by those "revelations"? Because they mostly show prosecutors being angry on IRC. What it proves is that the prosecutors hated the Workers' Party, which is understandable, given that they had spent the last several years dealing with massive corruption in the Workers' Party. I would classify that emotional reaction as normal. Their comments about the election are somewhat inappropriate, but there is no indication of any ill intent. The collaboration of the prosecutors with Moro, however minor, is more serious. That doesn't mean the charges were faked -- the evidence is publicly available and has been considered by many independent parties. Nobody qualified was arguing that this was a sham before June. However, judicial procedure exists for a reason. If back-channel discussions could have influenced Moro's decision, then it could be reversed even if the evidence is nonetheless sufficient to prove Lula's guilt. (I am not a lawyer.) It's not exactly out of the ordinary for prosecutors to be friendly with judges, who are themselves often former prosecutors, and it isn't evidence of any foreign influence. What they did do w.r.t. the election was say they wished they could file an injunction to prevent Lula from speaking publicly, but they were legally barred from doing so. Instead, the Bolsonaro campaign filed the motion and it was granted. It's unclear how much this would have influenced the election, which Bolsonaro won by just over 10%. That's a landslide in the United States. Furthermore, the American role in Lava Jato was never secret nor nefarious, and was well-known to independent institutions, e.g.: https://www.law.columbia.edu/public-integrity/conferences-and-events/Brazil-Justice https://www.law.columbia.edu/public-integrity/conferences-an... https://www.bakerinstitute.org/media/files/files/b49a8c69/lagunes-lavajato-backgrounder.pdf https://www.bakerinstitute.org/media/files/files/b49a8c69/la... Furthermore, this kind of paranoid ranting about "lawfare" is exactly what Brazil does not need right now: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/12/brazils-democracy-suffers-another-blow-with-operation-car-wash-leaks/?utm_term=.31d691cfecb9 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/12/brazils-d... >Widespread distrust of institutions will feed the “salvationist” narrative taking hold in Brazilian politics. Bolsonaro is a direct product of that — and he won before these recent revelations about Lava Jato. Liberal and conservative institutions alike in the West mourned the election of Bolsonaro. The West is not always the most honest actor but it is difficult to manage how it could manage to be so uniformly opposed to something in public and favor it in private. Right-wing economists in Brazil who supported his campaign have expressed regret. https://reason.com/2019/06/01/deal-with-the-devil/ https://reason.com/2019/06/01/deal-with-the-devil/ >Some of Ling's closest associates had pleaded with him not to sit down with Bolsonaro, who was infamous for public comments praising torture and dictatorship and denigrating women and minorities. Just associating with him, they feared, would tarnish Brazil's libertarian movement, which was drawing new followers at an astounding pace and winning mainstream recognition. This isn't an organized coup. It's a product of various special interests poking and prodding from within and without on a democracy, like every other country but with a lot of inequality and a culture of doing whatever it takes to get ahead. Painting a picture that colors in the lines drawn for you by Russian propagandists isn't going to clarify anything. It might make you feel like a hero, of course, but you won't be one.
- dang 7y agoPlease don't take HN threads into partisan flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- koolba 7y ago> An area of Amazon rainforest roughly the size of a football pitch is now being cleared every single minute, according to satellite data. A football pitch is 7,140 square meters so that’s 10,281,600 square meters per day. That’s 10.3 square kilometers per day, which assuming 24/7/365 work progress comes out to 3752 square kilometers per year. According to Wikipedia the Amazon rainforest is about 5.5M square kilometers so that’s 0.0682% per year assuming zero regrowth. Honestly that does not seem like a lot.
- patagonia 7y agoIf you’re gonna use math to show how unimpressed you are, I’d be more impressed if you factored in the increased rate of clearing over time.
- koolba 7y agoI considered it but if it’s anything like the US the rate would be relatively consistent over time until it eventually tapers out to a steady state vs regrowth. Here’s a fun read if you’re curious: https://www.fia.fs.fed.us/library/brochures/docs/2012/ForestFacts_1952-2012_English.pdf https://www.fia.fs.fed.us/library/brochures/docs/2012/Forest...
- patagonia 7y agoIf you're curious you could have googled something like "rate of growth of amazon deforestation". If you would, you'd have seen in the summary of the 1st result from Wikipedia: "The annual rate of deforestation in the Amazon region dramatically increased from 1991 to 2003." The title of the third result is: "Brazil: deforestation in the Amazon increased 29% over last year". So if you want to dismiss an idea that you had, maybe step outside your head. If you want to draw historic correlations maybe don't try to do so based on completely different examples. There are very few South American issues on which I'd use U.S. historical data points for which to draw forward looking conclusions. Military growth? Energy policy? Monetary policy? Natural resource utilization? I wouldn't for any of those. But you boldly chose,,, deforestation? If you're gonna try to sound smart by dismissing something out of hand, then be smart. But for the love of god don't trivialize deforestation just as climate change is in the beginning stages of getting really, really bad, based on some half baked hunch you have, and then suggest I read some 64 page document that has, more than likely, no value add to the discussion. (Sorry but not sorry for the tone. Trivializing this issue is not ok. The logic was not correct. Patronizingly suggesting I read a 64 page doc, like a professor handing out homework. This is climate change, and the arguments were weak to wrong.)
- aaron695 7y agoOne gets bored with the lies, so is it better now we've gone from a 'Football pitch' a second.... to one a minute!!! The fact it's such a old cliche but can be pulled out as new is the real problem, alternate facts, it's clearly a lie since any adult should have heard it before, but they still chose to believe the article. The rainforest issue: Myths and facts (1997) [There will be many articles before this talking about football fields a minute/second feel free to source the original lie] "From movies to classrooms to the nightly news, Americans are constantly being told that of the world’s environmental “crises,” the staggering loss of tropical rainforest, and Amazon rainforest in particular, is right up there at the top. Pictures of charred remains of once lush jungles flicker before our eyes, we are shown the exotic plants and wild species that are being made homeless by the chainsaw and the flame, and numbers likened to one football field per second are used to describe this devastating loss." https://www.cfact.org/1997/01/01/the-rainforest-issue-myths-and-facts/ https://www.cfact.org/1997/01/01/the-rainforest-issue-myths-...
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- FlyingSideKick 7y agoAs a citizen of the United States (a country that cut down nearly all of its old-growth forests) what can I do as an individual to slow down deforestation in the Amazon? What are some real solutions I could enact that would make any difference? The situation feels hopeless until the Brazilian government makes a sweeping effort to preserve the Amazon and that it's laws are fully enforced.
- russianbandit 7y agoUnfortunately, the Brazilian government is corrupt af, and is only interested in preserving their wealth.
- rolltiide 7y agoIn my experience, the only difference between corruption and other wealth preserving tactics is mere respect for the form of due process If respect isnt there, its corruption If respect is there, its the law
- r00fus 7y agoCorruption isn't a wealth preservation tactic. It's an exploitation tactic. Whether you're strip mining the earth's resources, stripping away the wealth of the nation, subverting the moral/political culture or simply just amassing ill-gotten gains, corruption is the proven method.
- rolltiide 7y agoMany places have deep histories and convoluted legal practices, which from an outside perspective gets dismissed as corruption, but internally it is considered due process Its just that the observation goes both ways
- r00fus 7y agoCorruption as due process? That's an incredible stretch.
- ohthehugemanate 7y agoDrives me crazy to see how we report this stuff. Doom and gloom sells more papers than hope, of course. Yes, we are still net deforesting the Amazon rainforest... At the slowest rate since we began measuring. In 2016 we deforested about 6000km2. TFA says that in 2018 we deforested about 3700km2. This is down from the 1995 peak of 28,000 km2/yr. Remember all those programs to save the rainforest? Turns out they're working really well, and TFA proves it. BBC opted not to print the headline "Amazon deforestation still improving, now at lowest rate ever!" And opted for the scary/outrageous version we see above. Both are true, but one tells you that our anti-deforestation efforts work, and have been improving the situation for decades. The other says everything is hopeless. Which one do you think is better for encouraging further action? We're not done yet, there's still a terrible amount of deforestation going on, but we are definitely getting there! (Fancy chart: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/11/annual-rate-of-legal-deforestation-in-the-amazon-in-km2-per-year-197788-2013-inpe0.png https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/11/annual-rate-of-le... )
- toomuchtuna 7y ago> Which one do you think is better for encouraging further action? I can fairly easily imagine that the doom and gloom spin does better. The message that anti-deforestation efforts work and have been for decades likely does less to make the average person feel they should continue to do anything about it in their daily lives, since the current trend indicates everything will be fine. Instead, if you believe that the situation is dire, a person that otherwise would not care deeply about the problem might be more likely to take action. I would argue that a combination of the two is most effective, if the primary goal is to encourage further action. A little doom and gloom by framing the current situation as an image people can understand ("a football pitch every minute") convinces people that there is still a significant problem, and then the hopeful aspect (that the trend actually shows a positive outlook) convinces them that any action they take will be useful.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y agoIndeed, I went from a genuine "what can I personally do about this" when hearing about this on the radio this morning to "OK, I guess I don't need to get involved after all" when reading GP's comment. Just because outrage promotes clicks doesn't mean that it doesn't also encourage action.
- qserasera 7y agoI'd much prefer that we prevent pristine forrest destruction knowing what I know about habitats. Perhaps we can create a sustainable harvesting cycle inside of already cleared areas.
- martincollignon 7y agoWant to make a difference on climate change as a technologist? Feel free to join these communities actively looking for support and with ongoing projects (that are alive): - https://climateaction.tech/ https://climateaction.tech/ - https://techimpactmakers.com/ https://techimpactmakers.com/ - https://www.tmrow.com/ https://www.tmrow.com/
- cojant 7y agoSounds interesting to me, however both first and last link are pointing to a 502 Bad Gateway. Is it just me?
- vbuwivbiu 7y agothe denial is strong today