22 ms·

Humanity Has Flipped the Amazon Forest from Carbon Sink to Source

223 points by notRobot 5y ago

stunt 5y ago
Greed & Stupidity
DoingIsLearning 5y ago
* Consumers eating JBS beef and consumers buying exotic wood and consumers buying gold from illegal mining have flipped the Amazon Forest from Carbon Sink to Source. This collective blamming becomes tiring when the actions are self-contained in a small group of people.
- 42droids 5y ago
  "Not all men" Surely, the actions of a "small group" of people won't affect the global climate. Let's be realistic here. Also, feel free to downvote if you feel personally attacked.
- danparsonson 5y ago
  That small group of people are responding to demand aren't they?
  - turbinerneiter 5y ago
    Do they run ads?
  - Valmar 5y ago
    The thing is, they're still responsible for cutting down the Amazon. The "responding to demand" is a complete cop-out. Stop blaming the consumer for the actions of the greedy. I wouldn't be surprised if the consumer very often isn't even aware of the sources of the materials for a lot of the stuff they buy. And it doesn't help that the consumer is all too often worried about stuff that immediately affects them, leaving them no time or energy to worry about stuff that's they're not immediately aware of. It's like blaming the consumer for the ridiculous amount of plastic corporations use for packaging when that's all that's available 99% of the time.
    - ratww 5y ago
      > It's like blaming the consumer for the ridiculous amount of plastic corporations use for packaging when that's all that's available 99% of the time. Oh, that's a huge pet peeve of mine. In some places I lived it was impossible to buy produce without plastic bags because the stores force you to use their own bags. Also you have to put different vegetables on different bags. Otherwise you can't buy. Sure one can argue that I could just boycott all the supermarkets in my city, but those people forget that I also have to fucking eat.
    - danparsonson 5y ago
      I didn't say they're not responsible too; my point is that none of us needs cheap beef or hardwood or gold (do we?) and it's widely known what these companies are doing, so we can't just shrug our shoulders and say "we didn't cut down the forest". Agree about the plastic though, that stuff is almost impossible to avoid.
  - yodelshady 5y ago
    Contract killers are responding to demand, but we don't let them legally practice their trade.
    - danparsonson 5y ago
      So people who hire contract killers are not to blame? I don't understand this argument - saying "it's not our fault the cattle/hardwood logging/mining companies cut down the Amazon" is nonsense, that's been widely known about for decades and we (collectively) just bought more and more of this stuff. It's their fault and ours.
      - yodelshady 5y ago
        Blame whoever you like. If we agree an activity is harmful, we usually pass laws to stop people doing it. Other options can be applied, but only really if we don't agree, usually due to personal choice being relevant (some drugs, prostitution, seatbelts and helmets) or non-linear effects in both the utility and externalities (most pollution). Or both (cigarettes, alcohol, sugar).
      - ricardobeat 5y ago
        Public policy is always the greatest factor for change at this scale. It’s extremely unlikely that you’ll effect change by individual action, even if you enlist a church-like following.
        danparsonson 5y ago
        Sure, and (in countries with functioning democracies) public policy responds to pressure from the public. It doesn't tend to change in the face of public apathy.
        pessimizer 5y ago
        And in countries with functioning mass media systems, the public responds to pressure from the tv.
- ArnoVW 5y ago
  I could be wrong, but I belief that the issue is bigger than that. If you live in the US and drive a car or eat meat, you are likely to be co-responsible. Soy culture is used to create a cheap protein feedstock for the meat industry. Modern car fuel contains ethanol (10% in the EU). The ethanol is produced by having micro organisms convert biomass. The idea being that you use the short carbon cycle (already in the eco system) instead of the long carbon cycle (stuff that has been in the earth for 200My) thus effectively reducing carbon emissions. Both of these are produced in Brasil, both have a footprint much larger than the gold or exotic wood markets (which are tiny, compared with meat and car fuel)
  - nine_k 5y ago
    If you live in the U.S. and drive a car and eat meat, you are very unlikely eating illegally-raised Brazilian beef, or consuming illegally-mined Brazilian gold. Most likely, you eat U.S.-raised beef and burn gasoline from oil that comes from the U.S. or Middle East. Surely you are adding to the global warming, but it has nothing to do with Amazonian forest being illegally cut. In Brazil, most if not all cars run on ethanol [1]. The U.S. produce massive amounts of ethanol domestically [2] so, most likely, whatever gasoline you might be buying in the US, it's not using Brazilian ethanol, even though the U.S. does import some Brazilian ethanol [4], it's dwarfed by the domestic production [2]. U.S. beef is raised so efficiently that farmers manage to export it to Mexico an China, among other places [3], while receiving virtually no subsidies. You likely need to specifically look for gourmet Brazilian beef if you want to have a chance to taste a cow illegally raised on a pasture which used to be Amazonian forest. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_the_United_Sta... [3]: https://www.fas.usda.gov/beef-2020-export-highlights https://www.fas.usda.gov/beef-2020-export-highlights [4]: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_epooxe_im0_mbbl_m.htm https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_epooxe_i...
    - DennisP 5y ago
      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-beef/ https://www.statista.com/chart/19122/biggest-exporters-of-be...
- littlestymaar 5y ago
  Tiffany & Co and JBS Foods shareholder have flipped the Amazon Forest from Carbon Sink to Source. This collective blaming becomes tiring when the actions are self-contained in a small group of profit seeking investors.
- baron_harkonnen 5y ago
  We all benefit from global economic activity. Do you earnestly not believe that part of the capital generated in Brazil (and of course all of other parts or resource extraction across the planet) eventually ends up as a dollar in an investment fund that a VC is going to use to fund the countless startups that employ HNers? Where do you think all the capital that drives our economy comes from? On top of that destruction of environments around the globe is what allows us to have such wonderfully cheap products here in the US (and Europe). Those cheap solar panels that everyone is excited about are because they're being built with energy from burning coal in China (the biggest factor in the price drop was going from minimal solar pv production in China to 80% today). One of the best methods of estimating CO2 emissions at an individual level is dollars spend. Highly paid technical workers getting paid from and buying goods from Amazon.com have an indirect but real relationship to the destruction of the actual Amazon. It is also worth noting that the HN community has aggressively flagged and remove many of the climate change article that have made it do the front page. I used to immediately upvote any articles I found and just wait to see how many minutes they would last. Not that placing blame does anything to solve these issues, but collective blame is appropriate if you really look at the systemic nature of all of these problems.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    Collective blame for the actions of a tiny minority is an excuse to not do anything. If it's everybody's fault, it becomes nobody's fault.
travisjungroth 5y ago
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 wood. I hear they're mostly used for making charcoal. Next to where I was staying is land owned by a wealthy foreigner in Lima. She bought it to maintain it as jungle. But "ownership" is a funny thing. People moved onto her land and set up a community. It's what locals call an invasión. They had the backing of a politician, so the cops did nothing. The rumor was she was beating them in court and some people were going to jail. At the same time, a bulldozer was coming in widening the trail to the invasión into a road. The land there is more like settling the frontier than buying a parcel in a suburb. People don't respect a barbed wire fence, no trespassing sign and a piece of paper. They will generally respect you living on the land. Residents visibly establish their ownership. Even the smallest town will have a giant sign welcoming you. Houses sitting on just two acres will have a sign and name (usually fundo something) and maybe even their claimed property borders on it. You need to reside in your home, or someone else might be when you get back. I'm sympathetic to the tree-clearing locals. You're living in poverty, there are some trees sitting over there you can cut and sell, but you're not supposed to. Why? Because a foreigner in a big city has a piece of paper? Because some countries that exploited their own resources and launched themselves into modernity say you can't do the same? I get why you'd buy a machete and walk off into the jungle, then buy a chainsaw once you can afford it. At the same time, I'd rather they didn't do that. I used to feel guilt about visiting the jungle. The boards that make our hut were cut from somewhere. Maybe the best thing to do if you love nature is live downtown in a city and send money to a preservation charity. But I also see the value of people who are stewards of the land. You have to cut down an acre to build the community, but that lets you protect many more. So I plan to keep visiting and keep supporting.
- brabel 5y ago
  Without the rule of law, you only own what you can defend yourself.
redpiller 5y ago
Carbon dioxide is good for trees. This will continue the planetary greening which has been occurring over the past few decades thanks to human activity. Trees are very good at adapting to and compensating for additional carbon dioxide. I look forward to further decentralization of forests and an overall greener planet. BTW, the science behind planetary greening is that higher carbon dioxide helps plants to be more water-efficient. This allows them to grow in areas which would otherwise have been too dry for them. https://theconversation.com/rising-carbon-dioxide-is-making-the-worlds-plants-more-water-wise-79427 https://theconversation.com/rising-carbon-dioxide-is-making-... "Evolution is cleverer than you are" - Leslie Orgel
- helen___keller 5y ago
  > I look forward to further decentralization of forests This sounds like something that you would read in a whitepaper for TreeCoin
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lm28469 5y ago
  I think the trees are good dude: https://ourworldindata.org/exports/global-co2-concentration-ppm_v6_850x600.svg https://ourworldindata.org/exports/global-co2-concentration-... Water is also good for you, yet you don't live at the bottom of the atlantic ocean.
- redpiller 5y ago
  People who are downvoting this are selfish tree killers. Collecting carbon offset money in exchange for planting trees in suboptimal locations is pointless when nature already handles this by itself much faster and more efficiently than all humanity ever could... Also, unlike people, nature does it free of charge... No hidden motives. Humans are the most wasteful and most arrogant species in existence. Look at any other species in existence, they consume very few natural resources by comparison. Why then do humans exist? Maybe nature needed us to increase CO2 levels to maintain the balance. It's arrogant to see ourselves as the center when in fact nature has always been at the center and will always be. We are mere pawns serving nature's intended purpose of balancing the ecosystem. First, humans thought they were at the center of the universe and solar system, now they think they're at the center of the planet. Science will force us to keep conceding to how pathetic we are... Most people can't even control themselves, why are they trying to control the planet?
ricardobeat 5y ago
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/brazil-accelerating-deforestation-of-amazon-a-direct-result-of-bolsonaros-policies/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/12/brazil-accele...
- b0tzzzzzzman 5y ago
  Yes, blame will solve this. This is just political baiting.
  - ricardobeat 5y ago
    Taking responsibility for what ideas you support, promote, and how you vote, does solve a lot of things. I hope that's not surprising to most people.
- saiya-jin 5y ago
  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.
  - justshowpost 5y ago
    Everything right wing is just an universal bogeyman for the poorly informed consumers of leftist propaganda. It is merely an another slur, not anything related to political compass, just like fascist or nazi (but never socialist or commie, that's quite revealing)
    - ricardobeat 5y ago
      Maybe you're not familiar with where he stands on the political spectrum, this might help: - pro guns, open carry, stimulates violence often - prejudice against the poor, believes in 'meritocracy' (aka they deserve it) - believes in 'traditional family & church values' - wants to privatize whatever he sets his eyes on - wants to deregulate everything - pro death penalty (a good criminal is a dead criminal) - prejudice and violence against women (has threatened to rape a colleague in parliament, but would leave it alone cause she's ugly) - prejudice against non-whites - prejudice against LGBT (said he would pound his own son to death if he turned out gay) - against all kinds of environmental protection measures (it hurts business!) - still believes communists are around and trying to take over the country - praises the military coup that terrorized the country from the 60s-80s, denies any wrongdoing at the time (thousands of deaths documented) - publicly praised military personnel who have been convicted for torturing the country's last president during that time, said they should have done a better job - would be happy to have the military back in charge, and runs the presidency like he has absolute power - said the country should 'stop being faggots' when going against coronavirus measures Not making any of this up. Sounds pretty 'right' to me.
mrfusion 5y ago
Is it really humanity or just Brazil?
- throwamon 5y ago
  You might be shocked to know that the products of this destruction are mostly not used locally but rather exported to much of the world, especially wealthy countries.
mrfusion 5y ago
Why should it ever have been a carbon sink? I thought forests were neutral as they release carbon when old growth decomposes?
- eloff 5y ago
  I would guess that process is not 100% efficient and some stays buried in the soil. Just a guess though. The big deal with forests is they keep a large amount of carbon out of the atmosphere on a rotating basis. We really need that right now.
- fulafel 5y ago
  In the long run, presupposing a constant size of forest, this is approximately true, but 1 if you harvest sustainably and use the lumber for building long lived structures, it might be a sink in the timescale that's important for combating global warming. 2 these forests have been sinking a lot, stands to reason they could alternatively be expanding, which would make them a carbon sink for the duration of the expansion
- maCDzP 5y ago
  If they were neutral we wouldn’t have fossil fuels. Oil, coal and peat are made of old forests, wetlands and what not.
  - mrfusion 5y ago
    I thought they were made before life had figured out how to digest cellulose.
  - helen___keller 5y ago
    It's worth mentioning that carbon deposits are not made uniformly, and in fact certain geological periods are known for having large deposits of carbon while others have almost none.
    - maCDzP 5y ago
      True - I generalized too much.
protoman3000 5y ago
With negative externalities, being an asshole is the dominant strategy and we see this principle play out here very clearly.
praptak 5y ago
The headline is unnecessarily sensationalist. A mature forest is never a carbon sink. Trees can only store so much carbon before there is no more room for them to grow. Obviously, burning a forest is still bad from the CO2-in-atmosphere point of view. Not because you have destroyed a carbon sink but because you released carbon from an existing carbon reservoir.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > mature forest is never a carbon sink Not never [1]. But never ca. 300 m.y.a. [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mushroom-evolution-breaks-down-lignin-slows-coal-formation/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mushroom-evolutio...
  - praptak 5y ago
    This hypothesis is being contested: https://www.pnas.org/content/113/9/2442 https://www.pnas.org/content/113/9/2442 Although yes, if the old trees don't decompose (for whatever reason), then the forest becomes in fact a carbon sink.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
I have seen interactive data representations over time using NASA satellite databases: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/147075/a-new-tool-for-tracking-amazon-fires https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/147075/a-new-tool-f... It was amazing seeing the effect of political action on the satellite data: e.g. areas that were deemed okay (or not) to cut down were almost immediately protected (with lit borders to stop law-breakers) or destroyed. If Brazil becomes a failed state, of course the Amazon will be destroyed. We know this due to the millions of examples of the ‘tragedy of the commons’. It’s an interesting thought experiment as to what it would take for the world to force protection with an external military force (e.g. this might be the only solution, but the chances of it happening are zero).
- aaomidi 5y ago
  Mate we still have patent protections for refigerents that have a GWP of less than 1. Stuff that can replace the nasty stuff were using. Maybe we should start fixing problems within our own borders first before resorting to fucking weapons.
- eloff 5y ago
  > It’s an interesting thought experiment as to what it would take for the world to force protection with an external military force (e.g. this might be the only solution, but the chances of it happening are zero). Brazil would never tolerate that, nor should they. On the other hand if you want to buy huge tracts of the Amazon and pay private security forces to protect it, that's doable. Better though would be to make it in Brazil's interest to protect the Amazon. We all benefit from it being intact, so we should all chip in to create an economic incentive for the county of Brazil to maintain it.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Phaedor 5y ago
    > Better though would be to make it in Brazil's interest to protect the Amazon. We all benefit from it being intact, so we should all chip in to create an economic incentive for the county of Brazil to maintain it. Something like this exists in the Amazon Fund. Unfortunately it seems like it has broken down lately: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-environment-norway-idUSKCN1V52C9 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-environment-norway...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
perfunctory 5y ago
> "We don't know at what point the changeover could become irreversible." I guess "could" can be safely replaced by "will".
okprod 5y ago
At the same time, I'd rather they didn't do that. I'm not familiar with the details of this topic -- Are actions by locals significant-enough/at a large enough scale to yield these results? I'm thinking of Native Americans' hunting v. colonizers' actions.
psadri 5y ago
I’ve been wondering if climate change could disturb the environment enough to deplete/reduce the oxygen in the atmosphere. For example, if large enough tracts of forests/grasslands turn into deserts?
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  Not likely, since increased carbon dioxide would eventually result in more plant biomass, you'd wind up with a subsequent increase in atmospheric oxygen, and subsequently an increase in animal biomass. If something catastrophic happened that suddenly killed an existing ecosystem and the air and water vapor currents in the local climate changed enough to prevent new growth you could wind up with something like that.
slackfan 5y ago
So I guess we need to burn the forests now?
dfilppi 5y ago
Humanity hasnt. Brazil has
- kiliantics 5y ago
  The economy is global. They export the products of the deforested land. All who buy are complicit.

223 points by notRobot 5y ago

Greed & Stupidity

* Consumers eating JBS beef and consumers buying exotic wood and consumers buying gold from illegal mining have flipped the Amazon Forest from Carbon Sink to Source. This collective blamming becomes tiring when the actions are self-contained in a small group of people.

42droids 5y ago
"Not all men" Surely, the actions of a "small group" of people won't affect the global climate. Let's be realistic here. Also, feel free to downvote if you feel personally attacked.
danparsonson 5y ago
That small group of people are responding to demand aren't they?
- turbinerneiter 5y ago
  Do they run ads?
- Valmar 5y ago
  The thing is, they're still responsible for cutting down the Amazon. The "responding to demand" is a complete cop-out. Stop blaming the consumer for the actions of the greedy. I wouldn't be surprised if the consumer very often isn't even aware of the sources of the materials for a lot of the stuff they buy. And it doesn't help that the consumer is all too often worried about stuff that immediately affects them, leaving them no time or energy to worry about stuff that's they're not immediately aware of. It's like blaming the consumer for the ridiculous amount of plastic corporations use for packaging when that's all that's available 99% of the time.
  - ratww 5y ago
    > It's like blaming the consumer for the ridiculous amount of plastic corporations use for packaging when that's all that's available 99% of the time. Oh, that's a huge pet peeve of mine. In some places I lived it was impossible to buy produce without plastic bags because the stores force you to use their own bags. Also you have to put different vegetables on different bags. Otherwise you can't buy. Sure one can argue that I could just boycott all the supermarkets in my city, but those people forget that I also have to fucking eat.
  - danparsonson 5y ago
    I didn't say they're not responsible too; my point is that none of us needs cheap beef or hardwood or gold (do we?) and it's widely known what these companies are doing, so we can't just shrug our shoulders and say "we didn't cut down the forest". Agree about the plastic though, that stuff is almost impossible to avoid.
- yodelshady 5y ago
  Contract killers are responding to demand, but we don't let them legally practice their trade.
  - danparsonson 5y ago
    So people who hire contract killers are not to blame? I don't understand this argument - saying "it's not our fault the cattle/hardwood logging/mining companies cut down the Amazon" is nonsense, that's been widely known about for decades and we (collectively) just bought more and more of this stuff. It's their fault and ours.
    - yodelshady 5y ago
      Blame whoever you like. If we agree an activity is harmful, we usually pass laws to stop people doing it. Other options can be applied, but only really if we don't agree, usually due to personal choice being relevant (some drugs, prostitution, seatbelts and helmets) or non-linear effects in both the utility and externalities (most pollution). Or both (cigarettes, alcohol, sugar).
    - ricardobeat 5y ago
      Public policy is always the greatest factor for change at this scale. It’s extremely unlikely that you’ll effect change by individual action, even if you enlist a church-like following.
      - danparsonson 5y ago
        Sure, and (in countries with functioning democracies) public policy responds to pressure from the public. It doesn't tend to change in the face of public apathy.
        pessimizer 5y ago
        And in countries with functioning mass media systems, the public responds to pressure from the tv.
ArnoVW 5y ago
I could be wrong, but I belief that the issue is bigger than that. If you live in the US and drive a car or eat meat, you are likely to be co-responsible. Soy culture is used to create a cheap protein feedstock for the meat industry. Modern car fuel contains ethanol (10% in the EU). The ethanol is produced by having micro organisms convert biomass. The idea being that you use the short carbon cycle (already in the eco system) instead of the long carbon cycle (stuff that has been in the earth for 200My) thus effectively reducing carbon emissions. Both of these are produced in Brasil, both have a footprint much larger than the gold or exotic wood markets (which are tiny, compared with meat and car fuel)
- nine_k 5y ago
  If you live in the U.S. and drive a car and eat meat, you are very unlikely eating illegally-raised Brazilian beef, or consuming illegally-mined Brazilian gold. Most likely, you eat U.S.-raised beef and burn gasoline from oil that comes from the U.S. or Middle East. Surely you are adding to the global warming, but it has nothing to do with Amazonian forest being illegally cut. In Brazil, most if not all cars run on ethanol [1]. The U.S. produce massive amounts of ethanol domestically [2] so, most likely, whatever gasoline you might be buying in the US, it's not using Brazilian ethanol, even though the U.S. does import some Brazilian ethanol [4], it's dwarfed by the domestic production [2]. U.S. beef is raised so efficiently that farmers manage to export it to Mexico an China, among other places [3], while receiving virtually no subsidies. You likely need to specifically look for gourmet Brazilian beef if you want to have a chance to taste a cow illegally raised on a pasture which used to be Amazonian forest. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_the_United_Sta... [3]: https://www.fas.usda.gov/beef-2020-export-highlights https://www.fas.usda.gov/beef-2020-export-highlights [4]: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_epooxe_im0_mbbl_m.htm https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_epooxe_i...
  - DennisP 5y ago
    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-beef/ https://www.statista.com/chart/19122/biggest-exporters-of-be...
littlestymaar 5y ago
Tiffany & Co and JBS Foods shareholder have flipped the Amazon Forest from Carbon Sink to Source. This collective blaming becomes tiring when the actions are self-contained in a small group of profit seeking investors.
baron_harkonnen 5y ago
We all benefit from global economic activity. Do you earnestly not believe that part of the capital generated in Brazil (and of course all of other parts or resource extraction across the planet) eventually ends up as a dollar in an investment fund that a VC is going to use to fund the countless startups that employ HNers? Where do you think all the capital that drives our economy comes from? On top of that destruction of environments around the globe is what allows us to have such wonderfully cheap products here in the US (and Europe). Those cheap solar panels that everyone is excited about are because they're being built with energy from burning coal in China (the biggest factor in the price drop was going from minimal solar pv production in China to 80% today). One of the best methods of estimating CO2 emissions at an individual level is dollars spend. Highly paid technical workers getting paid from and buying goods from Amazon.com have an indirect but real relationship to the destruction of the actual Amazon. It is also worth noting that the HN community has aggressively flagged and remove many of the climate change article that have made it do the front page. I used to immediately upvote any articles I found and just wait to see how many minutes they would last. Not that placing blame does anything to solve these issues, but collective blame is appropriate if you really look at the systemic nature of all of these problems.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  Collective blame for the actions of a tiny minority is an excuse to not do anything. If it's everybody's fault, it becomes nobody's fault.

travisjungroth 5y ago

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 wood. I hear they're mostly used for making charcoal. Next to where I was staying is land owned by a wealthy foreigner in Lima. She bought it to maintain it as jungle. But "ownership" is a funny thing. People moved onto her land and set up a community. It's what locals call an invasión. They had the backing of a politician, so the cops did nothing. The rumor was she was beating them in court and some people were going to jail. At the same time, a bulldozer was coming in widening the trail to the invasión into a road. The land there is more like settling the frontier than buying a parcel in a suburb. People don't respect a barbed wire fence, no trespassing sign and a piece of paper. They will generally respect you living on the land. Residents visibly establish their ownership. Even the smallest town will have a giant sign welcoming you. Houses sitting on just two acres will have a sign and name (usually fundo something) and maybe even their claimed property borders on it. You need to reside in your home, or someone else might be when you get back. I'm sympathetic to the tree-clearing locals. You're living in poverty, there are some trees sitting over there you can cut and sell, but you're not supposed to. Why? Because a foreigner in a big city has a piece of paper? Because some countries that exploited their own resources and launched themselves into modernity say you can't do the same? I get why you'd buy a machete and walk off into the jungle, then buy a chainsaw once you can afford it. At the same time, I'd rather they didn't do that. I used to feel guilt about visiting the jungle. The boards that make our hut were cut from somewhere. Maybe the best thing to do if you love nature is live downtown in a city and send money to a preservation charity. But I also see the value of people who are stewards of the land. You have to cut down an acre to build the community, but that lets you protect many more. So I plan to keep visiting and keep supporting.

brabel 5y ago
Without the rule of law, you only own what you can defend yourself.

redpiller 5y ago

Carbon dioxide is good for trees. This will continue the planetary greening which has been occurring over the past few decades thanks to human activity. Trees are very good at adapting to and compensating for additional carbon dioxide. I look forward to further decentralization of forests and an overall greener planet. BTW, the science behind planetary greening is that higher carbon dioxide helps plants to be more water-efficient. This allows them to grow in areas which would otherwise have been too dry for them. https://theconversation.com/rising-carbon-dioxide-is-making-the-worlds-plants-more-water-wise-79427 https://theconversation.com/rising-carbon-dioxide-is-making-... "Evolution is cleverer than you are" - Leslie Orgel

helen___keller 5y ago
> I look forward to further decentralization of forests This sounds like something that you would read in a whitepaper for TreeCoin
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lm28469 5y ago
I think the trees are good dude: https://ourworldindata.org/exports/global-co2-concentration-ppm_v6_850x600.svg https://ourworldindata.org/exports/global-co2-concentration-... Water is also good for you, yet you don't live at the bottom of the atlantic ocean.
redpiller 5y ago
People who are downvoting this are selfish tree killers. Collecting carbon offset money in exchange for planting trees in suboptimal locations is pointless when nature already handles this by itself much faster and more efficiently than all humanity ever could... Also, unlike people, nature does it free of charge... No hidden motives. Humans are the most wasteful and most arrogant species in existence. Look at any other species in existence, they consume very few natural resources by comparison. Why then do humans exist? Maybe nature needed us to increase CO2 levels to maintain the balance. It's arrogant to see ourselves as the center when in fact nature has always been at the center and will always be. We are mere pawns serving nature's intended purpose of balancing the ecosystem. First, humans thought they were at the center of the universe and solar system, now they think they're at the center of the planet. Science will force us to keep conceding to how pathetic we are... Most people can't even control themselves, why are they trying to control the planet?

ricardobeat 5y ago

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/brazil-accelerating-deforestation-of-amazon-a-direct-result-of-bolsonaros-policies/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/12/brazil-accele...

b0tzzzzzzman 5y ago
Yes, blame will solve this. This is just political baiting.
- ricardobeat 5y ago
  Taking responsibility for what ideas you support, promote, and how you vote, does solve a lot of things. I hope that's not surprising to most people.
saiya-jin 5y ago
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.
- justshowpost 5y ago
  Everything right wing is just an universal bogeyman for the poorly informed consumers of leftist propaganda. It is merely an another slur, not anything related to political compass, just like fascist or nazi (but never socialist or commie, that's quite revealing)
  - ricardobeat 5y ago
    Maybe you're not familiar with where he stands on the political spectrum, this might help: - pro guns, open carry, stimulates violence often - prejudice against the poor, believes in 'meritocracy' (aka they deserve it) - believes in 'traditional family & church values' - wants to privatize whatever he sets his eyes on - wants to deregulate everything - pro death penalty (a good criminal is a dead criminal) - prejudice and violence against women (has threatened to rape a colleague in parliament, but would leave it alone cause she's ugly) - prejudice against non-whites - prejudice against LGBT (said he would pound his own son to death if he turned out gay) - against all kinds of environmental protection measures (it hurts business!) - still believes communists are around and trying to take over the country - praises the military coup that terrorized the country from the 60s-80s, denies any wrongdoing at the time (thousands of deaths documented) - publicly praised military personnel who have been convicted for torturing the country's last president during that time, said they should have done a better job - would be happy to have the military back in charge, and runs the presidency like he has absolute power - said the country should 'stop being faggots' when going against coronavirus measures Not making any of this up. Sounds pretty 'right' to me.

mrfusion 5y ago

Is it really humanity or just Brazil?

throwamon 5y ago
You might be shocked to know that the products of this destruction are mostly not used locally but rather exported to much of the world, especially wealthy countries.

mrfusion 5y ago

Why should it ever have been a carbon sink? I thought forests were neutral as they release carbon when old growth decomposes?

eloff 5y ago
I would guess that process is not 100% efficient and some stays buried in the soil. Just a guess though. The big deal with forests is they keep a large amount of carbon out of the atmosphere on a rotating basis. We really need that right now.
fulafel 5y ago
In the long run, presupposing a constant size of forest, this is approximately true, but 1 if you harvest sustainably and use the lumber for building long lived structures, it might be a sink in the timescale that's important for combating global warming. 2 these forests have been sinking a lot, stands to reason they could alternatively be expanding, which would make them a carbon sink for the duration of the expansion
maCDzP 5y ago
If they were neutral we wouldn’t have fossil fuels. Oil, coal and peat are made of old forests, wetlands and what not.
- mrfusion 5y ago
  I thought they were made before life had figured out how to digest cellulose.
- helen___keller 5y ago
  It's worth mentioning that carbon deposits are not made uniformly, and in fact certain geological periods are known for having large deposits of carbon while others have almost none.
  - maCDzP 5y ago
    True - I generalized too much.

protoman3000 5y ago

With negative externalities, being an asshole is the dominant strategy and we see this principle play out here very clearly.

praptak 5y ago

The headline is unnecessarily sensationalist. A mature forest is never a carbon sink. Trees can only store so much carbon before there is no more room for them to grow. Obviously, burning a forest is still bad from the CO2-in-atmosphere point of view. Not because you have destroyed a carbon sink but because you released carbon from an existing carbon reservoir.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> mature forest is never a carbon sink Not never [1]. But never ca. 300 m.y.a. [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mushroom-evolution-breaks-down-lignin-slows-coal-formation/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mushroom-evolutio...
- praptak 5y ago
  This hypothesis is being contested: https://www.pnas.org/content/113/9/2442 https://www.pnas.org/content/113/9/2442 Although yes, if the old trees don't decompose (for whatever reason), then the forest becomes in fact a carbon sink.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

I have seen interactive data representations over time using NASA satellite databases: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/147075/a-new-tool-for-tracking-amazon-fires https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/147075/a-new-tool-f... It was amazing seeing the effect of political action on the satellite data: e.g. areas that were deemed okay (or not) to cut down were almost immediately protected (with lit borders to stop law-breakers) or destroyed. If Brazil becomes a failed state, of course the Amazon will be destroyed. We know this due to the millions of examples of the ‘tragedy of the commons’. It’s an interesting thought experiment as to what it would take for the world to force protection with an external military force (e.g. this might be the only solution, but the chances of it happening are zero).

aaomidi 5y ago
Mate we still have patent protections for refigerents that have a GWP of less than 1. Stuff that can replace the nasty stuff were using. Maybe we should start fixing problems within our own borders first before resorting to fucking weapons.
eloff 5y ago
> It’s an interesting thought experiment as to what it would take for the world to force protection with an external military force (e.g. this might be the only solution, but the chances of it happening are zero). Brazil would never tolerate that, nor should they. On the other hand if you want to buy huge tracts of the Amazon and pay private security forces to protect it, that's doable. Better though would be to make it in Brazil's interest to protect the Amazon. We all benefit from it being intact, so we should all chip in to create an economic incentive for the county of Brazil to maintain it.
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- Phaedor 5y ago
  > Better though would be to make it in Brazil's interest to protect the Amazon. We all benefit from it being intact, so we should all chip in to create an economic incentive for the county of Brazil to maintain it. Something like this exists in the Amazon Fund. Unfortunately it seems like it has broken down lately: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-environment-norway-idUSKCN1V52C9 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-environment-norway...

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perfunctory 5y ago

> "We don't know at what point the changeover could become irreversible." I guess "could" can be safely replaced by "will".

okprod 5y ago

At the same time, I'd rather they didn't do that. I'm not familiar with the details of this topic -- Are actions by locals significant-enough/at a large enough scale to yield these results? I'm thinking of Native Americans' hunting v. colonizers' actions.

psadri 5y ago

I’ve been wondering if climate change could disturb the environment enough to deplete/reduce the oxygen in the atmosphere. For example, if large enough tracts of forests/grasslands turn into deserts?

betwixthewires 5y ago
Not likely, since increased carbon dioxide would eventually result in more plant biomass, you'd wind up with a subsequent increase in atmospheric oxygen, and subsequently an increase in animal biomass. If something catastrophic happened that suddenly killed an existing ecosystem and the air and water vapor currents in the local climate changed enough to prevent new growth you could wind up with something like that.

slackfan 5y ago

So I guess we need to burn the forests now?

dfilppi 5y ago

Humanity hasnt. Brazil has

kiliantics 5y ago
The economy is global. They export the products of the deforested land. All who buy are complicit.