https://phys.org/news/2023-09-arson-amazon-reforestation-ashes.html
It was supposed to be a good-news story out of the damaged Amazon rainforest: a project that replanted hundreds of thousands of trees in an illegally deforested nature reserve in Brazil.
It's standard behavior there.
I know someone from the deep amazon brasilian states and there is a complete disregard in the person when trying to have a civil discussion about conservation. And it is very easy to infer that it is not an isolated case but a standard way of life and thought.
Because there is so much land and so much wilderness, paired with so much distance from developed areas and a lack of a truly organized central government, people feel in the right to take what they want, when they want it, with no fear for reprimand.
This is a person that just picked a piece of land on the end of an undeveloped area, where a dirt road was open, cut down some of the vegetation to outline an area and then just set fire to it to clear the land for building. No concern for safety, building codes, building permits, sewage and eletrical infrastructure, nothing. Because, and I quote, "if you leave it be, in one year everything grows back".
And when it comes to animals, anything is fair game. Monkeys, leopards jaguars (take in mind large cats are generally not considered as food anywhere in the world), alligators, all kinds of wild fish and birds - including macaws and tucans - capibaras, tapirs, anything and everything is on the menu because, and I quote again, "the jungle is full of creatures".
This is plain disregard towards the basic notion of being civilized.
It's complicated. Not the need to save the Amazon, but the fact that we need to save it because the developed world is largely developed because they did things like clearing forests and otherwise damaging the ecosystem in the name of economic progress.
I don't have the answers, but I have to imagine it would involve an international effort to compensate Brazil for their lost "productivity", a program to properly share that wealth, additional aid/assistance to prevent further destruction of the Amazon, and legitimate international deterrents that provide exorbitantly heavy punitive actions against the criminal bosses who order these types of acts.
But that's just my back of napkin spitball of how to approach it. I'm the furthest thing away from having any meaningful expertise, knowledge, or insight, into how the Amazon can actually be saved.
I know your comment was light-hearted in nature, but I'd like to point out from the article:
"Investigators say the Rio Preto-Jacunda reserve is >bordered by ranches with a record of environmental crimes, >including repeated encroachments on the reserve.
Razing protected rainforest for pasture is an illegal but >lucrative business in Brazil, the world's top beef exporter.
The crime often hits remote, hard-to-police nature reserves, >overlapping with other organized criminal activities >destroying the Amazon, including illegal logging and gold >mining."
These are people looking to make a buck with a 'fuck you, got mine' attitude. And it's happening all over the world in grey-areas with regards to law enforcement. Burning down stuff is one of the favoured methods, especially if you can bribe officials to say that it was an accident (as does not seem to be the case here, however so props for that for what it's worth).
The article also mentions death threats by the ones doing the arson towards those against their interests. People are the reason we can't have nice things.
This is a case of 'if you don't laugh you'll cry.'
It's really fucking horrendous in reality. And I don't expect Brazil to have the means or inclination to deal with this appropriately either.
Do the same thing they do for poachers, have armed guards that shoot to kill and ask questions later.
As nice as it sounds, I don't think it's feasible. The Amazon is absolutely massive and not very populated. The logistics of keeping armed guards all around the protected areas sounds like a nightmare. The only way I can see deforestation actually stopping is if cattle, soy and wood stop being lucrative businesses somehow.
I guess the only real change we could effect is if "bee from Brazil" was flat out banned in a lot of western countries. Could not be imported. But heh, as if the industry big wigs who could not care any less (they'll all be dead from old age by the time this truly has significant big fallout so they don't care, naturally) will do that.
But yeah, need to remove the market to truly impact this, beyond making it illegal in the first place.
You'd think. On paper, it's the logical response. Irl, anything not on the market is going on the black market
The human race will get what it deserves. You think everyone will accept climate change after it kills a billion+ people?
Except it isn't "humanity", it is a tiny percentage of (generations of) rich fucks destroying the planet for profit, and maintaining a (completely artificial) system that feeds off of oppression, exploitation, greed and selfishness.
When you blame "humanity" you also blame those living in the Amazon trying their best to save it, as well as every other poor bastard born in to this world with no power or means of getting it.
These generalisations only serve to keep the rage from its rightful target.
Except this arson wasn't done by rich people. It was locals who want to use the land for farming cattle.
Absolving individuals for their behaviours is a great way to go nowhere. We all make choices
And they probably did that because they have no other viable way of living, because they're exploited by the rich. There's no excuse for what they did, but there's never only one person to blame for a disaster of such scale.
Theres only one person to blame and that's the person who lit it on fire. It's very convenient for no one except the ultra rich to have any agency in the world but it's not how reality works
I argue that agency is proportional to wealth. Money is power. Everyone has at least some amount of agency, but the ultra wealthy have exponentially more power to create change and affect the world.
Redistributing wealth from wealthy back to average people is also redistributing agency and responsibility back to average people.
While the influence from the elite is undeniable, I also hope you don't subscribe to the idea of the noble savage.
It's a tiny number of rich fucks emboldened by billions of people not doing anything to stop it though. Have you doorknocked for campaigns?
Billions of people with literally no choice but to be exploited or die..
Your bootlicking isn't making the point you think it does, and it definitely doesn't give you a high ground to be judging others' actions from (never mind that the actions you think need taking are pushing puppet A over puppet B on people's doorstep, what a joke)..
I'll take that as a "no, I don't actually do anything but complain online". Have fun while I go help hundreds of people vote every election.
I'm sure the planet cares about the technical difference. They are humans therefore part of humanity. You can save your speech.
"it's so much easier for me to cast a wide net, that way I get to distance myself enough from the problem so that I don't need to bother acting, and you pointing it out makes me uncomfortable, stop it"
Nope, it feels like most people are too far gone for that and they'll never accept it. All thanks to these dumb politicians that took bribes to cover it up for years and years. Thanks for making our futures so much worse...
Then it went up in flames, allegedly torched by land-grabbers trying to reclaim the territory for cattle pasture.
A little hippie in me ask people to seek out and pay for more sustainable produced meat, buy cultured meat in the future, or just eat less meat.
This risk of unreliability is one downside of carbon capture using trees or other plants.
Unless the carbon is moved under ground, where it cannot escape again due to accidents or arson or the like, it's not safely removed.
Trees are cheap and effective, but humans are destructive. If we just left nature alone, cut meat production to a level where we could pull everything back to older fields, it would recover relatively quickly.
Meaning we need to prosecute and take punitive actions against humans and corporations who just can't cope with not being destructive. Any business that's willingly involved needs to lose everything. Make it impossible to profit from, remove the incentives for farmers when the money disappears and loans can't be given out because the banks stopped existing.
The trees would die and rot at some point, which releases the CO2 they stored. We cannot keep capturing CO2 without increasing forest areas, and that's expensive. However, artificial carbon capture does not fare much better so the best strategy is to just burn less stuff. It is still more effective to offset fossil fuel power plants with clean electricity (as long as there is no oversupply) than using it for carbon capture.
Trees replace themselves. So yes, forests store carbon, rather than specific trees. Also, dead trees don't just evaporate into the atmosphere. Other species eat them, etc. Over time, more and more carbon will be stored somewhere, if it's left alone.
Dead trees don't evaporate (except for some of their water which isn't too relevant); the decomposing (micro)organisms that eat them release CO2 - about as much as burning the trees would. Yes, an old growth forest will be storing more CO2 per unit of area than a newly created one but that does not increase very fast and after a century, the forest will have reached most of its carbon storage capacity it will be able to store for the next millenium - at this point, basically only oxygen-free peatbogs where dead biomass does not decompose (as the decomposers cannot breathe) will provide extra carbon storage. This will eventually turn into coal (and sunken sealife into oil), storing its accumulated energy as hydrocarbons that won't be touched unless some pesky intelligent species start an industrial revolution.
Carbon capture is expensive: you need to isolate CO2 from the atmosphere, which takes energy, and turn it back into solid or liquid chemicals, which by laws of thermodynamics takes more energy than burning that amount of corresponding hydrocarbons. Then they need to be stored somewhere where nobody will find and burn them to enjoy cheap energy from them like we've been doing for the past 200 years. So we've had cheap energy at the expense of the environment, and we need to expend at least as much energy to get all that nasty carbon back out of the atmosphere. Thunderf00t made a very informative video about all this.
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Sounds good, yes! That can reduce the risk from arson. What remains is the risk from natural pests, droughts and wildfires, which increase due to climate change.
When weighing our options, we should consider their real-world value, not an optimistic estimate under ideal conditions. Trees could be great, but there are many things which can go wrong over the decades that a tree needs to grow.
Or hype tree planting less, and rely more on industrial solutions. Or use tree planting, but make sure the plant matter is stored underground frequently, so it cannot get back into the atmosphere. Or weigh in other arguments and realize this risk of unreliability is not that big and acceptable.
Or write a snarky comment and do nothing!
I’ve been waiting 30 years for industrial solutions but it is obvious that marketing and advertising to maintain the status quo of legacy companies is still a better roi.
This is a regulatory issue not a market failure.
Also I’m sure plastic recycling on a large scale is just around the corner. The plastic packaging on my plastic products keeps saying so. (/s)
it is obvious that marketing and advertising to maintain the status quo of legacy companies is still a better roi.
Yes, sadly.
This is a regulatory issue not a market failure.
I think it's both. Emitting is practically free, and removal means costs, not profit. The economic incentives are to emit, not to remove. The external costs of emissions are not covered. This is a distorted market and a market failure. And this market failure can be fixed by regulations, for example carbon pricing, or subsidizing effective carbon removal. Both are still under threat from marketing and advertising, or lobbying.