The rest of the world has the power to force Brazil to save the Amazon. Stop importing soy and beef from Brazil, tie tariffs directly to satellite-based measurements of rainforest area.
What "suffering" has the rest of the world done to brazil ?
That’s how you mitigate the externality that’s going on.
And a tariff works as well as a subsidy, but is easier to get the party imposing it to enact because it generates revenue rather than consuming it.
https://medium.com/@indica/climate-winners-and-losers-in-two...
Essentially countries that are causing climate are the industrialised world (obv.). Countries that are vital to stopping climate change because they have huge green areas, ie Brasil, are actually being heavily impacted by climate change and now they are being climateblamed by the first world for chopping down their forests for productive activities. Well if the first world wants the forest to stay they ought to pay for it. They also ought to drastically reduce their carbon emissions.
It’s funny how the same citizen of the same countries who are not doing their share of reducing emissions (US) are claiming in the same breath that Brasil should be punished for destroying a forest the West is desperate to protect. Well then protect it - tax your corporations for carbon emissions and buy up the amazon to protect it. Simple.
It seems like a pretty direct relationship. Your link is comparing who caused the damage to who suffers it, but that's not the same as comparing who caused to who can prevent it. The people who can prevent it are the people still causing it. Notice that Brazil is the same color (red) in both versions of that map. (It's also a misleading comparison because the "harm" side is measuring change in GDP growth per capita, but GDP growth per capita is smaller in developed countries to begin with. And then comparing that per capita number with absolute rather than per capita CO2 emissions.)
> Countries that are vital to stopping climate change because they have huge green areas, ie Brasil, are actually being heavily impacted by climate change and now they are being climateblamed by the first world for chopping down their forests for productive activities. Well if the first world wants the forest to stay they ought to pay for it.
Should we make the same argument all around? Generating electricity is for productive activities. If the third world wants the US stop burning coal then they should pay for it? No. The country doing the bad thing should suffer the cost of stopping it.
> Well then protect it - tax your corporations for carbon emissions and buy up the amazon to protect it. Simple.
It's easier to get tariffs put on a foreign country than pass a tax on your own people. It would be nice if some other countries (China? Europe?) could put some tariffs on the US tied to some CO2 targets as well.
Yeah sure if there were tariffs all around. But the US hegemony was until recently sort of predicated on little tariffs and global trade. So your advocating a sort of ... I don’t even know how to describe it - reverse carbon mercantilism where everybody attacks each other’s carbon emissions through tariffs? That sounds like a good recepy for dramatically worsening international relations.
Because nobody is forcing them to do otherwise. So get somebody to.
> That sounds like a good recepy for dramatically worsening international relations.
Not really, because the point of the tariffs is to change behavior, not to actually collect the tariffs. You impose a high enough cost that reducing CO2 emissions is less expensive than paying the tariffs, so countries do that and then the tariffs don't get imposed because they're only imposed on countries that don't hit their targets.
Essentially the citizenship gets off free for not voting in more responsible politicians, and hey, “it’s the other countries fault for not forcing us to do it”. Hilarious.
It’s like any internal change is impossible i his mind - the only way anything can happen is if other countries tariff each other, and if other countries force the US’s hand... why isn’t he campaigning for change instead of sitting around and saying other, “more responsible” countries, need to force the US to take action?
That’s what I meant with “getting off free”. The population of the US, as far as I can tell, can choose some of their governments direction.
I still don’t understand how you would get this to work unless it was some sort of universal agreement. If it wasn’t such, what would stop it from descending into a carbon war, similar to the trade wars we have now with Trump, with cleaner countries aggressively adding tariffs to poorer, “dirtier” countries? It would just be a form of de-development for poor countries who can’t upgrade.
The main reason would be that the poorer countries as a rule aren't actually dirtier. Countries by CO2 per capita:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
It's basically a list sorted by approximately how rich they are, with rich oil states and big first world countries like the US, Canada and Australia at the top and impoverished African countries at the bottom.
Moreover, actual poor countries like Haiti and Kenya are irrelevant in this game. They're emitting negligible amounts now and for new infrastructure renewables are already cheaper.
This is all about the western countries and BRIC. None of them are "poor" to the extent that they can't be expected to pay the cost to clean up their own house. It's one thing to worry about countries like Ethiopia, but Russia is not that.
Meanwhile the nature of the shift away from carbon makes it an economic stimulus for non-oil exporting countries like India and China because it allows them to stop paying to import oil and instead pay for renewables that can be from domestic producers.
“Tariffs are easier to enable”. Sure, FOR YOU. By you are fucking over Brasil twice - once by enacting climate by your irresponsible, untaxed and unregulated carbon emissions. Then by BLAMING Brasil for doing something productive with THEIR forest land.
Why don’t you just tax your own carbon emissions and make a difference instead? Oh it’s politically difficult. Same as any action against carbon emissions.
So let’s fuck over the third world twice by A) causing climate change which will affect them more than us and B) making THEM PAY for OUR IRRESPONSIBILITY.
Why ? Because it’s more politically feasible to fuck them than to limit our own industrial capacity. America First
And it doesn't even necessarily change anything. Read this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem
The difference between tariffs and subsidies is who gets the money. But even that doesn't really change very much unless the different people have significantly different preferences. If the American fat cats are just going to invest the money into the same ventures as the Brazilian fat cats then there is no real difference at all.
Suppose we give them money for the rain forest so they leave it alone, and they take the money and invest it in the S&P 500, and then take the returns from that and reinvest it in the same thing.
Suppose instead we threaten them with trade sanctions if they don't leave the rain forest alone, keep our money and invest it in the S&P 500 ourselves.
It's the same result in practice. The real cost to Brazil is that they don't get to have an agriculture industry where there used to be rain forest. Which fat cat subsequently gets to be the nominal owner of some shares of SPX has no real effect on ordinary humans. The fat cats care but nothing real changes for anybody else.
Because we all know Brazilians don't need oxygen to breathe.
It may be politically easier to impose sanctions or tariffs on foreign countries than to ban or tax their own electorate. I'm in favour of forcing other countries to clean up especially if those countries in turn force my country to do the same.
Look, if you reason like that you essentially say that you can never apply any pressure on others, because pressure might turn out to be too much, and might then lead to destabilization, and might then lead to conflict, which might grow into a horrible large-scale war. But that's putting yourself in a very weak position. Others may well take advantage, and you may end up in an even worse situation - on average. All that doomsday thinking about pressure is probably usually being to pessimistic. And even if things go badly, they shouldn't do so overnight; it's quite unlikely another nation wouldn't have the opportunity to reduce pressure before push comes to the rhetorical shoving.
The whole point to fight against climate change is to save future lives, but if this comes at a huge cost of present lives, then that outweighs the potential future problems.
If you put pressure on a country economically, especially one that's poor then you're creating enemies for yourself for generations. It destroys goodwill and cooperation. Look at Russia right now. They're clearly moving towards isolating themselves from the global economy, even though they brought this on themselves with hostile actions. Now imagine what would happen when other countries band together against a poor country to do the same.
I think the ill-will is probably worth it, especially if it turns out to work and future Brazilians agree that it worked. And how pressure (I didn't say sanctions, a previous poster did!) is applies matters, obviously the aim should be to both minimize the pain to normal Brazilians, and to make it as clear as possible why the sanctions (if they're part of that pressure packages) apply, and to do so so forcefully that change is inevitable.
I don't actually think Russia is a good example here at all; because the sanctions imposed on Russia are due to state belligerence - it's not easy to target those sanctions, and the Russian state has ways to subvert whatever targetting does exist. That's quite different in Brazil's case. The Brazilian state may not longer be enforcing the rules against deforestation, but it's still at least officially the policy, and I kind of doubt most Brazilians actively want the rainforest to disappear. Instead, the problem is economic incentives; and those can be more targetted externally, for instance by targetting industries that primarily cause the destruction; e.g. a ban on beef and milk products from countries in which deforestation for cattle ranching occurs, etc. If you want to retain the appearance of neutrality and don't mind spending a bit of money, you could even offset that by reductions in tariffs elsewhere, or even by subsidizing some other thing Brazilians care about or whatever.
Regardless, that's only ever going to work if Brazil eventually sees the light and agrees that saving the rainforest is worthwhile, so whatever penalties are part of the pressure package must never be enough to simultaneously piss off enough Brazilians to matter while being small enough that they stay in force for long enough to cause bad blood. If that's not doable, better to look for other pressure points; there's nothing to be won by pissing people off, harming yourself (sanctions aren't free) and Brazil, and then not having anything to show for it.
Otherwise it is nothing more than hooliganism.
People in poor countries suffer. You're basically saying that they should have fewer opportunities than others.
Of course we should do our best towards fairness as well, but perfectionism amounts to giving up.
Edit: also, many rich countries have chopped away their forests and it's now plain that doing sustainable forestry would have been much better even for the time.
If all you have to burn is wood, and all you can grow are relatively unimproved crops, then that's what you burn and grow. But nowadays even the poorest of countries has better options available, and likely can get some help in exploring those options too.
Also, brazil is not some weak, destitute country. It's GDP is comparable to italy & france, and even per capita it's similar to the EU members bulgaria and romania. At PPP, the average income is pretty much smack on the world average, similar to china and serbia (the poorest EU country). Brazil isn't rich, but neither is it poor; it has the means to spend at least a small amount of effort avoiding deforstation. And let's not forget that deforestation will likely hurt Brazil too in the medium term; trying to avoid that isn't asking for a major sacrifice. It's asking for calm, rationality, and discipline. And yes, that's not at all trivial, but it's not a black and white affair either; some improvement is probably achievable, right?
Bulgaria is a poor country. Bringing them up as an example is a bad idea, because life there isn't great.
>But nowadays even the poorest of countries has better options available, and likely can get some help in exploring those options too.
Yeah, and that "help" will come after we've sanctioned them into irrelevance, right?
How would you feel if people discussed openly like this that China should buy a large chunk of the US and force the US to submit through sanctions from the world? Sanctions that would likely severely impact the quality of life of the people in the US? (Even then Americans would still be richer than Brazilians are right now.)
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As to sanctions, and the fairness and perception thereof:
I don't think that fairness matters; nor should matter. There's no good way to figure out what's "fair" and what's not in the first place, and different people have different perceptions. Waiting for fairness simply implies not acting; and that's too costly. The whole situation isn't trivially generalizable to other countries anyhow; deforestation of the amazon happens in the amazon basin, i.e. largely in Brazil. This circumstance applies here, not elsewhere, and circumstances aren't always irrelevant.
Furthermore: the only reason to apply sanctions in the first place (and I hope I wasn't the poster to use that word?) is to induce change. If the sanctions are too mild and change not induced, they're merely harmful. If sanctions do induce change, then there's no "sanctioning into irrelevance" to speak of anymore, right?
But personally: I'd hope that sanctions could be applies precisely enough to induce change without impacting quality of life very much for the vast majority of brazilians that aren't chopping away daily. E.g. by prohibiting the trade in goods that encourage chopping as long as chopping persists (beef and vegetable oil IIRC?); If you want fairness; how about a simultaneous push to lower tariffs or other barriers on other goods. The aim should not be to punish, simply to force change.
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Finally, I'm going to emphasize that I really think aiming for international fairness is a terrible idea here - but... if indeed a similar issue were to face the US or EU, I'd vehemently agree that sanctions are warranted. And there are issues where it'd be only fair to apply pressure even today. But the thing is: it's not a tit-for-tat game; the point is to cause change. Sanctions that don't cause change are worse than pointless; they're damaging. And however unfair that may be, I don't think it's going to be easy to leverage the US like that anytime soon. Maybe china, you're right... but then the question is whether they'd do that even if it's in the rest of the world's interest - after all, sanctions typically hurt the sanctioning country too (both directly and indirectly), not to mention cause diplomatic damage. If if china had the leverage, would they "waste" it on something like GHG, or instead prefer to "win" the next trade war?
Which brings me to a small dose of realism: it might be benevolent and selfless to apply pressure on Brazil wrt. the rainforest today, but which country is going to waste whatever leverage they have over Brazil and squander diplomatic goodwill over a rainforest that's everyone's problem, most specifically Brazil's too? Brazilians might even be better off in the long run - but countries aren't easily that selfless, so it's not going to happen. This whole discussion is likely going to remain hypothetical.
I have been to Brazil and the situation is very different there. You are correct that the GDP is comparable, but the gap between the rich and the poor there is far worse, though I don't have the stats to back up my claim. Just an observation.
That being said I'm sure that the short term profits they make from cutting the rainforest will definitely only help widen the gap between the rich and the poor there. I agree with you that they have other options to better their situation in a more sustainable way.
Ref:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
How is that fair?
There is nothing good here, much less perfection. US and China, only 2 countries, can do far more to fight climate change. I want Amazon to be saved as much as anybody else. Deforestation of Amazon is something large scaled stuff and protecting it is also a big task. If we want Brazil to stop Amazon deforestation, we must also make sure that counties like US, China must also take similar big steps.
[1] https://www.rapidtransition.org/stories/how-china-brought-it...