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Comment by aznpwnzor | Hacker News Reader

The world needs to pay Brazil for management of the Amazon. If the Amazon is truly (and it is) this important to the planet, then they should be paid to not destroy it to earn a living.

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Our government is short sighted so even if you all chipped something, our current president would rather have it burned to the ground to allow illegal mining, wood cutters and cattle raising on the burned ground.

http://www.amazonfund.gov.br/en/home/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/16/norway-halts-a...

> SAO PAULO, Brazil — First, Brazil announced it would take foreign aid away from projects to protect the Amazon rainforest and give it instead to cattle and soybean farmers.

> Next, Germany and Norway froze tens of millions of dollars in planned assistance.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/bolsonaros...

I don't necessarily disagree, but this feels like a diplomatic nightmare. It would encourage the rest of the world to threaten to burn their resources too, in order to extract payment.

Perhaps we should be paying the rest of the world too, but what if there's a disagreement about how much a resource is worth? And remember, this is all money that could be invested in solar panels, or carbon capture, or countless other things.

Clearly the UN should be funded and buy this to set aside as a global reserve.

Then the UN can help put out fires, but only if fired upon.

Given the UN’s history of corruption, they’re the last org that should run anything. See Oil for Food scandal for one example.

>How do you avoid encouraging the rest of the world to also threaten to burn their resources?

I mean, this type of extortion for foreign aid is already common among pariah states. See: North Korea.

That'd be great, like you can see how good Brazil is at managing its resources, so let's all pay them, they surely will not spend it on their 5th megayacht.

Why does it matter if they spend it on their megayatch as long as they did what they paid for, which is not burn the Amazon.

Jesus Christ... So Brazil gets to dictate some sort of hostage/cold-war scenario and you're suggesting that this is a good solution?

That is exactly what is being proposed, but the inverse.

Very true. Unfortunately there is no way to put a value on the environment until it needs to be fixed. In reality its value is infinite but current economics can't place a value so we don't. But I can imagine a system where the world's large economies start paying to save it.

This is already being done. Germany and France are paying Brazil 1.5b to keep the forest safe but Balsinaro is unwilling to curb the illegal logging. This is making the Europeans wonder why they should be investing this 1.5b into something that will clearly not be respected/carried out.

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