Brazil scientists map forest regrowth keeping Amazon from collapse: Study

How much economic benefit would those resources offer if consumed? In the case of forests, is the land covered by them fit for pasture or crops? Is that an apt comparison with the Amazon?

The US alone has more untapped oil than any other country on the planet, including Saudi Arabia or Russia, and those countries are largely dependent on oil for their whole economies. So I would expect that there's enough oil to finance an entire second world economy (if not first world), especially prior to the recent decline in oil prices. And that's not counting forest or oil.

As far as forests, I'm sure much of it isn't fit for crops because most of what was fit for crops was cleared hundreds of years prior to our modern understanding of environment. America should work to eliminate and reverse its own environmental damage and Brazil should do the same. To that end, America has bigger environmental opportunities than reforesting agricultural land--for example, passing a carbon tax (with border adjustments) will certainly yield more environmental benefit (at lower cost).

> Is that so? How much of Europe is covered by native forests? In Brazil it's roughly 50% of the country. And that's native rain forest, not artificial reforestation.

Doesn't matter. The original claim was that western countries exhausted their own resources, so any amount greater than zero suffices to disprove it (and thus the broader argument that depends on that claim).

> Is Europe willing to relocate people out of territories they've occupied for generations to restore the original forests?

I don't buy your underlying assumption that Brazil not knowingly deforesting the Amazon is equivalent to Europe reversing damage they did during the Iron Age. What sense does it make to fault living Europeans for decisions that Iron Age Europeans made? They're both nominally European in that they reside in Europe, but they're different populations. I grant you that extant Europeans benefit from the dearth of forests in the same way that Brazilians benefit from the forests that have already been cleared, but how do we compare these things? Why do we need both polities to have the same percentage of preserved vs cleared forests? Or does fairness demand that the economies of all polities are exactly the same (or the same per-capita)?

Fairness is inherently subjective, so we oughtn't defer environmental progress to such a time as we discover some objective notion of fairness (or even one that we all agree upon); rather, each country should work to improve its own environmental trajectory and not make excuses based on other countries.

> If the US were a poor country and the oil pipeline would represent a big economic gain for them, I honestly don't think that would be unreasonable. You can't expect poor countries to sit on their hands if it's a game changing opportunity.

According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves_in_the_United_Sta...), there's something like $20 trillion in oil (at its peak price in 2008, there was about $20 trillion in undiscovered oil reserves alone). There's no dearth of poverty in the United States.

More important are our current post-modernization emissions.

Would you prefer to normalize the data in the only other way that makes sense - per country? Give each country 1/193th of the world's carbon budget? The West would still not be looking pretty under that plan.

Or would you prefer that we also account historic emissions? That only seems fair to me (and would put us on track for decades of negative emissions, starting tomorrow, to pay back what we borrowed from the future.)

I know that at some level their merch and maybe the wasteful things are not a major sources of climate change but ... the attitude is. Each individual youtuber/podcaster is taking the attitude "My income is more important than the environment" which is basically the attitude almost everyone takes and arguably in the exact same category as fast fashion etc.

Do you really need a Kurzgesagt calendar/poster/plushy shipped across the world to you? Flash Forward Podcast is always advertising you should subscribe to have gourmet beers shipped to you on subscription. Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast shills for Bespoke Post to send you boxes of stuff you don't need every month. Isn't there some kind of disconnect between these shows telling us we should do more about climate change and then pushing exactly the kind of consumerism that brought us here?

It was sad to watch VOX try to justify traveling by plane 10-20 times a year.

There's two ways this story goes, humanity decides to consume less meat in the future, or climate change forces humanity to eat less meat in the future. There's no other option out of this, the current situation is absolutely unsustainable.

If your burn down chart says you'll be broke in 5 months, then you can either spend less, or you'll be forced to spend less once you're insolvent. There's no way to continue down that path forever.

The cites for the tipping point are two editorials written by the same team of two researches in Science Advances, these are editorials, not research articles.

They cite https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200... that is a peer-reviewed research article in Geophysical Research Letters.

The research article claims that with a 40% deforestation the rain reduction will cause problems, but in the editorial they use hand waving to reduce that to 20%.

Yes, because those three-letter agencies have a fantastic track record in South America. [/s]

That would be a fine way to make things exponentially worse.

Have you ever read a book by Hannah Arendt called Eichmann in Jerusalem? The whole point of the book is the sheer banality of evil -- that the bulk of evil is not the sensationalist stuff that makes up movies, but its boring, bureaucratic machinations and tacit complicity of civilians under the regime.

So all I can say about your idea is it is at best naive and at worst cynical. First of all, it's naive because it supposes that military intervention ever works when that flies in the face of history showing that nation-building (especially of the American sort) never works unless it's the kind that comes about indigenously -- if it was so easy to fix problems, why has American military intervention post WWII been an almost complete failure?

Second of all, it's cynical because it's easy to support such ideas when you're not the citizen who has to suffer through the consequences if things get worse. What would be your response if your idea simply doesn't work? "Better luck next time?"

This isn't a game.

I do believe that there are good and bad NGOs acting there. There are even registered cases https://www.dw.com/pt-br/membros-de-ong-s%C3%A3o-presos-na-a...

I couldn't find the text in German or English, but "Deutsche Welle" isn't exactly pro-bolsonaro.

EDIT, found one article from "The Guardian"

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/26/brazil-police-...