Comment by rmsaksida | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rmsaksida | Hacker News Reader

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> North America has some of the most abundant forests, oil fields, and coal deposits in the world, and that without accepting payment to compensate for not consuming them

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?

Also, how much does North America need the money they'd get out of consuming those resources?

> Similarly, Europe has many resources of its own

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.

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

> most of the consumption of natural resources in these countries predated our modern understanding of environment

Yes, but the fact is Western countries are wealthy and the resources they consumed throughout their history surely played a part in the wealth they've accumulated. Why shouldn't Brazil have that chance?

To clarify, I do not think it's reasonable to cut down the forest - but it's very easy and convenient for European countries to point fingers when they've gotten rich off their own resources and other countries' resources via colonialism.

> If the US demanded a check from Brazil in order to halt the creation of some oil pipeline or coal mine, they would rightly be laughed out of the room

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.

> Maybe the analog here is a border adjustment for Brazil and other countries that aren't managing their environment to some accepted standard, so that other Western countries aren't contributing to Brazilian deforestation

I would fully support that. I don't think we'll see any improvements to the situation until other countries maneuver to make deforestation an economic issue.

> Also, how much does North America need the money they'd get out of consuming those resources?

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.

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