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| Finishing out this conversation here just for completeness by blackwater 08/26/2019, 9:13pm PDT | ||||
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| My comment was kind of offhand. I didn't do a lot of research about it.
The only things I know about Lula da Silva is that he was at the center of a Watergate-like web of government malfeasance, and that he refused to extradite a literal communist terrorist to face trial in Europe. Neither one really makes me think that this guy is a national treasure for Brazil. If you look at the graph that the New York Times itself provides (I can't link to the graph directly because of their HTML shenanigans), there is definitely a big decline in deforestation during the 2003-2010, during Lula's time in power. However, you can also see that the there has been an increase in deforestation since 2014. In 2014, Lula's handpicked successor was still in power. Will Bolsonaro make things worse? Maybe. There are some bad signs. But for now, he is sending in the army to help fight the fires. Now, maybe you could argue that he needs to start prosecuting people for starting the fires. But Brazil is big, and a lot of it is virtually lawless. If you do something in the jungle, it's going to be kind of hard for the government to find out. In the failed state of California (why does that sound so truthy?), all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't stop almost 2 million acres from burning in 2018. Is that because Governor Brown is a space alien who is secretly scheming to destroy the state from inside? Yes. I mean no. Definitely no. This stuff is hard. It's even harder when the economic interests of some very poor people are on the side of clearing the forest. This is going to be the real conflict in the future. Not really left versus right, but poor people who want a piece of the pie, versus rich people who want the pie preserved so our grandchildren can see the rare spotted toad and etc. etc. Probably the best way to thread the needle is more tourism, more parks, and more rights for indigenous peoples. As far as running out of oxygen goes... the scientific consensus is that the rainforest consumes as much oxygen as it produces. Of course, it's still shitty to burn it down, and it will still affect the environment in many other negative ways. The big one, of course, is putting more co2 into the atmosphere. If burning down the forest would shut off 20% of our oxygen supply, I'm pretty sure the Times would lead with that. (Unless the forest burning had something to do with racism or slavery, in which case that would clearly take precedence over the Earth becoming uninhabitable.) |
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