It's easy to sit in a developed western country, buying products from other countries, and then complain about their emissions. I'm glad that we're trying to be responsible. It may not be enough or not the right way to do it (some thoughts on this?), but it's something.
I'm not sure how it's being protected though.
OTOH the earth has been getting greener recently:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/we-are-making-the-gl...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100201171641.h...
They marketed it in an "own a piece of the rainforest" way and kid me was super stoked about the idea of owning a piece of rainforest, imagining how I would be living there.
I think it might have been Yps [0], but I'm not 100% certain.
That's why we need a carbon tax. To force people to.
Help me find a consumer toaster made in the United States. I searched for six months and only found ones made in China.
If I want a giant hotel toaster, there is an American option. But nothing sized for a household kitchen.
There are lots of people who make efforts to buy domestically. But so much manufacturing has gone to China that for some items there is no alternative.
If you're familiar with the history of industrialism, all currently clean and rich countries went through a phase of horrible dirtiness as they rose out of awful poverty.
Fortunately, China seems to go through the same steps as the west 3-5 times faster than we did.
Sometimes, the only way out is through!
if you want to reduce emissions stop consuming
Doing what you suggest would not necessarily have any impact on emissions (as they might just shift to another country) while ensuring that 1.3 billion people remain poor and that their country remains undeveloped.
Far better to impose strict requirements on production methods. But if that is more expensive there should also be financial help available to countries that may not afford it.
There are better solutions that don't involve trading human suffering for environmental protection.
Is everything made in China uniformally disastrous for the environment?
I was under the impression the easiest way for people, who live in developed nations, to reduce emissions is to eat less meat?
Granted if you really really want to reduce your personal emissions, stop using technology from post-1950, maybe buy some land...
Poor people have been put in a position where they really don't have a lot of options. Blaming poor Westerners is like blaming a child for their parent's bad spending habits.
At least in Spain, a tremendous percentage of land is put at the service of mankind. The dehesas give cork, honey, acorns to feed the pigs, and grass for the cattle.
The situation where developing countries need to conserve their land in a natural state in the interest of biodiversity and climate reminds me a game of Civilization where you are no longer allowed to exploit them to your advantage (with good reason!). We need to keep this land intact, but the only way to do it is to make conservation more valuable than exploitation.
When I was in southern Germany I did notice how cultivated the land was. There were a few patches of trees but they didn’t look like old growth forests. Even the hills were cultivated into farmland.
Costa Rica is a good example of developing a country who wants to keep their natural resources in tact. 25% of their land are national parks.
Wild boars scare me much more than black bears.
Yeah, keep this in mind; big parts of Europe are hundreds of years after a gradual deforestation. Europe, mostly Western, is highly cultivated. Mind you, thanks to that we're also very efficient in agriculture - NL, despite being one of the smallest countries in the world, is also the second biggest agricultural export country in the world.
They agreed to merely postpone it for a year https://www.reuters.com/article/us-rwe-lignite-hambach/germa...
Actually a great part of European biodiversity depends on the cultivation of the land. The natural state would be forests and swamps. Grazing leads to open lands with a multitude of grasses, other small plants, bushes, hedges and solitary huge trees, which support different insects and birds.
In Germany we have a biome type, Heide (seems to correspond to heath [0]), that was created by degrading the land by removing the good topsoil to fertilize fields (as opposed to field rotation which was used in the south), and which is now a valuable habitat for many species.
However, much of this also depends on a non-intensive cultivation, where less-than-ideal areas (rocky, too steep, too wet..) are left alone or only used occasionally (eg to cut the hedges). This kind of use is going down, which is ap problem.
Another thing that changed my mind in the last few years: Even the Amazon region, which in the West has this aura of untouched wilderness, was recently found to have been heavily populated and changed by humans in the past, eg to make the ground more fertile in some areas. The key is to work with the forest, not against it, and there is so much we can do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_reintroduction#Europe
Hypocritical seems a bit strong though. The extinctions in europe happened a long time ago, those people are dead. Conservation may stand in the way of a particular guy's dinner but it's not like shooting all the gorillas is the key to Uganda getting to first-world living standards -- the advice that they are worth more alive than dead is probably sound.
What has been wiped out? We do have wolves and bears.
Clearing your land for agriculture only benefits a select few. It is not a good way to grow into a first world economy.
Bringing up what Europeans did 1000-500 years ago is not a good analogy.
But you shouldn't assume that there are no poisonous snakes. That's not true even in the most cultivated parts - many snakes do pretty well regardless.
Here's how we're monetizing conservation locally:
"..
To offset their own carbon emissions, European companies have been overpaying China to incinerate a powerful greenhouse gas known as hfc 23.
And in a bizarre twist, those payments have spurred the manufacture of a harmful refrigerant that is being smuggled into the U.S. and used illegally.
…"
https://e360.yale.edu/features/perverse_co2_payments_send_fl...
A somewhat similar initiative regarding the Yasuni rainforest in Equador unfortunately went nowhere a couple of years ago because rich countries weren't willing enough to pay.
It's usually countered by saying "that oil would get pumped anyway, better us doing it 'cause our oil sector has the smallest CO2 impact per barrel of oil pumped" or something along those lines.
A decent argument, but it hinges on a massive "what if".
The other blurb[2] I read recently was about Maya Bay. A situation like this is a bit more amenable to ecotourism and whatnot than palm plantation... but still it's a daunting task to try to preserve the environment in a country that's very dependent upon it for short-term sustenance.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/19/palm-oil-ingred...
2: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/the_beach_nobody...
Just like europe loves to pretend it is lowering emissions when it's just shifting manufacturing to china, norway loves to pretend to be environmenally friendly with its oil money.
If europe or norway truly cared about emissions or the environment, they'd end global trade and drilling for oil, but they aren't going to give up their luxurious first world lifestyle are they?
Edit: To everyone downvoting, how about this scenario. We give norway $1 billion for them to shut down their oil rigs? Surely norway will sacrifice their economic wealth and prosperity to help the environment right? Or do we only expect that from poor countries?
The whole point is that it isn't realistic to assume that it's possible to quit oil overnight, buy it's very possible to mitigate its effect by converting some externalities to a concrete price tag and thus creating incentives to abandon the use of at least some fossil fuels and to compensate those who contribute to invert the tendency.
How about this, if indonesia told norway to go to hell, cut down their forests, got rich and then in 20 years paid Laos $1 billion to spare their forests. Would we celebrate indonesia as great environmentalists? Of course not. We'd call them hypocrites, especially when the deforestation just moved to cambodia instead.
At the end of the day, this exercise is just wealthy european neocolonialists trying to feel better about themselves as they keep a underdeveloped country poor. While norway gets to destroy their and other countries resources to enrich itself, they use that ill gotten wealth to dupe poor countries to stay poor.
How about this, lets shift wealth instead. Tax all of europe X amount of money and shift that wealth to indonesia and ASEAN to achieve an equal living standard? This way, indonesia and ASEAN won't touch their forests or resources and their living standard will be equal to that of europe? Now that would make a real difference.
Of course it would mean europeans living standard would have to decline, but europeans (especially norwegians) are such environment loving saints right? They are willing to sacrifice right? Or are they greedy like the rest of us and want others to sacrifice while they themselves enjoy the good life?
Or how about this, we give norway $1 billion to shut down their oil industry? Do you think the norwegians would agree to that? Of course not.
Less than half of the exports from Norway are oil. It accounts to less than a quarter of revenue. See: https://www.norskpetroleum.no/en/economy/governments-revenue...
Nevermind that half of a nation's export or a quarter of a nation's revenue from a single source is a ridiculous amount, the money norway uses to play neocolonist comes from their sovereign wealth fund(s) which come entirely from oil.
Also, indonesia ( and ASEANs ) problem is poverty, education and economic development. That $1 billion is nothing in the greater scheme of things. Heck it probably made things worse because deforestation went elsewhere, indonesia's development was slightly stunted and indonesia will probably deforest at a greater rate in the future.
Maybe if norway truly cared, they will force netherlands to pay reparations for colonization to indonesia and hand over the assets of the largest oil company in the world ( royal dutch shell ) to indonesia so that indonesia could develop faster. The dutch got rich stealing oil from indonesia. Maybe return some of that back?
Or buying $1 billion in advertising for self-congratulatory purposes while making things worse is better.
What has fundamentally changed? Nothing. It's like a billionaire tossing a homeless man $1 and being celebrated for their charity. Especially so if the billionaire caused a financial crisis that cause the guy to lose his job, home and become homeless in the first place.
I'm sure the indonesians living in poverty are ecstatic that wealthy norwegians are using their oil money to toss them some crumbs.
