Or lets say those natives get tired of living a primitive lifestyle and support building a road and power lines into their village.
They should be happy to live their primitive life and run around naked so rich western eco types can go down and take their picture.
I think Brazil should charge the world an air tax. They could spend that money employing their citizens to maintain the integrity of the rain forest.
Please read my contributions to the earlier thread. Especially these posts.
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=21826968&postcount=36
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=21829554&postcount=45
In short, the oxygen levels will not be measurably affected by the Amazon fires. But the carbon dioxide levels could be severely affected.
Which indigenous Brazilian have you listened to, or spoken with, or read the writings of, that leads you to think this is anything remotely related to reality? I mean, since you’re calling folks racist and all.
Dontcha know, if it weren’t for meddling rich foreigners, the indigenous people would willingly sell their land for a fair and openly negotiated price and move to a nice quiet suburb and take up knitting.
The argument is that we should more heavily weight the preferences of the original people who live in that forest and derive their entire livelihoods from it.
To be logically consistent, that would mean we weigh their opinions more if they want to burn it down. But even an elementary view of history shows that natives consistently are the ones who want to preserve their forests while drooling capitalist morons want to destroy it for extractive purposes.
Kind of arrogant of you. What if they just want a damn higher standard of living than living in a mud hut? What if they want a way to have commerce and trade with the outside world? What if they want electricity?
‘We did something terrible so everyone else should get to do it also’ isn’t a very good argument.
‘We got rich by doing terrible things so we should spend some of that money paying other people not to do the same terrible things’ is a pretty good one, IMO. But just ‘even though we found out that was a bad idea everybody gets one round of doing it anyway’ isn’t.
How about we pay attention to what indigenous people are actually saying?
I haven’t time right now to make a study of the issue, and I’m sure they’re not all saying the same thing. But I’ve seen at least a couple of articles showing indigenous people at the forefront of protests against the fires. And I have no idea whether they’re living in “mud huts” with no electricity, let alone whether if they are they prefer living in their own mud huts to renting in high rises.
For that matter, there are lots of ways to have commerce and trade with the outside world, and even to get electricity, many of which don’t require burning down one’s home first.
What if they don’t?
BBC had a good article earlier this week sorting out the falsehoods and realities: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-49450925
That article linked to another one, in which one graphic showed the acres de-forested in July were 2.5 times the previous worst month (although the chart only goes back to 2015): The Amazon in Brazil is on fire - how bad is it? - BBC News
Remind me again of what position is racist? Christ almighty.
Thanks for that great link which answers some of my questions.
Some worth pulling out -
Great article. Thanks again for the link.
I think it’s clear that the fires themselves are bad enough for many reasons but one doesnt have to say it’s 20% of the worlds oxygen to make a point how important the amazon is.
Indeed, but I will have to point out here that mainstream media was already well known for getting things wrong about science.
Point here that it is almost obligatory to point out that thereafter a lot of the media from the right and blogessors then grab those errors and then make a huge talking point about ‘most scientists getting wrong’ regarding an issue like climate science when it was the news writers who did get it wrong.
What scientists are saying is not the same as the mainstream reports it, and then it is even less so when the right wing media gets to it when their intention is to seed doubts not only about non-right wing media but about the science itself. That crucial part about the science being more accurate than the media is usually skipped when histories like this one are ‘examined’ later.
To go back to the OP, I’d say no, we aren’t being lied to. We just aren’t paying attention. You have to pick your sources. I don’t watch CNN, but all I seem to read is stories about how the Amazon isn’t responsible for 20 percent of the O2. For example, here’s a Chicago Tribune headline “Is the Amazon the ‘lungs of the world’? Northwestern scientist says rainforest not source of 20 percent of Earth’s oxygen, but fires can add to greenhouse effect” which is true. Macron misspoke. I’m not going to say he lied, but he’s been corrected over and over.
The general population seems to think that O2 and CO2 are roughly equal parts of the atmosphere, whereas O2 is a fifth of the atmosphere, and CO2 is measured in parts per million. A trivial amount but that slight amount of CO2 helps kept warm. Unfortunately, it’s gone up about 25% (320ppm to 400ppm) just over my lifetime, so now that’s keeping us more than a bit too warm. I don’t know the effect of burning a rain-forest, but it’s not going to take a lot of CO2 to shift the curve up still more.