
Amazon deforestation: Brazil's Bolsonaro dismisses data as 'lies' - pseudolus
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-49052360
======
spodek
I see remarkable similarity in Bolsonaro's response on a national scale to
nearly every American's response when choosing between making money and the
environment.

Suggest to an American to fly less and over 99% will say, "But my job. . ." as
humans fly more than ever. Not to dwell on flying, we could talk of miles
driven, plastic discarded, air conditioning empty rooms, eating more beef than
ever.

The scale is different, but the emotional response is similar.

An alternative: we could see ourselves as part of something greater than
ourselves that benefits us all including ourselves. We want Bolsonaro to feel
that way. We can do it ourselves and reduce our waste each by a good 75 to 90
percent.

As Frankl said, "We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who
walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of
bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that
everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human
freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to
choose one's own way."

~~~
scottLobster
Which is why the fix must be economic, not moral. LED light bulbs and wind
power in the Midwest aren't successes because everyone decided to pitch in,
take their place on the line and give it all for Captain Planet, they're
successes because they fulfill the fundamental promise of efficiency: do more
with less. They save people money.

And if you doubt the efficacy of said approach, just look at Texas renewable
numbers. Texas is arguably the capital of the American oil industry and is a
solidly red state. And yet it's gone from 6% Wind to 19% Wind in 10 years,
with Dallas likely to be 100% renewable by 2030:
[https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/a-snapshot-
of-t...](https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/a-snapshot-of-texas-
growing-appetite-for-wind-and-solar-power)
[https://www.windpowerengineering.com/business-news-
projects/...](https://www.windpowerengineering.com/business-news-
projects/dallas-to-cut-citys-electricity-costs-thanks-to-renewable-energy/)

It's a concept most environmentalists I encounter look upon as the dark side
of the force, like if they used economics and human selfishness towards a
positive end it would somehow take away their environmentalist virtue. Guess
it's hard to be a martyr when you take away the sacrifice. Doesn't help that
they usually look down on the individuals in question, and can't seem to
understand why "pay more and do less so you can make a negligible personal
impact on the problem, because it's the right thing to do." is a hollow
argument for many people. Maybe that person in the concentration camp who gave
his last piece of bread died, and maybe you don't want to be that person.

~~~
DFHippie
> It's a concept most environmentalists I encounter look upon as the dark side
> of the force, like if they used economics and human selfishness towards a
> positive end it would somehow take away their environmentalist virtue. Guess
> it's hard to be a martyr when you take away the sacrifice. Doesn't help that
> they usually look down on the individuals in question, and can't seem to
> understand why "pay more and do less so you can make a negligible personal
> impact on the problem, because it's the right thing to do." is a hollow
> argument for many people.

Do you think an environmentalist would read this description and think,
"that's me to a tee!"? If not, do you think you are more perceptive about the
motives, beliefs, and strategies of environmentalists than they are
themselves?

Your point would be better made without the dubious theories about the beliefs
and motives of environmentalists.

~~~
scottLobster
No, they probably wouldn't think that. But that's how it comes off in many
cases. Not all, but many. See the parent comment relating environmentalism to
the romantic martyrdom of those concentration camp prisoners who offered
comfort to others and gave up their last piece of bread. And its argument that
Americans who refuse to stop flying/driving/using plastic for their job are
somehow "emotionally" the same as Bolsonaro's politically motivated denialism.

You need look no further than any Hacker News discussion of climate change to
see tons of comments of how people should stop eating beef, stop eating all
meat, stop driving so much, stop flying, pay more for clean energy, pay more
in taxes, even stop having children (at which I will never cease to
/facepalm), all with the theme of "There is no way you have any valid argument
against any of this, so if you refuse to make these sacrifice you're part of
the problem."

I'm all for environmental regulation, I'd even be in favor of a carbon tax,
but modern environmentalism has a huge messaging problem that makes both
nearly impossible in the US outside of deep blue zones. It's way too
moralistic and way too unwilling to adapt(ironic, given its cause). Maybe if
environmentalists turned down the volume on climate change and talked more
about good jobs, clean air, clean water, they'd make more headway. Find common
ground and go with that, because in a functioning democracy we all move
forward together (given a large majority) or not at all. And in my opinion
anyone who truly cares about solving climate change should prioritize progress
over virtue.

------
emn13
We really live in the age of head-in-sand.

How do you do anything about that? Somehow reality has become not just
optional and uncertain in our policies, perceptions and opinions, but
downright irrelevant. When there's no merit in even trying to be truthful and
accurate, well... you get this.

~~~
Waterluvian
I think this is one of the costs of democracy. We could always just take power
away from all the uneducated who rely on emotion-based decision making. And
then somehow punish the educated who do the same despite being equipped with
the tools to parse the facts.

I'm sure this would work out horribly.

~~~
IAmEveryone
I'm not entirely sure of this 1:1 relationship of intelligence/education to
bad political ideas such as Bolsonaro's.

There is a lot of ideology involved, which correlates rather poorly with
intelligence. There are, for example, quite a few Republican politicians that
aren't obviously stupid, who still spent decades denying first the existence
of climate change, then the human contribution, followed by the risks and,
finally, our ability to act against it.

Other example: when people say "Barack Obama was not born in the United
States" it is not intended as a statement of fact, which is why no amount of
fact-checking and birth-certificate-producing stopped people from engaging in
that particular conspiracy theory. It is an expression of ideology.

And because every comment on such topic must end with George Orwell: In 1984
the highest achievement of ideology is the expression of facts that are
obviously wrong.

~~~
lotsofpulp
>It is an expression of ideology.

It’s a veiled way of signaling they are willing to discriminate against
certain races to other racists, while claiming plausible deniability.

------
harshreality
Leaders do not operate in an environment where they can tell the truth and do
things based on facts on the ground.[1]

Leaders have one real job, that is to reward (through jobs/money/political
clout) people who help them. If they don't think telling the truth about
deforestation or global warming will help their sycophants, they will tell
lies.

[1] CGP Grey's Rules for Rulers:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs)

~~~
benj111
Surely their real job is to get reelected?

In that case should they not at least project an aura of being in touch with
reality.

On this issue voters either don't care, in that case they wont mind you
telling the truth. Do care about deforestation but value jobs over
environment, in which case you're losing their votes. Do care and value the
environment over jobs, in which case they still don't want to be lied to, and
the lying doesn't exactly pander to them. I cant think of many other
reasonable political outlooks. So what is this? virtue signalling to some
group? Is there a group so out of touch with reality that only lies sound
reasonable? I don't know.

~~~
closeparen
>In that case should they not at least project an aura of being in touch with
reality.

Voters in democracies around the world have made it overwhelmingly clear that
they don't want that.

------
ricardobeat
This is their modus operandi. Deny everything that doesn’t fit their world
view or makes them look bad. Not even hard data or science is safe.

~~~
bmurphy1976
I think it's even simpler than that. Deny anything that is a threat to their
power/money/hegemony.

Their are plenty of people who will do and say anything (even if they don't
believe it) for self gain. It's basic short-term vs long-term thinking. They
stand to gain much in the short term and lose nothing in the long term because
they'll all be _dead_ when it comes time to collect.

Combine this with loose ethics/morals and we have a serious and intractable
problem.

~~~
braythwayt
And it’s even simpler than that again! I forget the essay I read on this
subject, but a huge factor is signalling group membership.

Truth is a terrible signal, if our group says that Dinosaurs died out 65
mission years ago, and humans rose about 100,000 years ago, anybody can
pretend to be a member and agree with us. There is no cost to saying the
truth.

And if your group’s beliefs are the same as every other group’s beliefs, there
are no “switching costs,” so your members can leave easily. You have a really
porous border between your group and the rest of the world.

But if we say that the Earth is about 6,000 years old, and humans rode
dinosaurs, and there were unicorns, but they died because they didn’t board
the Ark, and so on, well, you sound ridiculous to people outside of the tribe
when you say that.

Saying that has a real cost, so saying that proves your loyalty to the group
and by virtue of lowering your standing outside the group, drives you to seek
your comfort and standing from the group.

I am not putting it rigorously, but it boils down to the fact that humans want
to belong to groups, and groups that organize themselves around things that
are untrue (or at least rejected by all other groups) generate more loyalty
and more of a “we versus them” dynamic than groups that emphasize truth and
uncontroversial beliefs.

So it doesn’t even have to be a belief that is self-serving to the group’s
leaders (although it doesn’t hurt to have beliefs that the group leader gets
all the money and all the young and comely followers as partners).

It’s enough to demand that the group’s members base their loyalty on their
faith in beliefs rejected by everyone else.

(None of this disagrees with your point, after all, if a leader bases their
power on the size and loyalty of the group, false beliefs are inherently
protecting the leader’s power. You don’t need cults to see this. Most
companies have a lot of beliefs that every reasoning person can see are false.
They know that the diversity initiative is a sham in most companies. They know
that “employees are our greatest resource” is said often, but the company
behaves like a cobalt mine in the third world, and so on. But loyalty demands
that everyone pretend these things are true.)

------
TomMckenny
The new crop of wannabe autocrats call every inconvenient fact a lie. They
imply a vast conspiracy to undermine their "always right" supporters and the
one and only leader who can fix things.

In democracies with bad leaders you might get "it needs more study" or "we
can't afford it" or just silence. At worst opponents are labeled "misguided".
But the new autocrats end all conversation by turning facts and those who
believe them into conspiring enemies.

------
diegoholiveira
The data from INPE is accurate, but no one is talking about what is showing
us: most part of the deforestation is happening in Bolivia and Peru. In the
last decades, deforestation in Brazil was been decreasing a lot.

------
superpermutat0r
What do the EU and USA do? Import more soybeans for their growing livestock
industry. No penalties for anything, only rewards.

~~~
pridkett
79% of Brazilian soybean exports go to China. Very very little goes to the US
as it’s a net exporter (by a significant margin).

Source:
[https://oec.world/en/visualize/tree_map/hs92/export/bra/show...](https://oec.world/en/visualize/tree_map/hs92/export/bra/show/1201/2017/)

~~~
superpermutat0r
Good correction, I meant beef, it's linked. Although USA does seem to avoid
Brazilian soybean and beef.

~~~
pridkett
Thanks for the clarification. This led me down a fun rabbit hole of
understanding Brazilian exports. I would not have guessed that Lebanon and
Saudi Arabia were the third and fourth largest importers of Brazilian beef
after Chile and the Netherlands.

------
oldwinebottles
Again, for the ones that don't have a side in Brazilian politics but do have a
concern for the Amazon, and what the president may or may not do, I'd suggest
checking out
[https://www.brazilianpoliticspodcast.com](https://www.brazilianpoliticspodcast.com)
for unbiased political information/analysis on the country and its policies.

------
reese_john
Here's the actual Amazon deforestation data in the last decades:
[https://imgur.com/a/cA5mXMc](https://imgur.com/a/cA5mXMc)

2018 was a bit higher than 2017, but there is a clear downward trend. Honestly
I would like to see more data points before crucifying Bolsonaro.

~~~
user982
Bolsonaro took power in 2019, replacing the more left-leaning Workers' Party,
which held the presidency from 2003 to 2018*.

With those dates in mind, look at your data again.

~~~
Carioca
Nitpick: the Worker's Party was in power up to 2016, when president Dilma
Rousseff was impeached and their former allies, centrists Democratic Movement,
rose to power. Even Dilma wasn't particularly friendly to the environment, as
can be seen on the 2010-2016 data.

Bolsonaro's presidency is on another level of pandering to illegal loggers and
agribusiness, though. The current Minister of the Environment, Ricardo Salles,
is openly hostile to anything relating to preservation. Including risking a
free investment by European countries to the tune of about half a billion
dollars

------
markvdb
A leader who rejects science should be consistent and not use its fruits
either.

------
holografix
You can put the blame for Trump, Brexit, Bozo-naro and other populists
squarely at the feet of the previous administrations.

The political elite alienated the population.

By spying, failing to prosecute financial criminals that decimated economies,
stealing several billion dollars, failing to pro-actively prevent a human
calamity in the Russia x US proxy wars in Syria, squabbling amongst themselves
as the non-politicians gained in popularity.

Can you blame people who’s savings and jobs were annihilated by the GFC and
saw no major arrests voting the incumbents out?

Can you blame the underprivileged domestic populations in Europe from turning
right and nationalistic when they see spikes in homelessness, criminality and
culture friction when their small towns are flooded with desperate immigrants?

Can you blame people voting out de-facto organised crime from power after they
rob billions from a third world economy?

I don’t think it’s right. I think Bozo-naro is an embarrassment of a human
being. But I empathise with the people who threw the previous job out.

~~~
pas
The people responsible for the machinations (loosened regulations, underfunded
financial oversight agencies, underfunded consumer protection, etc) are
now/still in power.

Blaming the elites of old is a fallacy, because the elites of old are the
elites of new. Brexit is a conservative issue, due to conservatives
underfunding education, healthcare, fire brigades and the police and blame it
on the EU and immigrants.

Trump is put in place by the same party that caused the GFC.

And Bolsonaro is probably even more corrupt than Dima et al. Yet people voted
for him.

How, why? Because they were not aggressively authoritan. Trump openly flouts
with totalitarianism. Let's see how Bolsonaro will fare.

(And I'm not trying to somehow wash the previous administrations clean.
Clinton loosened the financial rules, he could have vetoed it, but I don't
think that would have mattered, the lack of funding for competent oversight is
the main point, and that was under Bush.

Similarly I don't have any love for the Labor govs in UK, but fiscal
responsibility aka. let's underfund the stuff that only poors use is a classic
conservative trope.)

~~~
holografix
I don’t blame the elites. I blame the people who were in place with the power
to restrict the elite’s behaviour.

Corrupt, incompetent or inconsequent politicians can not be rewarded with re-
elections they need to be voted out. However when the population stops
believing that any political party presents a credible choice we get
populists. We get the “non-politicians”.

Of course they solve nothing. They’re worse than the established politicians.

~~~
pas
There were ... really no one to reign in the elites. That's why they are the
elites. Only a subgroup of them can meaningfully challenge a different
subgroup of elites. (Not counting revolutions, and other serious regime
changes.)

Alas the re-election rate is astoundingly high. There's no consequence for
being a sellout. Populism thrives on these imbeciles.

------
FailMore
What needs to happen for Long Term Earth?

1) The economics of every process must take into account the cost of the
environment. If it's not going to biodegrade, that costs. If it comes from an
unsustainable logging practice, that costs. If came in a boat from across the
world, that costs. Adding the cost of environmental consequences to all stages
of production opens up the room for investors to sensibly bet on less damaging
production methods. We will look back at this time and rub our eyes when we
realise what an insane free-for-all it has been.

2) A global body needs to be created to handle environmental policy, probably
balancing quality of life with environmental outcomes. This body should be
elected, but independent from politicians. Just like monetary policy was been
removed from the easily bendable hands of politicians, the environment needs
to be too. This deals with i) the short term thinking required of politicians
[elections] ii) the global nature of the problem.

~~~
bharam
> A global body needs to be created to handle environmental policy

I think some people have too much faith in the ability of politicians and
bureaucrats to protect the environment.

A better solution would be decentralized decision making. Place ownership of
the rain forest in private hands and let the market determine the most
valuable use of the land. If a sufficient number of people believe the rain
forest should be set aside for environmental preservation they will have the
ability to act on that belief.

Letting politicians and bureaucrats decide will do nothing to preserve the
rain forest or environment short- or long term.

~~~
devxvda
> Place ownership of the rain forest in private hands and let the market
> determine the most valuable use of the land.

I find it much easier to believe that this satire, because were it up to the
“Market”, the rainforest would be gone, and every river polluted. Short-term
profits are incompatible with environmental protection. Just because a few men
get rich doesn’t mean the result is what’s overall best for society. The
“market” (quotes necessary because it’s so much more complicated than that)
has decided that continuing to burn fossil fuels is what’s best, and look how
that’s working out.

The incentives have to change. Making money hand over fist typically only
benefits a select few, to the detriment of the many. How many more examples do
we need?

~~~
FailMore
Exactly, only if the environment is given financial value will things change.
I can see that being the only solution to the current situation. It enables
financial optimisation, but results in protection. There will be much
resistance though.

~~~
defterGoose
> only if the environment is given financial value will things change.

Or maybe we should try to help people understand that it's futile to see in
terms of human concepts (like profit) the entity which literally created our
species. Perhaps financialization of literally everything we should hold dear
is the problem? The value of human life itself has at times been boiled down
to a dollar amount, but that doesn't mean you can go around killing as many
people as you want as long as your bank account is big enough (oh, unless
you're a corporation of course).

~~~
bharam
> it's futile to see in terms of human concepts (like profit) the entity which
> literally created our species.

Why is it futile to understand our planet in terms of human concepts? What
alternative means of understanding do you have in mind? Direct perception or
revelation? Feelings?

~~~
defterGoose
Maybe I should clarify: I didn't mean that it's always futile to build mental
models to understand the world. More that in this instance, our attempts to
rationalize our behavior and use that understanding to guide future behavior
(via economics, esp.) have clearly been at least partially a failure. If we
continue to see profit as the ultimate goal of human endeavor, we do so at our
peril. I think it's clear that economics is lagging behind the physical
sciences in it's ability to successfully guide our behavior. It needs
modifications to be able to properly deal with externalities; otherwise we're
on a collision course with a future that I think most people would consider
highly dystopian.

------
SpikeDad
Well if we had native resources that had been protected for years and suddenly
we had a President that had little concern for environmental issues we'd
probably also be increasing the destruction of it in order for his political
supporters to increase their profits.

Oh wait... Sigh.

------
0815test
> Amazon deforestation: Brazil's Bolsonaro dismisses data as 'lies'

I'm pretty sure the standard term is "Fake news".

------
oldwinebottles
I don't have the time or patience to engage, but for the ones that don't have
a side in Brazilian politics, the Amazon should be fine.

Bolsonaro is a fool with words, but has shown to be well intended. He'll
probably come around on this particular issue (as it has already happened a
few times during his government).

~~~
jkoudys
"don't pay attention to what he says or does, just have blind faith that he'll
be great!"

~~~
oldwinebottles
I actually meant the exact opposite of that. Stop reading headlines and start
looking at what is being done.

~~~
ricardobeat
Which is exactly _what_ in this case, considering the increase in logging is
happening under his government?

