Take a Cool Guess—The Fun Quiz on Renewable Energy and Environmental Sustainability. Today’s Topic: Losing the Amazon
Question: At what rate are we losing the Amazon rain forest, in terms of acres per hour?
Answer: Can be found at Clean Energy Answers.
Relevance: Needless to say, this is a serious matter, for dozens of different reasons, including absorption of CO2 and providing the habitat to support biodiversity.
Amazing painting above by Maurizio Rega; he loves trees as subject matter.
Craig,
Very alarming indeed ! Although exactly what can be done to stop the rate of deforestation,especially with the attitude of the Brazilian President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro is difficult to foresee.
It will need a very subtle and persuasive effort on behalf of the world community to persuade President Bolsonaro to continue preserving the Amazon rain-forest.
One thing that will not help is loud demonstrations, abuse and threats. Bolsonaro is not the sort of guy who would respond favorably to such pressure.
Very worrying indeed.
Craig,
Craig,
(Sorry, I closed because I thought my flight had been called, but it’s still delayed by over an hour).
The folly of pursuing a radical agenda in such matters has been well illustrated by the recent riots and forced back down in France by the threat of the French government introducing a raft of “green’ tax measures (carbon taxes etc).
In America, the UK and other nations, the radical left and activists, like yourself who ranted
about how eager the sophisticated French welcomed the Paris Agreement, are now strangely silent at the spectacle of a ‘people’s revolt’ against the tyranny of radical environmentalism.
Across France hundreds of thousands of ‘gilets jaunes’ stormed the streets of France in often violent protests against Emmanuel Macron and his treatment of them with aloof technocratic disdain.
This is not a rebellion funded by oil companies, but a true “people’s” revolt against the onerous consequences of radical climate-change policy.
The demonstrators the ordinary, little people of France who are tired of being condescendingly sneered at for daring to live relatively modern fossil-fuelled lives, against the politics of excessive environmentalism.
This is unprecedented ! For the first time, the first mass uprising against eco-elitism is occurring and the leftist elite have only themselves to blame.
As Brendon O’Neil writes in the Spectator Magazine;
“For years we have lived in a climate of ‘You can’t say that’. You can’t criticise mass immigration — that’s xenophobia. You can’t oppose the EU — that’s Europhobia.
You can’t raise concerns about radical Islam — that’s Islamophobia. You can’t agitate against climate-change polic,that’s climate-change denialism, on a par with Holocaust denialism, and anyone who dares to bristle against eco-orthodoxy deserves to be cast out of polite society.
Yet now, in this populist moment, people are daring to say precisely these unsayable things. They’re standing up to the EU. They’re demanding that immigration become a democratic concern rather than something worked out for us by unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels.
Now they’re even grating against the hitherto unquestionable religious-style diktat that we must all drive less, shop less and do less in order to ‘save the planet’”.
I’m not sure as I would go as far as Brendon, but for years I’ve been warning of this sort of backlash created by eco-left extremism.