In this case, it will be the encouragement by the Brazilian government of uncontrolled logging in the all-important Amazon rain forest, in this case, the very heretofore unexplored center regions, through auctioning off logging rights. Unfortunately for everyone else (and every living thing on the planet) the Amazon just happens to be our most important land-based ecosystem, for one thing, in terms of generating oxygen, as well as regulating those greenhouse gases (especially CO2), as well as the home to innumerable species found nowhere else… and, you get the idea.
What we have is that most dangerous of all animals, the human formerly-leftist-politician who wants to be reelected by garnering “business” support… in this case, the politician being Luis Inacio Lula de Silva, or “Lula” as he is widely known, who ran and won as a hard-left socialist with heavy support from the environmental movement. The rationalizing rationale is that there is a great deal of illegal poaching of Brazil’s Amazon and other forests anyway… this will just be an opportunity to regulate it and capture some revenue from it. The problem is that no resources whatsoever are going to be put into regulating it: just paper laws, to be enforced by local peasants without any means whatsoever to do it. [Note to environmentalists with means out there: this is an area where we industrialized First Worlders should make an offer to pay Brazil for the right to protect its forests, by supplying first world enforcement for the right to intervene, in exchange for trading some carbon credits under the Kyoto arrangement… the McCain-Lieberman-Obama bill can include this, for example.]
In short, the central government in Brasilia and some politicians will make some money, while the poachers and clear-cutters in the Amazon get help to move into the heart of the jungle, which heretofore, had at least been logistically off-limits.
I realize that as citizens of one of two nations that refuse to ratify Kyoto (four counting Liechtenstein and Monaco), with our insistence on aggressive war, violating the Geneva Conventions and other international law against torture, detaining children, and so forth, we Americans pretty much have a government that has shot our moral standing on just about anything, including this. But what Lula is going to do in Brazil, unless someone has technical information that Amazon logging has no effect on the ecosystem at all which they don’t because it’s not true, will put still more stress on the Amazon, possibly almost certainly hastening its failure, which, along with Gulf Stream failure or massive ocean methane release, is one of three catastrophic environmental scenarios which would more or less alter world climate sufficiently to pretty much end civilization this century.
And for what? For one God damned term as Brazil’s President? For 5 years of logging revenues? It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world… but for hardwood floors?
tdog
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