The part of your post above I made bold is False.
Thanks for the link, but please read my four comments following extracts from that TIME article (in blue below) and my {brief inserts} in TIMEâs text below:
A summary of my POV is: TIME either distorted or did not understand the deforestation process well. An alcohol energy based economy is susatinable and can make life better for almost everyone.
From his Cessna ⦠he watches men converting rain forest into cattle pastures and soybean fields with bulldozers and chains. ⦠deforestation is on track to double {see 1 below} this year ⦠explosion in demand for farm-grown fuels has raised global crop prices to record highs, which is spurring a dramatic expansion of Brazilian agriculture, which is invading the Amazon {see 2} at an increasingly alarming rate.
⦠trendy way for {US} politicians and corporations to show they're serious about finding alternative sources of energy and in the process slowing global warming. The U.S. quintupled its production of ethanol--ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter--in the past decade
Corn ethanol ⦠turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, ⦠looks less green than oil-derived gasoline. Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The GRAIN it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. {3}
only a tiny portion of the Amazon is being torn down to grow the sugarcane that fuels most Brazilian cars. More deforestation results from a chain reaction so vast it's subtle: U.S. farmers are selling one-fifth of their corn to ethanol production, so U.S. soybean farmers are switching to corn, so Brazilian soybean farmers are expanding into cattle pastures, so Brazilian cattlemen are displaced to the Amazon.{4}
(1) Even if it doubles, the rate of deforestation will be less than it was decades ago, even less than the peak rate of centuries ago! The cause of Amazonâs deforestation is US and other rich countryâs demand for beautiful woods, like mahogany. When this demand started, âpau brazilâ was Brazilâs main export. (Here un-capitalized âbrazilâ is an adjective telling the type of wood. âPauâ is Portuguese for âwood.â) When Napoleon invaded Iberia, the king of Portugal fled to his colony (now called Brazil after its principal export 300 years ago). Until last year, the rate of deforestation has been dramatically decreasing for more than a decade as Brazil strengthen the policing of forests.
(2) True, if âAmazonâ refers to a region. False if âAmazonâ refers to a forest. The agriculture use of land that was once forest begins after the forest has been illegally destroyed to export wood. SEE (4) for more details.
(3) If corn were used, it would be about 8 months. If sugar cane were used it would be less than one month. If the SUVs were replaced by the typical poor personâs car in Europe or the also smaller 100% alcohol-capable car most Brazilians use, about 10 days. If more than half of the miles driven by these smaller, more-efficient cars were replaced by electrified public transport, only about 6 days (urban areas only). If âtele-commutingâ were extensively used, less than 3 days. (Half of the âsuburbanitesâ work from house, have their internet-ordered groceries etc. come by the storeâs electric van, etc.). If better schools more luxury apartments existed in US cities, instead of extensive âsuburban sprawl,â about 1 day! I.e. then half of the worlds agricultural could be producing food and half (mainly in or near the tropics) be producing energy. (Brazil already imports most of it wheat. Perhaps in an ideal âAdam-Smith world,â someday Brazil is a net importer of food and exporting more than 40 times its own domestic energy needs to pay for it. Such a mutually dependent world would probably be free of wars and their huge costs. I.e. Everyone could be richer and live better, but the current shallow âconspicuous consumptionâ attitude would also need change to the New England Yankeesâ âMake it do, use it up, wear it out.â POV. )
My point is: The current petroleum based economy is very energy intensive and totally unsustainable. ** ($1000/ Barrel oil will follow âpeak oilâ in less than a decade.) Thus, rich economies will disastrously and permanently collapse, if conversion to a sustainable alternative is not started immediately. (It may already be âtoo late.â) ALL of the tropics producing only alcohol cannot sustain the current energy inefficient economies of the rich world. Peak Oil is a certainty, but I think there may be enough time still to avoid a return a âstone ageâ economy in US and EU. Do you know that >95% of the cost of an Idaho potato, eaten in NYC, is oilâs processing costs (for fertilizer, pesticides, etc. and shipping)? How would you fare if even potatoes were 20 times more expensive and you car was never driven? IMHO, if you are not older than 40, that is your future, if no drastic change to the economyâs energy base is started now. It took Brazil 35 years to get to be âenergy independent,â but still criminally (against future generations) burning petroleum for its heat.
(4) True, but how did the forests become âcattle pastureâ? Answer:
A small percent of the forest trees were illegally and selectively harvested for the wood the rich world wanted to buy. (Wood from a single mahogany tree can be sold for more than $8,000 in the US!)
The best way to hide the crime is to set fire to the forest so it looks from the air like lightning-strike fire. (An old tire placed on the mahogany stump first is a good idea in case one of the policeâs 4-wheel-drive truck comes by a few years later on the dirt road the loggers made.) With the forest gone the locals, mostly Indians, can no longer make the cash they need from it (Trapping for illegal sale small animals, especially parrots, etc.). So despite the poor soil, they try to farm it. Pot (âgrassâ) in small isolated spots is the best cash crop but bigger drug suppliers do not like the competition, so soon a few cows, pigs and lots of chickens are trying to find food between the burnt stumps. Eventually, the stumps are cleared and the land is seeded by a rich, absentee owner, who employs a few of the natives and the rest go to nearby cities. That is how the rich countries demand for pretty woods made the pasture now being converted to soy beans, etc. by high food prices. Sugar cane had nothing to do with the conversion. Essentailly no sugar cane will grow in the Amazon, nor is it economically feasible even if it would. Brazilâs sugar cane is grown 100 miles, or less from the populations that will use the sugar and alcohol. The Amazon is more than 1000 miles too far away, to be economically competitive. Perhaps someday it will be with alcohol capable pipe lines and river tankers etc.
While not false, Timeâs article is very miss leading. - Perhaps telling US readers that they are the cause of the Amazonâs deforestation is not good for sales?
In closing, I note: that yes a mature forest stores more carbon that a field of growing cane, but an economy based on sugar cane energy stores a huge amount of carbon in alcohol, probably more that the difference between cane fields and forests on the same land. This carbon storage is in tanks of many different sizes â Perhaps 100 âCapesizeâ ocean going tankers, more still in the various near port tanks, and even more in the tiny fuel tanks of individual cars, etc. â Not at all a balance POV to only consider the forest cut down, especially as worldâs growing population and rich peoples love of pretty woods, not sugar cane, is responsible for the destruction of the forests. One also essential step towards sustainability is the control of populations. Here China is leading the way, but creating huge problems for itself by the way it is doing so. (Women are already being stolen from rural villages and it will get much worse still due to the cultural preference for your one child to be a boy.) I gave a much better approach to population control as point (2) in a prior post.
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*In Portuguese, adjectives such as âbrazilâ in âpau brazilâ or âoakâ in âpau oakâ, follow their noun. Brazil, the country, takes its name from a type of wood, which once was the dominate wood of the forests but is now rarely found. â So extensive was the first ârape of the forestâ by rich countries. You are part of that rape still continuing today when you buy something made of mahogany etc.
**Brazil is leading the way: half the cars on road now burn alcohol, essentially all cars made in Brazil now can, but the rich still import their BMWs etc. I would make that illegal, except that it exports part of the flood of dollars coming to Brazil, which is causing the âde-industrializationâ of Brazilâs labor intensive industries.(Exports cannot cover the workerâs salaries, especially with the now rapidly rising minimum wage. These industries will be badly needed when machine cutting of cane terminates hand cutting, is it rapidly is. - Despite great expansion of cane fields, the demand for cutters is already decreasing. Hand cutting requires the fields be burned first. â A source of pollution and waste of vegetable material.)
