Eco Double Speak in Brazil

Flickr/<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/leoffreitas/">leoffreitas</a> (Creative Commons)

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


To meet its lofty 2020 goals for biofuel production, Brazil will need to make some difficult choices that pit conservation against biomass. But Brazil denies that it will have to make such a choice, arguing that the uptick in biofuels will have a minimal impact on deforestation.

Not so fast, says a new paper in Proceedings in the Natural Academy of Sciences, which argues that Brazil understates the impact a biofuel increase will have on the country that is already responsible for twenty percent of the world’s deforestation.

This is exactly consistent with the conservation methods promoted by the Brazilian government so far. Brazil preserves 50,000 acres in the Atlantic forest against deforestation, but displaces indigenous people in the process. Brazil promotes a hydro-electric dam saying that no indigenous people will be directly displaced. Tell that to the 12,000 people indirectly affected. And in this most recent move, Brazil will endanger the Amazon in order to meet its 2020 biofuel quota.

To make way for the additional 63,800 square miles of sugarcane and soybean farmland that the report estimates is necessary for the biofuels, the Brazilian government will displace cattle farms, currently the largest source of deforestation in the Amazon. The carbon payback time for 1,500 square miles of the project’s direct deforestation would be 35 years, says the paper. But taking indirect deforestation into account could add an additional 210 years of carbon payback for soybeans alone. 

“Indirect land-use change could considerably compromise the GHG savings from growing biofuels” by expanding 47,000 square miles into Amazon forests and 18,000 square miles into other “native habitats,” writes David Lapola of the German University of Kassel.

Conservation often requires a difficult choice between opposing options. So far, the Brazilian government has brushed aside firm choices, shifting priorities to fit the issue of the day. To solve this problem, Lapola and his colleagues suggest “an increased interconnection between land-use sectors” that would modernize cattle ranching to minimize indirect land use change from biofuels.

That should work this time, but let’s hope it sticks the next time a tough eco-choice comes along.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate