When we think of Brazil's natural environment we tend to think of "untouched rainforest".
But this is a really unhelpful framing so here's a quick thread to unpack it:
The Amazon rainforest often seems to be the only thing you hear about, but it's one of *six* important natural environments in Brazil:
Probably the most important one that you hear less about is the cerrado to the south and east of the Amazon, coloured yellow in that map.
It's a tropical savannah, ie mixed forest/scrub/grass, and this is where most of Brazil's soy and beef is produced.
Then you have the Atlantic Forest along the coast.
This has been mostly cleared for 400 years and is where most people live, plus where most coffee and sugarcane is grown.
There's also the caatinga semidesert in the northeast inland from Bahia and Recife; the pantanal wetlands close to the Paraguayan border; and the pampas grasslands in the far south.
There's also a distinction around whether or not forest is "untouched".
Primary forest that's never been cleared is only about 40% of Brazil's forest cover. 60% is secondary forest, regrown after being cleared in the past.
There seems to be a sort of hierarchy in the public mind that's something like this:
For one thing, secondary forest is *really* important. It's 60% of the tree cover and performs up to 80% as well as primary forest in terms of biodiversity and carbon sequestration: sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/…
It's also the area that's most often re-cleared for agriculture.
Deforestation in Brazil's primary forest was brought more or less to a halt over the past decade but continues apace in secondary forest, a fact which gets very little attention.
(As an aside, I can't but note that there's a weird set of ideas around "virgin" and "despoiled" forest that seems to derive more from analogy with misogynistic old ideas about women's sexuality than anything to do with land management...)
The other thing is that *we should all be focused on the cerrado, not the Amazon*.
The current fires, and the chainsaw-happy posturing of President Bolsonaro, are obviously very worrying.
But generally the Amazon is pretty well-protected. The real battleground is the cerrado.
Soy producers, for instance, have had a moratorium on buying from the Amazon for a decade.
What happens in the cerrado over the coming decades will almost certainty have the more decisive impact on the global climate.
Only about half the cerrado is used for agriculture, and most of that is pastureland.
Farmers tend to clear most trees to make pasture but the real clear-felling comes when you switch to arable crops -- which in the cerrado means soy.
Each of those steps usually represents a loss of biodiversity and carbon-fixing.
Pasture at least is quite good at fixing atmospheric carbon -- most of the cerrado's carbon biomass is *below ground* so it can survive occasional bushfires.
Row crops like soy are much worse though, because each time you till the soil to plant seeds you diminish its capacity to lock up carbon.
There has been some experimentation in the cerrado with silvopasture -- grazing livestock in forest environments. It's possible this could play a big role in making beef farming in the cerrado more sustainable.
In terms of this year's fires in Brazil, a bit over 50% have been in the Amazon. And they're probably being set by ranchers or would-be ranchers, so it's right that people are freaking out.
But about 30% of fires have been in the cerrado too, and I don't notice #prayforthecerrado being a trending hashtag.
It should be, though! (ends)
Oh, one last thing about "Virgin Amazon rainforest".
Much of the Amazon isn't "untouched" at all but the product of specific agricultural practices by Indigenous peoples in the first millennium AD.
The characteristic Amazon "terra preta" black soil is a thick layer made up of charcoal from hearth fires, smashed pottery sherds, bone, compost and manure.
Large, possibly in some places urbanized societies in the first millennium AD laid this soil down carbuna.com/en/core-info/t…
"Primary forest" is a bit of a misnomer in most parts of the world. What we really mean by it is "not cleared by colonial and post-colonial societies", ignoring the fact that Indigenous societies were active land managers.
Secondary regrowth forest eventually becomes almost impossible to distinguish from primary forest. To a non-expert, that process probably takes no more than 30 or 40 years.
Here's my piece from @bopinion today linking these issues to the U.S.-China trade war: bloom.bg/31YzQSE
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I've long been a huge fan of @michaelxpettis and agree with him about most aspects of China's economy, but I think there's good evidence that clean tech, at least, is seeing solid, operationally-financed, productivity-enhancing growth right now. 🧵
A pretty common argument you hear these days to justify trade restrictions on Chinese EVs, solar panels, and batteries is that the industries are only prospering because of unfair subsidies. I don't think that's supported by the data:
The argument goes something like this: China is awash in easy money from state banks; its renewable manufacturers are undercutting overseas rivals; ergo, its comparative advantage isn’t scale, efficiencies or innovation, but the availability of cheap government cash.
Last September I made one of the scariest calls I've made as a columnist — a prediction that consumption of crude oil had already peaked, despite predictions that this was a decade or more in the future:
Well, much of the ocean floor is strewn with these potato-sized pebbles, which appear to form through complex processes over millions of years and are rich in manganese and other useful base metals.
From time to time, people have thought about mining these nodules. The most famous case was an extraordinary Cold War caper in the 1970s, when Howard Hughes set up a fake nodule mining company as cover for a CIA operation to salvage a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine.
I would like to suggest that the best explanation for this contradictory series of facts is that oil demand is in decline and every party is behaving rationally.
If you think oil demand is in fact rising then the entire global oil industry, with ~$3 trillion of annual revenues and ~$500 billion of annual capex, has taken a collective decision to just leave trillions of money on the table for ~reasons~
Today I want to tell a story about the con artists of cryptoland, and how they have a lot more in common with the founding fathers of modern capitalism that one might initially think (thread):
At this point it's pretty clear that cryptoland is in deep trouble. Sam Bankman-Fried can now add allegations of bribing Chinese officials to the string of accusations stemming from the collapse of crypto exchange FTX: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
His nemesis Changpeng Zhao is now facing a lawsuit against his rival Binance exchange from the CFTC: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Methane is a huge and somewhat underappreciated problem in climate.
It represents only about 1% of the tonnage of carbon dioxide that we pump out.
But the @IPCC_CH this week estimated it may be responsible for as much as 0.5C of warming so far, against 1.2C for CO2.
Governments are finally looking at tackling this directly. The Global Methane Pledge announced 18 months ago by the US and EU -- a plan to reduce human-caused methane emissions by 30% this decade -- now has more than 100 countries signed up to it.