[kikoreis]

Not downvoting, but as a Brazilian living in Brazil I don't agree with the false dichotomy you imply here, that you can't develop in an environmentally sane way. What the current government is implementing is criminally irresponsible and walks us back to 20th century exploitation. My dad worked for Shell and Rio Tinto for years, and travelling with him around the country you could see how practices changed as environmental regulations came into play. It was definitely less lucrative for the companies, but they were not major employers or generators of local business anyway. We can do better than suggesting we should replicate environmental damage the first world committed.

[marcosdumay]

There is environment friendly development, and there is pushing a country into forbidding every kind of energy generation available. What do you want to replace hydroelectricity with?

[iraphael]

> there is pushing a country into forbidding every kind of energy generation available

which is not what is happening in Brazil. There are enormous opportunities for energy generation far away from the Amazon. In fact, a lot of foreigners don't know but the vast majority of Brazilian population lives nowhere near the Amazon. Creating an energy grid in the forest is a great way to waste energy due to traveling long distances in transition cables.

[marcosdumay]

> There are enormous opportunities for energy generation far away from the Amazon.

Like where?

The Amazon is 50% of the area of Brazil, and the only place where most large falls aren't harvested yet. Besides, most of the Brazilian rivers are there by number, and an even bigger share of them by volume.

[namarie]

Wind energy in the south, solar in the northeast - both closer to major population centers.

[marcosdumay]

You know, there are plenty of articles just like this one criticizing the construction of wind farms in the NE (there, because the South is way too small to have a sizeable project).

There aren't enough articles criticizing Brazilian solar farms. That's probably because they are expensive. As they get cheap enough to turn a profit, you can be sure the articles will appear.

[iraphael]

And, perhaps more importantly, nuclear energy in the coast, which Brazil is already investing heavily in. IIRC, our third nuclear facility is set to open in 2018.

[kikoreis]

I wasn't commenting on hydro plants in general but rather on the OP's commentary on environmentalism vs. economic development. Hydro is great.. if the consequences are reasonable, and that's totally project-dependent.

[DennisP]

If the goal is climate-friendly power that doesn't take a lot of space, the obvious choice is nuclear. It has a better safety record than hydroelectric and is currently experiencing a tremendous expansion in China and other parts of Asia.

[kikoreis]

Incidentally, if you are brazilian (or can read portuguese) and care about a critical view of what's going on, reading Eliane Brum's piece at https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2017/10/02/opinion/15069617... provides well-grounded perspective on how this current shift is utterly corrupt.

[thiagooffm]

I'm not suggesting we replicate, but that we at least do whatever we want and need, instead of having needing to bend to the needs of what other agendas tells us to.

My point isn't only with forests, but also with everything else. And I'm not being populist, or nationalist, left-wing or right-wing... just being real. Once I've moved abroad and stopped living in Brazil, I started to understand how other countries and cultures, from the first world, are pretty much immune to this kind of debate, or are the ones setting up standards on how everybody else should behave and do things.

And how this feeds poverty and confusion... and in the very end, as counter-intuitive as it seems, damages the environment.

We need no fucking agendas to follow, if they aren't of our interest, it's not like we've got 50k+ dollars an year per capita in a very egalitarian society to start caring about this, at least to the degree that those who doesn't have any fucking forests anymore, cares. In the Capitalist world we live in today, managing a country it's about picking up the right battles, there isn't an infinite overflow of money coming in so we can both educate 200mi of brazilians, feed them, give them the good life and in the end, still be 100% green.