If carbon was priced to reflect its negative externalities the Amazon [Rain Forest] wouldn’t have to generate money because clearing it for agriculture would be prohibitively expensive.

Perhaps the rest of the world should be sending money to the rainforest areas to represent the value to the world climate that they provide.

Absolutely; pay a dividend to people that comes out of the revenue of the carbon tax.

I'd imagine people wouldn't really pay for a permit to cut trees, the forest would just accidentally get burned or something like that.

If we'd make it not economically useful to burn it down, because agricultural products were less profitable, that would work, probably.

Cattle ranching in the Amazon is the main responsible for deforestation, responsible for about 65% of the land deforested.

So a simple economic solution to the problem is to stop buying so much beef and the deforestation would reduce drastically. Why would they continue to chop the forest down if they have no economic incentive to do so?

The excessive consumption of animal products in the west is the main reason why this "3 football fields" a minute thing is going on.

What incentive mechanism are you proposing? (Real question, not rhetorical)

Generally, when people ask for an economic solution, they’re looking for a proposal to change behavioral incentives, rather than proclamation of the desirability of someone’s pet cause (as noble as it may be).

The incentive to keep deforesting is to provide cheap beef meat mostly for western countries which can pay the most.

By reducing the amount of meat consumed in the west, there would be no reason to keep chopping down the forest, it's expensive.

In the west we would need a meat tax like it has been proposed in several countries, this alone we would reduce demand for beef and reduce the rate that the forest is getting chopped.

Only if it hurts on people's pockets will anything change, if it doesn't and it goes down for long enough, and the climate keep changing like it has it's going to end up as it as always ended when multiple groups of people are competing for resources: war.

High tariffs on Brazilian beef are an idea.

Stop eating meat could be one of answers.

So is "stop having more than 2 children".

Another one is "stop buying things you don't really need".

But yeah, good luck convincing people to get behind that.

It's also going to make those you convince of this less genetically fit than those who ignore the advice. So the people who choose to have ten kids are going to be more represented in the population a hundred years from now.

Arguments like this are insane because complex behavior like lifestyle choice is not 100% (or probably even 50%) genetic. It’s like saying that the only way to have more people coding is for coders to have kids. Complete bullshit.

In principle there is a selection pressure against it if it's even 1% genetic. But that pressure might not be strong enough to have a large effect very soon (especially when very few people today seem to be actively motivated to have as many children as would be physically possible for them).

So are "driving without seat belts", "buying a house in a flood plane without insurance", "smoking tobacco".

All 3 have been curbed quite dramatically with a combination of regulation, graduated penalties and education. Yes there are gaps in enforcement, and these behaviors haven't been completely eradicated of course -- but dramatically curbed, nonetheless.

There's no reason the same can't happen with the current (wildly excessive) habit of read meat consumption.

You’re being down voted, but you raise a valid point. We are helpless. Even our first world governments are helpless to save the amazon. It’s just so damn sad.

What should we do? Have the US military take over the Amazon river basin, declare it a human-free zone, forcefully evict all people from the site, and let it grow back? We're not helpless, we're just not totalitarian conquerors.

I heard a story/statement once, that every time a bunch of smart people got together to think about solving the world problems, they all pretty much came up with the same solution: eugenics and birth control.

Both of these are controversial subjects at best.

Have you seen the TV show Utopia? Basically a group of people decide it's in the humanity's best interest to wipe out 90% of the population with viruses. Rather grim, but understandable in a way.

While in the domain of Sci-Fi, the solution I liked better was the idea from "Forever peace" by John Haldeman, where human evolution is propelled to the next step by increasing mutual empathy through technology. The Internet might be a small step in that direction.

We probably don't need to impose birth control, population is stabilizing and will probably decrease after peaking.

The faster we get people out of poverty, girls educated, and reduce child mortality, the faster we stop population growth.

The population is not stabilizing. The growth rate is stabilizing. We're still adding almost 100m new humans to the roster every year. We're going to hit 8 billion in 3 years (ahead of predictions made 20 years ago), and then 9 billion 12 years after that. People love to talk about the birth rate is falling in developed countries and how we're going to have a population peak here Real Soon Now. But I'll bet you dollars to donuts that the world human population in 2100 is greater than the population in 2090 (a horrific mass killer like the Bubonic Plague or nuclear war notwithstanding).

The growth rate is approaching zero though. Year after year.

And yet year after year there are 80m+ more people being added. If the rate of change of the rate is slow enough it doesn't matter that it's going down, the population is still increasing at a breathtaking pace, and we'll have to have a population collapse to get back to anything sustainable.

Is this the question? Could rainforests produce enough "economic value" to justify their existence?