> Modern car fuel contains ethanol (10% in the EU).

Here at Brazil, ethanol is produced from sugarcane. And sugarcane farming is actually illegal in the Amazon. The President tried to make it legal, but fortunately his decree was suspended by the Judiciary [1].

I don't doubt there may exist a few illegal sugarcane farms in the Amazon, but given how huge sugarcane farming is in southeastern Brazil, I don't think any Amazon sugarcane would significantly contribute to Brazilian ethanol production.

> Soy culture is used to create a cheap protein feedstock for the meat industry.

Soy is more of an issue for Amazon than sugarcane. But, just as you said, it is used to feed cattle, and the main issue resides in the cattle. Cattleman in Amazon usually adopt the extensive breeding system, so lots of area are required to breed cattle.

[1] https://www.conjur.com.br/2020-abr-21/juiza-suspende-decreto...

If you live in the U.S. and drive a car and eat meat, you are very unlikely eating illegally-raised Brazilian beef, or consuming illegally-mined Brazilian gold.

Most likely, you eat U.S.-raised beef and burn gasoline from oil that comes from the U.S. or Middle East. Surely you are adding to the global warming, but it has nothing to do with Amazonian forest being illegally cut.

In Brazil, most if not all cars run on ethanol [1]. The U.S. produce massive amounts of ethanol domestically [2] so, most likely, whatever gasoline you might be buying in the US, it's not using Brazilian ethanol, even though the U.S. does import some Brazilian ethanol [4], it's dwarfed by the domestic production [2].

U.S. beef is raised so efficiently that farmers manage to export it to Mexico an China, among other places [3], while receiving virtually no subsidies. You likely need to specifically look for gourmet Brazilian beef if you want to have a chance to taste a cow illegally raised on a pasture which used to be Amazonian forest.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazil

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_the_United_Sta...

[3]: https://www.fas.usda.gov/beef-2020-export-highlights

[4]: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_epooxe_i...

You make it sound like Brazilian beef is some little boutique thing. We don't eat much of it in the US because we are a giant beef producer ourselves, but Brazil is the world's largest beef exporter, by a significant margin.

https://www.statista.com/chart/19122/biggest-exporters-of-be...

He’s just saying that if you’re an American, you probably don’t have much hand in the destruction of the rain forrest via consumption.

I'm not convinced even that's true. We eat a lot of beef. If we didn't, our beef producers would export a lot more, and there'd be less global demand for beef from Brazil. The only way that's not true is if Brazilian exports are significantly cheaper than American, but as the above poster mentioned, American beef producers are pretty efficient.

The parent seemed to be pretty clearly focusing on the US. I don’t think the idea was that the US experience extrapolates to allot most countries.

These are all commodities, the fact that you are being served by the closest producer does not mean that you are not generating demand that has to be compensated by someone else increasing their production. The world is connected together.

Also US-raised beef also occupies the area of destroyed forests. American beef didn't destroy the Amazon but it destroyed the environment anyway and is every bit as guilty of producing global warming.

You can find cheap canned Brazilian corned beef at Walmart or pretty much any US dollar store.

That doesn’t seem to refute the idea that American consumption of Brazilian beef is trivial/niche. What share of Brazilian beef supply ends up on Wal-Mart shelves as corned beef?

Pretty much all cars here run on gasoline.

Yes, but it is in fact a mixture of gasoline and ethanol. To quote the Wikipedia article:

Blends of E10 or less are used in more than 20 countries around the world, led by the United States, where ethanol represented 10% of the U.S. gasoline fuel supply in 2011.[1] Blends from E20 to E25 have been used in Brazil since the late 1970s. E85 is commonly used in the U.S. and Europe for flexible-fuel vehicles. Hydrous ethanol or E100 is used in Brazilian neat ethanol vehicles and flex-fuel light vehicles and hydrous E15 called hE15 for modern petrol cars in the Netherlands.[2]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_ethanol_fuel_mixtures

The issue is not exported beef, it's exported soy to feed the beef in the US and in Europe.

The US also produces a huge amount of soy and corn. Do we really import that much Brazilian soy?

> Modern car fuel contains ethanol (10% in the EU)

It‘s a maximum of 10%, but you almost never actually get that much. E5 fuel contains 0-5% ethanol, E10 contains 5-10%.