Nonno
Habari Na Mijeldi
"While sugar cane ethanol is certainly less ecologically destructive than some other biofuels, the industry's boosters have overlooked one key fact: You've got to plant sugar cane somewhere. One couldn't pick a worse place to harvest cane than Brazil's Atlantic rainforest. There, sugar cane crops have led to deforestation and, paradoxically, more carbon emissions.
It's difficult to imagine that a serene and pastoral landscape lies just beyond São Paulo. Take a bus through the city and the miles and miles of grey industrial factories stretch on forever. But nearby is the Atlantic rainforest, also known as the Mata Atlântica. When the first Portuguese explorers stepped ashore in 1500 A.D., the forest may have covered more than 500,000 square miles, or approximately one-fifth the size of the current Amazon jungle lying 500 miles to the northwest. To put it in perspective, that's an area about twice the size of the state of Texas. Located in the Brazilian south and southeast, the Atlantic rainforest ranged all the way up to the Northeast in a long coastal strip. In some areas the forest even extended a full 300 miles inland or more and encompassed a broad spectrum of habitats, including coastal mangrove thickets and mountain massifs 3,000 feet high, covered in broad-leaved evergreens and conifers.
In a bad omen, one of the first things the Portuguese explorers did was to chop down a tree. They then built a cross out of it and celebrated Mass, claiming the land and rainforest for God and king. In short order the Portuguese went to work, cutting down trees and releasing the carbon stored in the rainforest. In 1525, the Portuguese began to grow sugar cane and introduced the crop to the Atlantic rainforest. Then, the colonists shipped six million African slaves to Brazil to do the cutting. "
More at: The Dirty Underside of Lula's Clean Energy Revolution - By Nikolas Kozloff | Foreign Policy
It's difficult to imagine that a serene and pastoral landscape lies just beyond São Paulo. Take a bus through the city and the miles and miles of grey industrial factories stretch on forever. But nearby is the Atlantic rainforest, also known as the Mata Atlântica. When the first Portuguese explorers stepped ashore in 1500 A.D., the forest may have covered more than 500,000 square miles, or approximately one-fifth the size of the current Amazon jungle lying 500 miles to the northwest. To put it in perspective, that's an area about twice the size of the state of Texas. Located in the Brazilian south and southeast, the Atlantic rainforest ranged all the way up to the Northeast in a long coastal strip. In some areas the forest even extended a full 300 miles inland or more and encompassed a broad spectrum of habitats, including coastal mangrove thickets and mountain massifs 3,000 feet high, covered in broad-leaved evergreens and conifers.
In a bad omen, one of the first things the Portuguese explorers did was to chop down a tree. They then built a cross out of it and celebrated Mass, claiming the land and rainforest for God and king. In short order the Portuguese went to work, cutting down trees and releasing the carbon stored in the rainforest. In 1525, the Portuguese began to grow sugar cane and introduced the crop to the Atlantic rainforest. Then, the colonists shipped six million African slaves to Brazil to do the cutting. "
More at: The Dirty Underside of Lula's Clean Energy Revolution - By Nikolas Kozloff | Foreign Policy
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