Back in the 1990s I did a thought experiment using 1990s industrial cost figures and production volumes, that were readily available online. Turned out Americans could save the Brazilian rainforest by cutting our beef consumption by 10%. I don’t have the math on hand but the gist was that if demand for beef dropped 10% so would demand for cattle feed, which was mostly corn. Reducing corn production by that much and devoting the land to hemp cultivation (which would work) would produce enough hemp fiber to replace all the wood pulp being imported from Brazil to make paper. At tha time most trees being logged in the Amazon region were being pulped and exported to the US to make paper. So boom, demand for Amazon pulp logs drops to zero, rainforest saved!

Admittedly this was simplistic and did not account for pulp producers selling to other countries that may have been competing with the US to buy the pulp. But they would have to compete with whatever other pulp sources those customers already had. Anyway, just the fact that the numbers worked out so well gave me a little understanding of how a tend in one area can affect seemingly unrelated areas.