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Scientists say halting deforestation 'just as urgent' as reducing emissions

theguardian.com

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Re: Scientists say halting deforestation 'just as urgent' as reducing emissions

#71

Post by gaius »

jplayer01 wrote: post #34
CalRobert wrote: post #17

Meanwhile even a country normally viewed as responsible is cutting down ancient forest to get to the coal beneath. Bit of a double whammy. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/09/berlin-startup...

Man, the arguments I've had with Germans about getting rid of nuclear. It's ridiculous. Instead, now we're incredibly reliant on coal and gas because there's no way we can cover our base load, much less 100% of our energy needs, with renewables. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/l... https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/l... This is incredibly depressing.

What are the German arguments against nuclear? They banned it after Fukushima as far as I understand it, despite having totally different geology?

Re: Scientists say halting deforestation 'just as urgent' as reducing emissions

#72

Post by mattbessey »

krageon wrote: post #40
lucidguppy wrote: post #39

Number one cause for amazon deforestation is cattle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_of_the_Amazon_ra... All the more reason to go vegan.

Or don't keep cattle in the rainforest. Not every problem with cattle has to be solved by making an impractical and enormous swing in your life.

Absolutism is unnecessary, two people eating half as much beef is just as impactful as one of two people going vegan.

I don't think eating less meat is impractical, certainly not specifically just eating less beef, by far the most environmentally impactful one.

Re: Scientists say halting deforestation 'just as urgent' as reducing emissions

#73

Post by AstralStorm »

CalRobert wrote: post #42
jplayer01 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, the arguments I've had with Germans about getting rid of nuclear. It's ridiculous. Instead, now we're incredibly reliant on coal and gas because there's no way we can cover our base load, much less 100% of our energy needs, with renewables. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/l... https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/l... This is incredibly depressing.

There needs to be a word for "environmentalist" vs "enviromentalist who can do math".

Would "a tool" suffice or is that both too harsh and not specific enough?

(Tools are being used for political agenda, often contrary to what they want.)

Re: Scientists say halting deforestation 'just as urgent' as reducing emissions

#74

Post by buckminster »

mc32 wrote: post #2

Deforestation is a great issue in developing economies. It's something which must be addressed. What's not mentioned is that human population growth is the main driver of this pressure. Given our abilities to manage disease and such, more efforts should go into educating women in developing allowing them to become more independent and have more control over their reproduction. When people move from agrarian societies…

The work has been done. The total number of children being born each year is already falling. The world population will stabilise. We have serious problems but this isn't one of them.

Re: Scientists say halting deforestation 'just as urgent' as reducing emissions

#75

Post by jplayer01 »

gaius wrote: post #71
jplayer01 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, the arguments I've had with Germans about getting rid of nuclear. It's ridiculous. Instead, now we're incredibly reliant on coal and gas because there's no way we can cover our base load, much less 100% of our energy needs, with renewables. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/l... https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/l... This is incredibly depressing.

What are the German arguments against nuclear? They banned it after Fukushima as far as I understand it, despite having totally different geology?

The lack of a permanent storage solution, the lasting radiation even if there were a permanent storage solution, the risk that something might happen in the future with the nuclear waste regardless of storage solution. It all revolves around nuclear waste and the risk of accidents/meltdowns and the consequences.

It's basically all about fear and it tends to override everything else. We have Chernobyl, Fukushima and the media to thank for that. It doesn't help that there are parties in the government that have been trying to sunset nuclear for decades (ironically, the green party).

Re: Scientists say halting deforestation 'just as urgent' as reducing emissions

#76

Post by Nasrudith »

nakedrobot2 wrote: post #57

Why can't a few billionaires of the world buy up a large % of the rainforests? Seriously. Besides the fact that they would rather let their wealth sit in a hedge fund, I mean.

Because that would only get them paper. Trees are poached even when offically off limit and enforcement carries its own problems - especially with the optics involved. Even if they started on the rental foreign aid model they would rapidly wind up in trouble via Morton's forks. Government engaged in travesties (even worse if done in defense of the tree subsidies) or becomes a dictatorship - do you stop the cash flow? Not to mention the money infamously usually fails to be distributed equitably driving the desperately poor to make more short term decisions.

Re: Scientists say halting deforestation 'just as urgent' as reducing emissions

#77

Post by eigenstuff »

grey_earthling wrote: post #15

In a capitalist economy, why would anyone maintain a forest? Unless you get enough direct personal benefit, or someone else is paying you enough, you wouldn't. This isn't a failure of capitalism; this is capitalism.

I have my own little forest. I do get personal enjoyment out of it everyday. But I also feel an enormous obligation to protect it as precious habitat for the critters who live there as their habitat all around my woods slowly shrinks and they run out of places to go. I am, in particular, very protective of my box turtle population (quarantined one girl this summer to [successfully!] stop another outbreak of a virus that killed over a dozen turtles last summer) and would like to see if my family is willing to plant some large patches of butterfly weed to let run wild in our hay field, especially since the drop in non-monarch butterflies this year compared to last is distressing to me. (It was a good year for monarchs, though.) When I'm in charge and get to call the shots, I want to let nature reclaim the fields entirely.

I do it because if I don't, who will? It's priceless to me that I am privileged enough to have this .5 sq mi plot of undeveloped land to call mine, I feel a sense of responsibility to care for it. If I was a millionaire, I'd absolutely buy up undeveloped land just to let it sit and run wild. I fantasize about it all the time.

Re: Scientists say halting deforestation 'just as urgent' as reducing emissions

#78

Post by TomMarius »

titzer wrote: post #51
TomMarius wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Clearly deforestation scaled. Yes, exactly my point. How do you want to fight something that clearly scales with something that doesn't scale? > We need people to realize they are part of this and it is not some videogame. Clearly that doesn't happen. Thinking it somehow magically will happen now is IMO foolish. Instead of hoping and arguing for emotional attachment with planting trees, we should be thinking of rea…

Ok, we're clearly on totally different pages, so let me take another try at this. > fight something that clearly scales My point was actually to refute the implied point that something that relies on manual labor doesn't scale. Industrial logging has got nothing on all those centuries of busy little humans. Deforestation scaled without tech. The Vikings had little but axes to deforest Iceland, just time. It's been th…

> My point was actually to refute the implied point that something that relies on manual labor doesn't scale.

That was not my point at all. My point was that there is zero economical demand for reforestation, you're not going to convince masses to plant enough trees. There is clear demand for deforestation, be it coal underneath, wood itself or a place to live.

Yes, we need to stop deforestation, I did not say anything against that at all. Let's not see the world as black or white.

> No matter how close you think these drones are to reality, this just simply does not exist, no one is funding this, and no one is building or running this.

That is a problem we should solve, on top of others - like stopping deforestation.

> On the contrary, going out and planting a tree is literally something that you can do today, and people do by the thousands and millions every year.

And yet we're here talking about the problem that it's not nearly enough.

> Technology is prima facie the reason this planet is threatened by our existence.

Definitely. There is a huge demand for the ease of living technology offers. People are never going to let that be and live more frugally, never. That's why we need better technology - technology that can solve problems we've done and technology that is more clean.

> God forbid someone suggest manual labor, working with our hands, and thinking seriously about how we've seriously, seriously fucked up.

I agree with you but this is never going to happen. You're not going to convince masses about this, ever. Almost no one on the global scale is going to happily let go of their easy lives, much less do any significant manual labor. We need a solution that doesn't involve manual labor of tens of millions of people. And, to be honest, I find the expectation that people will think about their mistakes naive - I don't think they will even admit a mistake.

Re: Scientists say halting deforestation 'just as urgent' as reducing emissions

#79

Post by fouc »

iNerdier wrote: post #13
danielecook wrote: post #12

Whatever happened with the idea of using drones to plant 1 billion trees? I was in Iceland earlier this year - a country largely devoid of trees. There aren’t any because the Vikings chopped them all down. Despite the cold - however - they do grow there albeit much slower then elsewhere. In any case, it seems to me we could be seeding a lot of barren locations so they’ll become forests within 20 years.

Sheep. They’ve tried and sheep tend to eat all the saplings. Unlike in other places the sheep are not penned in, they’re free to roam which means any area you want to try and re-forest in a fairly hostile environment to begin with has to be expensively fenced off until they get to a fairly good size.

Could have shepherd drones to go with the tree-planting drones.
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