Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 258 posts

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#211

Post by antisthenes »

maxmcorp wrote: post #162
supernova87a wrote: post #127

Did anyone else find the 350M number implausible? They claim it happened in 12 hours. Unless they're talking about planting seeds, I find it hard to believe and take this story just as a political stunt. Ethiopia's population is 100M. Did 10% participate in this somehow, and each person plant 35 trees across the country? How would you even get that many trees to plant?

"The average British Columbian planter plants 1 600 trees per day,[5] but it is not uncommon for experienced planters to plant up to 4,000 trees per day" https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_planting

I looked at the source of that and it seems to come from a "Preventing Tree Planting Injuries" safety manual.

They state that you can plant 100-200 trees per hour, and extrapolate that to planting 8x a day (presumably assuming an 8 hour work day).

Simply using common sense will tell you that this number is total nonsense, unless you're using seeds and just tossing them into the ground. 200 trees per hour assumes 1 tree every 18 seconds.

Multiple issues here:

1. The work is strenuous. I've planted trees before the proper way and it's not something you can do for 8 hours day in day out without breaks. Digging is intense work that requires frequent breaks even for a person who is in shape.

2. You need to have 1600 saplings available somewhere. Simply taking the time to bring 1 sapling to the dug hole will take you probably anywhere between 10 and 30 seconds. The farther away the hole from the sapling collection, the longer it will take, possibly up to a minute.

3. 18 seconds for digging a tree hole is absolute nonsense as well. This assumes top quality topsoil that's already been prepped for planting (trees or other plants). It basically assumes garden soil quality and no need to dig the hole back up once you planted the tree.

4. You need put the dug up soil back and cover the exposed roots with either soil that you dug up or good soil that was brought to the planting site. You also need to water the soil afterward and compress it around the roots to make sure the sapling doesn't fall from the slightest gust of wind. This easily triples the time compared to just "digging a hole".

Basically - don't believe the first number you see on the wikipedia or the internet. The source is not reputable and sounds like it was written by a person who hasn't done a day of garden work in their life.

I also wouldn't really consider anything less than a 2-3ft sapling a tree. And I wouldn't consider it "planted" unless it survives at least the next year.

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#212

Post by nottorp »

ceejayoz wrote: post #78
newsgremlin wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is those suicides at Foxconn are for one reason only, working conditions. Meanwhile the general suicide rate in China is for any number of reasons. Playing a pure numbers game with peoples lives is distasteful.

> The difference is those suicides at Foxconn are for one reason only, working conditions. That's a pretty wild assertion. Is there a reason to believe that the folks working at Foxconn have otherwise 100% idyllic lives with no divorces, deaths of loved ones, clinical depression, etc.?

Not to mention that there's >1 million of them. There are cities smaller than that. Every kind of deviation from the norm, they probably have one, ten or a hundred of them.

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#213

Post by dang »

Smrchy wrote: post #107
_bxg1 wrote: post #99

But tell me again how the world's largest economy can't be bothered to do anything about climate change.

The US already has the cleanest of water and air. No need to do anything when you are leading the others bigly.

This comment breaks the site guidelines. Would you please review them and stick to them while posting here? We're trying to avoid this sort of low-quality, off-topic subthread.

Note that they include: "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#214

Post by isostatic »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #92
isostatic wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethipoia, and Africa as a whole, is not Band Aid. Addis Ababa gets more rainfall each year than Washington state.

What part of Washington state? Western, that’s a lot of rain, Eastern, that could be little rain at all.

Wikipedia puts Seatle at 37.49", Washington State as a whole at 42.2", and Addis Ababa at 45.9". The precipitation figures (for Washington/Seatle) includes snowfall - I think it's about 10:1 snow:rain

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#215

Post by merpnderp »

zapita wrote: post #135
merpnderp wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The shortest and simplest argument is that the South barely had the funds to prosecute the war while the North not only could fully fund their war efforts, they had access to extensive lines of credit from other nations. The South had to rely upon the largesse of European countries using it as a pawn. The North lost roughly one soldier for every African slave brought to the South and the least we could do is not impl…

> The shortest and simplest argument is that the South barely had the funds to prosecute the war while the North not only could fully fund their war efforts, they had access to extensive lines of credit from other nations. The South had to rely upon the largesse of European countries using it as a pawn. Interesting argument. And what was the wealth of the North built on?

Well we know it wasn't slavery. In the South the rich invested in slaves, and the rich controlled most of the economy. In the North the economy was dominated by agriculture, and was well along into the industrial revolution.

To put the economies in the starkest of differences, 90% of all the capital in the United States, prior to the Civil War, was located in the North. The North employed 1000% more factory workers, in factories that were magnitudes more profitable. Steel production, railroads, engines, chemicals, all this was produced in the North in almost their entirety.

The South produced only three things of note: cotton, slavery, and traitors.

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#216

Post by thinkpad20 »

simonsarris wrote: post #140
thinkpad20 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America’s success was the direct result of ethnic cleansing of millions of Native Americans and the backbreaking labor of millions of slaves. The comparison is ridiculous. We were the exploiters.

No it wasn't. It doesn't even pass the sniff test. Why do you think the slave-free north was much richer than the south, before the civil war? If slavery makes a country rich, why isn't Africa rich? Why wasn't Brazil, which imported ~4 million slaves (compare to ~200k for USA) significantly richer than the USA? Native Americans had slaves: > "An exhaustive search of some 725 late 18th/early 19th century ethnohistoric…

> If slavery makes a country rich, why isn't Africa rich?

I never made the claim that any country can become rich simply by having slavery. The question of why the West is so much richer than e.g. Africa or Brazil is obviously vastly complex and does not boil down to "because of slavery." But whether or not the American South was richer than the North at the time of the civil war, it certainly very very wealthy, and slavery was instrumental in this.[0] I don't think this is really controversial.

> Native Americans had slaves:

The existence of slavery in these or other societies does not in any way absolve the US from its past in this regard. Pointing an accusatory finger at some Native Americans who enslaved prisoners of war and the like, in contrast to a vast and extremely profitable business empire built on systematic enslavement, which has had ripple effects of racism on individuals and communities since, seems incredibly tone-deaf. Even more so when you consider that we killed the Native Americans by the literal millions.

[0]: https://www.history.com/news/slavery-profitable-southern-eco...

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#217

Post by streb-lo »

harryh wrote: post #190
streb-lo wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly on private land for the purpose of harvesting with heavy equipment. Not exactly a carbon sink...

Sure it is. Harvested lumber doesn't release its CO2 back into the atmosphere unless you burn it.

Plantation-style forestry like that found in the US is much less efficient as a sink because the harvesting carbon cost is amortized across a much more frequent harvest cycle.

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#218

Post by simonsarris »

thinkpad20 wrote: post #216
simonsarris wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it wasn't. It doesn't even pass the sniff test. Why do you think the slave-free north was much richer than the south, before the civil war? If slavery makes a country rich, why isn't Africa rich? Why wasn't Brazil, which imported ~4 million slaves (compare to ~200k for USA) significantly richer than the USA? Native Americans had slaves: > "An exhaustive search of some 725 late 18th/early 19th century ethnohistoric…

> If slavery makes a country rich, why isn't Africa rich? I never made the claim that any country can become rich simply by having slavery. The question of why the West is so much richer than e.g. Africa or Brazil is obviously vastly complex and does not boil down to "because of slavery." But whether or not the American South was richer than the North at the time of the civil war, it certainly very very wealthy, and…

I'm not trying to point accusatory fingers anywhere, you're missing the claim. You made the claim that USA success was the direct result of slave labor. If this were true, you would expect other societies with boatloads of slave labor to be more successful. They weren't.

Since lots of places had lots of unpaid labor and did nothing particularly successful, there must be more to it. If there is more to it, it is (usually) evidence that the USA would have been successful without slave labor.

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#219

Post by seanmcdirmid »

isostatic wrote: post #214
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What part of Washington state? Western, that’s a lot of rain, Eastern, that could be little rain at all.

Wikipedia puts Seatle at 37.49", Washington State as a whole at 42.2", and Addis Ababa at 45.9". The precipitation figures (for Washington/Seatle) includes snowfall - I think it's about 10:1 snow:rain

Washington state is like Texas: there is a huge variation on climate. The same is true in Ethiopia, whether you are in the high planes (erm plateau) or towards sea level.

Re: Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change

#220

Post by UnFleshedOne »

zapita wrote: post #124
whb07 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, butter production in the southern states where there was "unlimited free labor" was roughly 20% of the national output, even though they had 40% of the total dairy cows. So there is your counter point to the argument that with "free labor" things got massively built. Quite the opposite. Its hard to get high productivity from slave labor (go figure). Anyhow, one has to observe to be first aware of such things li…

First, I'll note that you haven't addressed the "unlimited land" part at all. Shall I conclude that you agree with me, at least, that appropriation of native land was one of the pillars of US wealth creation? > butter production in the southern states where there was "unlimited free labor" was roughly 20% of the national output, even though they had 40% of the total dairy cows. So from this one example, you're extrap…

If he can't use his 25% native part as an argument for wealth partially accruing to original inhabitants of the continent, you can't use his other 75% as an argument for wealth accruing to European settlers (assuming his other 75% is European).
Post reply on HN