161–170 of 180 posts
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Having your cake and eating it too sounds like a great option. It just doesn’t have any basis in reality.
> It just doesn’t have any basis in reality. So you're effectively denying the possibility? I'd say that's a pretty gargantuan assumption to make.
The core assumption is that 3 billion out of a total of 4.7 billion acres of desert currently existing can be reforested by planting trees and irrigating them for 20 years, after which they will continue growing without irrigation. Is this possible, except for marginal areas bordering the deserts? Aren't most desert areas desert because of very low precipitation? This may be practical for areas such as the example in…
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I've heard this tree grows extremely fast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulownia_tomentosa
There is a lot of marketing and some "scammy" practices put in selling Paulownia trees. Eucaliptus is faster and many coniphers also. You can find photos of trees regrowing light fast after being chopped, and from an old root but this is not how you measure accurately growth in a tree. The tree enters in emergency mode and is using all the reserves in the root to restore the lost canopy ASAP. It will slow down consid…
A country where Eucalypts are completely dominant is Australia. In the US California is full of them. Both Australia and California have uncontrollable fire problems.
There are plantations of eucalyptus trees in Brazil, either they don't know what introducing them will do to their country or they just don't care.
Before using eucalypts, consider what introducing a very invasive tree that transforms the countryside into something much more flammable than it originally was will do.
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Are there methods of tree farming that are focusing solely on carbon capture? For example, is it known that a species of plant that grows quickly captures carbon very efficiently?
Wouldn't shallow pools of algea in a greenhouse be much more efficient than trees?
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That works under the assumption that we can't do both. We can absolutely work on carbon neutrality and getting the developing world off of coal and oil burning technologies while working on restoring a natural carbon capture system in the form of forests and ecosystems.
I just think the neutrality, reduction in resource use and sustainability has to come first. Otherwise Jevons. Of course there can be intelligent overlap. I would hope that as nations move near to neutrality they must have put effort into a rethink of agriculture and forestry (and every other human activity). Now they can re-plant locally appropriate species and create new forest that will eventually appear to be ent…
Some of us are also looking beyond the challenges (e.g., coal power) that have known solutions for the most impactful thing we can do to buy more time. Large transportation, electricity, and agricultural infrastructure will take time and lots of political will to change.
Planting trees on unproductive land with desalinated ocean water that no one's fighting over is low-hanging fruit.
I like the scalability aspects of this. I don't think we have a technical solution that is as scalable as a biological one. I do think that simply "planting trees" is not going to do the trick though.
The core assumption is that 3 billion out of a total of 4.7 billion acres of desert currently existing can be reforested by planting trees and irrigating them for 20 years, after which they will continue growing without irrigation. Is this possible, except for marginal areas bordering the deserts? Aren't most desert areas desert because of very low precipitation? This may be practical for areas such as the example in…
The core assumption is that 3 billion out of a total of 4.7 billion acres of desert currently existing can be reforested by planting trees and irrigating them for 20 years, after which they will continue growing without irrigation. Is this possible, except for marginal areas bordering the deserts? Aren't most desert areas desert because of very low precipitation? This may be practical for areas such as the example in…
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All of these are "not only but also" solutions. One thing we need to do is end the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, but that only addresses one type of pollution, and it only gets us so far if the alternative doesn't pollute in some way. (For example, solar and the waste that it generates.) We need to solve the whole ecosystem issue.
> We need to solve the whole ecosystem issue. Which unless we come up with some pretty smart measures is inevitably going to involve poorer lifestyles for most in the developed world, in effect (and perhaps this explains the keeness on the left for environmental issues) moving us to a more socialist model, wherein hard work offers far less in terms of monetary reward than at present.
Imagine you’re a janitor. Every day the boss drives away in a Maserati and every day you wait for the bus. You’ve been working really hard hoping for a 2 dollars an hour raise, but one day the boss brings you into his office and tells you the money is not there. The following day, you find out that executive bonuses have increased by 20 percent and the company has issued 50 billion dollars in stock buybacks. How does this make you feel about the value of hard work?
The core assumption is that 3 billion out of a total of 4.7 billion acres of desert currently existing can be reforested by planting trees and irrigating them for 20 years, after which they will continue growing without irrigation. Is this possible, except for marginal areas bordering the deserts? Aren't most desert areas desert because of very low precipitation? This may be practical for areas such as the example in…
Most areas became desert after deforestation, many times due to earlier civilizations of humanity, many speculate that these were often largely influential in the falls of empires. A good example would be Iraq, when it was still Babylon there were a lot of trees, forests, and marshes there. The deforestation around the mountains eventually caused droughts, which turned it to desert and contributed to the fall of an e…