> ”The initiative combines solar-powered sand-blocking technology with extensive vegetation planting to stabilize the desert’s edges.” What sand-blocking tech is that? Does anyone know?
Plants
China completes green belt around Taklamakan Desert
101–110 of 161 posts
Re: China completes green belt around Taklamakan Desert
#102It took 46 years to create the 1,900 mile, ~3060 km green belt around the 130,350 square miles (337,600 km2) desert. The linked article doesn't say anything about negatives, but the positives seem to be very beneficial for the area. I really wish other major powers would commit to similar projects. In my opinion, communities need larger goals to strive towards, to provide a sense of continued belonging and reinvestme…
One of the reasons for the decline of the Ottoman Empire was that sultans spent precious labor and resources on grand projects like this, for example around the Arabian peninsula as well as the Sahara. This ended up contributing to the bankrupting of the empire, which required them to take heftier and heftier loans from Europe and Russia.
I'd enjoy reading if you have any pointers to such projects. Not coming up with any from web search and asking a LLM. Closest might be the Hijaz Railway and maintaining a large military presence in desert regions.
Re: China completes green belt around Taklamakan Desert
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you seen a lot that's been clear cut right after and then after 5/10/20 years? They've got some near me where they cut adjacent lots every so often and they're on a cycle to do it again after whatever the interval is. If you cut the whole thing down at once, yeah, maybe it won't come back. But if you do a reasonable section, it comes back alright. So, current management practices are only cut down what you need…
> drop them off into deep ocean where they won't decompose muc I’m sure that won’t come with any unintended consequences
Probably will spark a bubble in deep sea distressed wood salvage operations when that becomes feasible.
Logs that long ago got stuck on river bottoms on the way to mills are pretty valuable now if they're in good shape.
Re: China completes green belt around Taklamakan Desert
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks like China is attempting a hybrid approach. Free market with the government intervening whenever and wherever it feels like. They still get some optimization and some otherwise-impossible-projects. I'd say the jury is still out on this strategy.
It's real wealth and productivity growth has dramatically outpaced peer nations over the last 40 years. How much longer will the jury be out? Will it come back in my lifetime?
Yeah, it's going to come out in the next 10 years or so, 20 at most.
The question is whether the Chinese economy will take a similar trajectory now to the Japanese one in the late eighties and through the nineties, with a period of extreme growth followed by mostly stagnation.
It could very well be that the Chinese model is good at catch-up growth so to speak, up to the level of an advanced economy.
I agree with the op that the jury is out on this and it might go different ways.
Re: China completes green belt around Taklamakan Desert
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some stories I heard while living in China. A couple of decades ago farmers in china’s arid regions used to be tasked with planting trees, they would plant them upside down because they knew they didn’t have enough water to feed the trees and their crops. The Gobi was planted with trees a few times to reduce dust storms, but it takes a lot more than just planting trees, so the dust storms would always invariably retu…
> they would plant them upside down That makes no sense. It takes more effort to plant a tree upside down and not irrigating it than it takes to plant it the regular way and not irrigating it.
Maybe if the trees are planted correctly and are still alive, the government would requires the farmers to water them or face punishment, leaving no water for the crops.
Re: China completes green belt around Taklamakan Desert
#106China may well have replaced the USSR as the latest bogeyman to keep attention away from whatever war crimes the US is currently supporting or committing, but all I can think about is the ~$10T spent on and millions of lives lost to the "War on Terror" and what could've been done with the money instead. I mean just look at the high speed rail transformation in 16 years [1]. China is not without its issues but neither…
The U.S need to spend a ton to defend their "imperium" even though it is a bit different from how empires have worked in history. If it doesn't another country will take place and assume leadership of the world. The nice thing about the Pax Americana is that it is based on voluntary alliances that benefit from the relationship and more neutral third-party that are not punished for their neutrality (and thus are not a…
> The nice thing about the Pax Americana is that it is based on voluntary alliances that benefit from the relationship and more neutral third-party that are not punished for their neutrality
Talk the talk
"Trump threatens 100% tariff on Brics nations if they try to replace dollar" [1]
Re: China completes green belt around Taklamakan Desert
#107Very interesting topic but the article strikes me as being blogspam adjacent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall_(China) cites https://www.yahoo.com/news/china-completes-3-000-km-11254926... which is one of many press articles that only cites (but does not link) state media.
The Economist has paywalled writeup https://www.economist.com/china/2024/12/05/will-chinas-green... that is a bit skeptical of the project's impact (unlinked claims at least half due to increased rain, not human efforts) and sustainability (also unlinked, but I'd guess correct, it seems somewhat similar projects such as the great plains shelterbelt in the US decline unless maintained).
Surely there must be an afforestation/macro ecological engineering geek out there who has blogged on this in depth, would love to read it!
Re: China completes green belt around Taklamakan Desert
#108Meanwhile the US uses it surpluses of wealth to do… what? Optimize ad sales to 16 year olds and fund genocide in Gaza?
Don't forget bailing out banks that fueled bubbles. With the money that went into that we could had by now a the Sahara rainforest.
Have you actually looked into "bailing out banks" (which is called Troubled Asset Relief Program), because if you have you would have learned that the US Government actually made ~$15 billion in profit after selling off the toxic assets 6 years later. Not to mention the money the government made thru preferred stock repurchase by corporations and other things (interest etc) the US Treasury booked a total profit of ~$121 billion.
Sorry for calling you out but I'm just very tired of purely emotional responses to this topic because people actually just refuse to go thru the facts of how events transpired and their consequences.
EDIT: You can see this for yourself from ProPublica https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/
Re: China completes green belt around Taklamakan Desert
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> China is not without its issues but neither is the US government and at least China is investing in long-term infrastructure for their people. Do you claim USA doesn't invest in long-term infrastructure?
>Do you claim USA doesn't invest in long-term infrastructure? Do you have any examples of where it has invested in long-term infrastructure? I ask, because I can't think of any, beyond 'roads'.
When I think of infrastructure investments, I always think of long-term stuff, rather than, I don't know, a temporary detour.
And pretty much every functioning state makes infrastructure investments, otherwise it wouldn't be functioning.
So it it surprising to me someone would even question any big country's investing in infrastructure at all...
For example here's an announcement from dep of transportation:
https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/biden-harris-ad...
There's roads (including bridges), but also railroads and port expansions.
Also:
- Fargo-Moorhead Metropolitan Flood Risk Management Project
- Ecosystem Restoration in the Upper Mississippi River
- Reactor Demonstration Program in Kemmerer, Wyoming
The information is there, easily accessible on the Internet, you didn't need to ask me.
Re: China completes green belt around Taklamakan Desert
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've sometimes wondered whether arid parts of the American Southwest could, through the right kind of permaculture interventions, support more biological carbon sequestration, more plant life, drive development of richer soil etc. But I suspect if you said "we're gonna use this big section of BLM land to incrementally try to keep water in the landscape, and introduce a sequence of plant species that can increase carb…
I don’t think this would be a good idea… these areas are not the result of desertification but are naturally desert ecosystems. The only way to make them anything else would be to take even more water from bordering non desert areas, which are already severely impacted by all of the water taken to support huge cities and green lawns in the southwest deserts. For carbon storage it would make more sense to regrow fores…
Plenty of places have water even Tucson