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China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

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411–420 of 666 posts

Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#411
post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Must.. resist.. temptation.. Killing all sparrows, compared to defunding vaccine science in the wreckage of a pandemic.. Village Steel making compared to literally cancelling construction projects for advanced wind turbines

Maybe this is a surprise. Nowadays, young people are increasingly fond of Mao. He wasn’t a perfect person, but he spent his entire life exploring communism and trying to finally eliminate wealth inequality and privileged classes. Older people might not like him as much, because they were more influenced by the West and dislike China’s system more. But with China’s rise and Trump’s hypocrisy, I can predict that Mao wi…

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Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#412

I don’t know how it is in other countries, but nearly thirty years ago when I was in elementary school, a Chinese propaganda slogan stuck with me: “If you want to get rich, build roads first; have fewer children, plant more trees.” Every part of that slogan has been put into action, continuously, for decades. Although low birth rates have now become a problem, back then it seemed like a solution. Xi Jinping may be a…

"Have fewer children" implies that people are a burden, which can be true in a dysfunctional society, like perhaps China under Mao. But in a well functioning system, more people get more things done and make society wealthier. The old idea was that the planet can only produce enough food for a certain number of people. But it turned out that people produce the food, not the planet!

Haha, what a delightfully backwards way to look at things. This ranks closely with “humans are not part of the ecosystem”.

You should look into what carrying capacity means, and in particular how our access to abundant cheap oil enabled us to overclock our chip in a manner of speaking.

Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Request the source? I researched and calculated the cumulative percentage of global carbon emissions from major economies since the industrial revolution: - United States: 24% - China: 15% - Russia: 6.7% - Germany: 5.2% - United Kingdom: 4.4% - Japan: 3.8% - India: 3.5% - France: 2.2% - Canada: 1.9% - Ukraine: 1.7% source from Global Carbon Project, is this reliable?

I added up the 2023 numbers from here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions?t...

You must have made a mistake in doing that. If you add “world” to the selection, Our World in Data adds them up for you, and you only have to divide 27253/181000. That gives you 0.1506, very close to 15%.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions?t...

Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#414
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A basic trencher is little more than a push lawnmower frame with a chain saw attached. Not enormous industrial equipment, but still a large boost to productivity vs a shovel.

I think the basic trencher would almost certainly still count as manual labor? Nobody is expecting that they are out there digging with bare hands.

> Nobody is expecting that they are out there digging with bare hands.

Most of these ditches are dug out by the locals with shovels. We're talking subsistence farmers here in areas where people are more or less trying to live off the land. Their hands and some primitive tools is all that's there.

Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#415
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same effect for half the work. Look up the videos on youtube, it's manual labor on very hard ground.

Why is it manual? If I had a mission to plant millions of trees, I am going to invest in a ditch witch.

local labour is cheaper

Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, I think Rome, Greece and other conquering powers get more respect than they deserve. There's no actual reason so many people have to die for these countries' national ambitions. Feel free to generalize to the US, etc.

Didn't Rome save a lot of lives by pax romana? Perhaps it was actually better in terms of loss of life to be conquered by Rome than have endless wars among yourselves. Applies to the US too.

The conquest of Gaul was essentially genocide. Ceaser killed one third of the population, enslaved another, and left the rest to live under Roman rule. My suspicion is Gauls would have been better off having petty wars among themselves than this.

Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#417

I don’t know how it is in other countries, but nearly thirty years ago when I was in elementary school, a Chinese propaganda slogan stuck with me: “If you want to get rich, build roads first; have fewer children, plant more trees.” Every part of that slogan has been put into action, continuously, for decades. Although low birth rates have now become a problem, back then it seemed like a solution. Xi Jinping may be a…

Not to glaze unelected uniparty governments, but this is what you can actually achieve if you don't have to focus on your new election the moment you enter office.

Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#418
post #367
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's many ways to achieve improved quality of life. Our fancy-insulated new German house with triple glazing and a heat pump used an average of 250 W grid power last month, despite our PV being (1) a Balkonkraftwerk and therefore only 800 W peak, (2) summer's over, lots of clouds now, and (3) in a very sub-optimal location due to a builder's skip. (Still, the neighbours have trimmed the hedge last weekend and the…

There's easy ways and hard ways, the point is a country which has done the easy way cannot tell another country with less impact per capita they need to do it the hard way before cleaning up its act. Or you can but you're huge hypocrites.

The easy way isn't the same from one year to the next.

China is currently building out all of this renewable energy and EVs, when the early industrial powers didn't, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because it is now the easy way.

Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>*"conservatives have been running that playbook since the New Deal" I think one of America's many failures is allowing a radically revolutionary right-wing (that is currently headed full speed to fascism) to keep calling themselves "conservatives" when that label is about as incorrect as can be. They don't "conserve" anything. They're not actually reactionary, although they often pretend to be. They are not trying t…

I agree. Of the two major US political parties today, one is primarily radical right with a small conservative branch that is struggling to stay in their party. The other is conservative to moderate with a small liberal branch that is fighting to make their party stand for something.

That liberals are the left wing in US is quite telling. In Europe and Latin America liberals are (center-)right.

Re: China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, I roughly searched around, including asking AI, but I couldn’t really figure out what happened. I hardly have any impression of her; her videos can be found on Chinese internet, but the recommendation algorithms have never suggested them to me. From what I’ve found so far, she seems quite controversial. She might have been limited in reach on Chinese internet. Maybe the government found a suitable reaso…

It seems she was silenced for publicly advocating for LGBT and visited by agents multiple times about it. But there are a lot more details I'm sure.

There's more than that. She was on the verge of exposing Chinese intelligence surveillance methods/technologies. The Shenzhen authorities know her well and were relatively lenient, but the moment she touched upon the intelligence area, she attracted the attention of much more paranoid security officials. Those officials then found out she had a Uyghur girlfriend and became even more paranoid due to suspected links with terrorism; those officials, after all, spent the 80s/90s taking bullets from Uyghur terrorists, so they are quick to jump to conclusions that Naomi is compromised and sends intelligence secrets to Turkistan Islamic Party.

I suspect these are much more of a reason to offboard her from social media than all the LGBT stuff, which she had already done for years.

Source: The Daily Mao on Twitter, who said he physically spoke with her half a year ago. Naomi said she's fine, she's just not allowed to have a public social media presence. She's very lucky not to have been thrown in jail for national security/terrorism reasons, especially given how paranoid the security officials are. Perhaps the Shenzhen authorities put in a good word for her.

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