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Denmark will plant 1B trees and convert 10% of farmland into forest

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Re: Denmark will plant 1B trees and convert 10% of farmland into forest

#141

Post by RandomThoughts3 »

credit_guy wrote: post #109
chipdart wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because it’s becoming increasingly obviously dumb to be paying farmers money to pretend like they are farming their land. This is a particularly ignorant and clueless opinion to have. The whole point of Europe's common agricultural policy is to preserve the potential of agricultural production as a strategic asset. Europe's strong economy and huge population density, coupled with cheap access to agricultural produc…

With this type of argument you can demonstrate that lots of things have strategic importance. Steel? Check. Textiles? Check. Asphalt? Check. We should subsidize everything. Yet, when the military threat actually materializes and you need to manufacture 155mm shells, all the strategic planning seems quite useless.

Everything you are listing is indeed very much strategic and Europe was indeed extremely stupid to let that go. The end of your paragraph is a demonstration of that. It doesn’t go against the core idea.

Re: Denmark will plant 1B trees and convert 10% of farmland into forest

#142

Post by missedthecue »

notRobot wrote: post #115
Auracle wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And he’d be right. When those trees die and then rot or burn, that CO2 will be released right back into the atmosphere. They’ll temporarily hold some, yeah, but it’s like trying to rapidly fire a squirt gun at a fire when someone else is spraying it with a firehose of gasoline. Especially because trees plant themselves. If they want to set aside the land for forest and seed it a little to get going - great - but thos…

The corollary to this would be that deforestation hasn't make climate change worse, and a simple Google search tells me that: > Deforestation plays a significant role in climate change, contributing 12–20% of global greenhouse gas emissions

Most global deforestation involves slash and burn. This releases the carbon stored in the trees. But I think that's OPs point. A growing tree doesn't remove carbon, it temporarily stores it until it dies or burns.

Re: Denmark will plant 1B trees and convert 10% of farmland into forest

#143

Post by RandomThoughts3 »

pvaldes wrote: post #89
ksec wrote: post #16

Before I go into rage mode, I suppose I should ask, why Farmland? Both Denmark and Netherland are big in agriculture export and they are very good at it. I am not against planting trees but it on top of farm land doesn't make any sense to me.

I think that there is an official and an unofficial reason. The official is that something must be returned to nature before climate change destroys everything. The unofficial is, in my opinion, that EU politicians are terrified by US elections. In all western countries, far right groups are crawling to grab more and more power gradually. Those groups feed basically on farmer followers, ruthlessly brainwashed with fa…

> The official is that something must be returned to nature before climate change destroys everything.

Nature is an abstraction, not a weird angry god. We need to capture GHG and stop emitting more but that’s pretty much it. That will most likely involve reforestation as it’s a good carbon sink but using the expression “returning thing to nature” is not a correct way to frame it.

Re: Denmark will plant 1B trees and convert 10% of farmland into forest

#144

Post by kawsper »

ggernov wrote: post #139

This is ghoulish - farmland should directly be benefit the endemic population as much as possible! That's what it's there for! I love green tech like solar etc, made my home even more efficient etc but we need fresh food to LIVE!

Denmark exports a lot of the produced food, and we are one of the most intensely farmed countries in the world, 60.4% of Denmark consists of fields, and 48% of Denmark's land area is used to grow food for animals, animals which are primarily pigs.

We also yearly import 1.8 million tons of soy from South America to feed said pigs, because we can't grow enough food for them ourselves.

It would be nice to have some nature to walk in, it's something I miss here and something there's a lot of in England, and it's great combined with their public footpath system!

Re: Denmark will plant 1B trees and convert 10% of farmland into forest

#145

Post by RandomThoughts3 »

postepowanieadm wrote: post #62
ksec wrote: post #16

Before I go into rage mode, I suppose I should ask, why Farmland? Both Denmark and Netherland are big in agriculture export and they are very good at it. I am not against planting trees but it on top of farm land doesn't make any sense to me.

Simple: Germany has a huge export surplus that China and the USA is unwilling to accept anymore. Also, German economy is stagnate, based on a cheap russian gas and cooperation with china. So now, the idea is to target South America for exports while balancing it with import of South American foodstuff(EU-Mercosur agreement, that we know will not be ratified by individual countries in a democratic process, but by the…

Germany has been leaching off the EU for so long through the weak Euro, they now think it will always work. They are clearly putting France on a fast track to an exit via a far right government with the whole Mercosur agreement debacle.

Re: Denmark will plant 1B trees and convert 10% of farmland into forest

#146

Post by awjlogan »

cpursley wrote: post #111
awjlogan wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would gently encourage you to engage with the topic rather than a puerile dismissal as “farting cows”. Agriculture is one of the main drivers of climate change (~30%), and and also has associated land usage implications. Ruminants (“farting cows”) directly produce around 6% of our total emissions.

I was just reusing the term op used. And that’s a tiny percentage if the trade off is keeping humans fed.

No, it's a huge amount relative to the nutrition it actually provides. There is so much terrible (by any metric apart from maybe direct monetary cost) meat consumed and there are vested interests in a lot of industries to maintain that status quo.

Don't get me wrong, good meat is delicious and there are plenty of ecosystems that require grazing and large herbivores to maintain, but the current system is devastating and doesn't provide nearly as much nutrition to the end user as it consumes in its production.

Re: Denmark will plant 1B trees and convert 10% of farmland into forest

#147

Post by credit_guy »

vorpalhex wrote: post #114
credit_guy wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With this type of argument you can demonstrate that lots of things have strategic importance. Steel? Check. Textiles? Check. Asphalt? Check. We should subsidize everything. Yet, when the military threat actually materializes and you need to manufacture 155mm shells, all the strategic planning seems quite useless.

In the US, we have sextupled 155mm shell production. If war breaks out, you need to feed people, maintain roads, build vehicles, etc.

Europe has a huge coastline, it's impossible to blockade. If war breaks out, it's better to shift workers from agriculture to war-related production, and import food from places that are not at war, such as South America. Food produced in Europe is basically a luxury. For every kilogram of beef produced in Denmark, you can buy 2.5 kg of Argentinian beef.

Re: Denmark will plant 1B trees and convert 10% of farmland into forest

#149

Post by JoshGG »

dataviz1000 wrote: post #52
ksec wrote: post #16

Before I go into rage mode, I suppose I should ask, why Farmland? Both Denmark and Netherland are big in agriculture export and they are very good at it. I am not against planting trees but it on top of farm land doesn't make any sense to me.

Haiti cut down all their trees. When a hurricane passes through it moves what little top soil they have into the ocean.[1] Haiti overfished their costal waters. Now they do not have fish to eat and worse can not participate in the single biggest economic driver in the Caribbean, scuba diving. Planting trees on farms is incredibly important for maintaining and protecting the soil. The Americans learned that the hard w…

You left out the part where Haiti was destabilized and crushed by colonial debt. And I don’t think that lack of fish is what’s keeping the tourists away. But hey, weren’t we talking about Denmark ?

Re: Denmark will plant 1B trees and convert 10% of farmland into forest

#150

Post by llm_trw »

chipdart wrote: post #57
Galaxeblaffer wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Denmarks agricultural performance is not great at all. it's way too expensive to produce stuff. if it wasn't for EU subsidies the agricultural sector in Denmark would loose over 50% of their profits. To drive the point home the agricultural sector in Denmark only makes up 3.6% of the bnp and 4.3% of exports while taking up 60% of Denmarks total area and employing around 3.9% of the working population. i think Denmark…

> Denmarks agricultural performance is not great at all. it's way too expensive to produce stuff. if it wasn't for EU subsidies the agricultural sector in Denmark would loose over 50% of their profits. Agriculture in the EU is renowned for not being financially unjustified. For decades it's been a finantial no-brainer to import the bulk of agricultural products from south America and Africa. This is not new or the re…

You'd think that people would have realized this after Europe avoided mass death from Russian gas being cut off only because the winter was mild.
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