Kind of low-hanging fruit, since it's the cursed orange website, and even they will soon vote it down to the negatives, but it was such a fresh flavor of unhinged that I had to share it.
Full text: (in response to "Per capita CO₂ emissions Over Time")
Let's count trees per capita.
Planting more trees is commonly regarded by leftists/communists/morons and "science" people (that don't know a method from a hole in the ground) as a dumbass solution.
If you want to reduce carbon dioxide in the air, it's simple. Plant more. Why dipshits from the left are against planting trees and carbon sinks shows me they only care about politics.
There's a number of issues with the "just plant more trees" rhetoric that people tend to not think of but the biggest one IMO is the loss of biodiversity.
Just like anything else, there's a lot of different types of trees. These tree planting companies are mostly putting nonnative species down all around a similar time. Both destroying the local ecosystem and damaging the potential for a new ecosystem at the same time because the canopy levels are too similar leading to less light leaking through and shooting undergrowth.
It also of course isn't good to just force large plots of low tree land like the savannahs and natural deserts to be something that they aren't when we should just be lowering our pollution instead.
feel like this is a "walk and chew gum" type of situation, we should both reduce emissions and plant more trees. if only because we cut so many of them down. it's hard to imagine a situation in which "no trees" is better for biodiversity than even stupidly planting monocultures or planting trees outside of their proper environments.
It might seem counterintuitive but yes, no trees can be better. Like I said, savannahs and deserts shouldn't be forced to be something they aren't. They are unique and important ecosystems in their own right (especially deserts which get a lot of unfair hate) and overwriting them is something we should avoid if we can.
Reforestation can be an important environmental tool but it has to be cautious and done properly and like most things, the better solution is to never cut down trees that aren't needed to begin with. One easy fix to that is to stop eating so much meat, a lot of our deforestation goes to making more land for the food crops that go to the farm animals.
I don't see any justification here for doing nothing, or scolding techbros who just want to grow plants. if your contribution is "don't do it wrong" then I guess that's sort of helpful.
if it makes it easier then imagine the HN guy is saying "let's go wherever we deforested and plant whatever used to be there"
yeah that would be cool. problem is they're saying "stop doing that clean energy shit, just burn coal and plant trees bro"
well that is indeed stupid
Trees are important and reforestation is something we should be focusing on, I don't disagree here. The issue is that in a rush to focus on some magic pill that will solve all of our climate and carbon woes (it won't), we can't be destroying all the other important and valuable ecosystems. Natural biodiversity is incredibly important in all sorts of ways.
expand the old growth forrests