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.
Countering desertification with tree planting seems to have yielded significant benefits to China.
Desertification isn't climate change, and tree planting can help. Planting trees to temporarily contain some carbon before they die and release it back into the atmosphere does not undo releasing carbon that was previously sequestered in a coal bed.
Can't we then cut down the trees, then make houses or throw them in a deep lake?
Yes, but now you're factory farming trees and requiring petrolium fertilizilers to counter the long-term soil depletion and runoff from planned deforestation events.
There's lots of good reasons to (re)plant forests to help slow climate change, but carbon storage is mostly a nice side bonus.
You can, wood products are a carbon sink.
We could start using wooden boxes instead of plastic for cheap disposable packaging, start building wooden skyscrapers, etc. It's a neat vibe, I like it. But it wouldn't put a dent in just how much wood we'd end up producing if we were trying to mitigate climate change with wood strats.
Desertification isn't climate change
but does contribute to climate change.
I actually think that mass tree planting is a highly underrated component of climate change mitigation.
But the context here is some guy ranting about how nobody's talking about planting trees in response to a post about per-capita CO2 emissions. And no number of trees* will catch up with the continued use of fossil fuels.
*Okay actually I napkin mathed this years ago, and using an area about the size of the USA for CO2-optimized lumber production would be enough to keep pace with CO2 emissions. But the sheer scope of that is absurd, and it would be an ecological disaster of its own right.
Oh sure. You'd need a command economy committed to actually planting new trees, rather than just running scams where you try to quadruple count trees already in the ground to make that kind of progress.
Damn shame the US doesn't have that.
a command economy committed to actually planting new trees
I brought that up as example with a few friday for future people, who didn't know their history (which is understandable). One of the students was like: "I thought socialists do only mine coal and increase industrial production." which is easy to think when you aren't aware of the multitude of people trying stuff under the label.
The problem with trees is that they're a temporary carbon sink so you need somewhere to go with the wood if you don't want to end up with a marginally lower steady state. It remains more energetically favorable to keep the genie in the bottle than chase it down and stuff it back in once it's loose.
How could you just turn our natural resources over to Putin like that
So restore about ⅔ of what we've lost. let’s zoom in on the last 300 years. The world lost 1.5 billion hectares of forest over that period. That’s an area 1.5-times the size of the United States
I wonder how does that compare to the size of the Sahel Green Belt?
Restoring that amount of forest would not be anywhere near enough. Trying to keep up with CO2 emissions by planting trees would require constantly cutting those trees down to make room for more trees. In an area the size of the US.
Also, trees are nice. Of course saying that we can solve climate change by planting trees is wrong, but also - plant more trees!
What happens if we're wrong and we create a better world for nothing!
😏
But yes. Like most carbon capture schemes, I'll concede it is not a panacea
The cost benifit analysis of the 2022 IPPC report shows that tree planting, agricultural carbon sequestration, and forest protection are some of the most beneficial aspects of any global mitigation plan in terms of effectiveness of carbon capture and cost.
We obviously can’t continue a pro growth model in developed nations for the end of time, but to say anything against tree planting is dumb. I don’t know leftists that are saying they are against trees, unless that’s what you have been doing?
Show
Nobody's against planting trees (if it's done right). But if wie don't stop pumping oil immediately, planting trees wont save us. Since leftists believe this, they "hate trees"
Genuinely feels like somebody pulled a successful psy-op on reddit to poison the well against tree planting and leftists bought it. Very nuclear energy-like.
Planting trees can be beneficial has China have made great progress regarding reforestation but trees are only an auxiliary measure to mitigate climate change and a proper response will require radical access across the entire...
THE WOKE LEFT HATES TREES!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'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"
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.
the insane people that manage to get ratio'd on the orange hell site are the most bizarre type of guy
The oceans are the world's largest carbon sinks, planting more trees won't counter CO2 emissions because most carbon isn't being stored that way. All it's useful for is helping a bunch of dumbass billionaires look like they're doing something about ecological collapse all while the oceans acidify.
It’s not just about carbon storage, it’s about land use. Are we really going anti tree here? I don’t understand this argument
It depends. Planting trees to protect against erosion and revert desertification can be great. Restoring habitats is also good. In the economic sector planting trees gives us a more sustainable source of lumber than cutting down wild forests. Trees beautify urban environments and provide natural cooling.
Trees are cool but you need to do a lot more than planting them to save the world.
If you want to reduce carbon dioxide in the air, it's simple. Plant more.
The commenter being dunked on here does seem to think that trees would function as carbon storage.
My objections aren't with planting more trees, it's with the fact that "plant more trees" has become the catch all solution by greenwashing capitalists so they can pretend they care about the environment as continue to destroy the global ecosystem.
Well, mismanagement of forest brush that contribute to fire fuel, by leftist morons, is a problem.
The liberals are destroying California. And, conservative humor gone array - conservative humor gone awry - is going to Fascistfornia today. So stay tuned, we're going to take a few pictures of the desert and how their, policies, are actually messing it up. It's not beautiful when you go across that border. So stay tuned guys we'll show you exactly what they're, we'll show you exactly what it looks like...
bro theyre still pumping oil from the precambrian or some shit out, theres no way you can compete with all the trees that will need
god i wish carbon scrubbing tech was good. we're so fucked right now
I think the criticism is what you said + tree planting goes full geoengineering sometimes when ppl advocate for replacing existing biomes with trees.
Yeah, we are going to plant the wrong kind of trees so we will see them either burn, get cut down for lumber again, or just mess up the ecosystem with some invasive species
One of the problems with that is that climate is changing which means the type of trees suited for various locations changes.
The one thing where I kind of feel like there's a smidge of a merit between "Well this wasn't communicated well!" is the split between climate change and enviromentalism.
"We should stop dumping plastic in the ocean so that we don't poison wildlife and ourself."
"Haha, stupid leftist. Plastic don't cause climate change :lib-status:"
reforesting and planting trees is good obvi but my sole contact with a tree guy irl was some STEM libertarian who thought commiting ecocide on the plains to plant more trees would fix everything.
idk where it comes from (probably white supremacy if you go deep enough) but a lot of this is founded on a bizarre belief that there's an ecosystem tier list with "forest" on the top. just plant trees guys are climate cranks right up there with the "regenerative" ranching believers, see silvopasture for the epic crossover event.
regret to inform you there's like an army of very smart and special boys here to tell us all about this one obvious trick to solve global warming forever that just happens to affirm the gut feelings of
google Allan Savory, follow the money
iirc trees are carbon positive for the first few decades of their existence as they develop the microbial ecosystem around their roots or something, also industrial farming, transport & logistics, etc etc; it's the stable, old growth forest ecosystems that are real carbon sinks and those are mostly dead/dying
trees by themselves go negative as they get older but we've pretty much missed that window in terms of short term emission reductions
Other way around, actually. Trees only sequester carbon while they grow (wood is full of carbon), and they grow slower as they age. A mature tree is more or less carbon neutral.
It's not just the tree itself. It puts humic acid in the soil and carbon gets locked into the soil.
this is what i thought before i fucking listened to posters
welp, gg, no investigation no right to speak asserts itself once again
Sounds like a Mao quote in regards to political cadres.
I don't think this is true. A mature tree is turning over massive amounts of carbon as it performs photosynthesis to feed its entire mass. Carbon removed from the atmosphere both by storage in the mass of the tree permanently but also by the tree's normal operational physiology.
spoiler
It gets even more complicated. After planting trees do have a positive CO2 balance, as the planting, preparation of soil etc. does cost CO2 when it is done by humans (if it isn't there is a good chance that non ideal flora takes over and reduces the amount of trees and their growth rate and with that the height).
However during the growth Trees do save the carbon created by photosynthesis, that is the majority of "saved" (better stored) CO2. The leftover has a more minor part according to my memory. Why is that? Cause the biggest part besides the wood growth is creating leaves and alike, which do survive only a short time and whose CO2 is released quickly unless stored, saved or reused (and even then it is a zero sum game). You are right that in the middle of a trees life span they store the most carbon.
A mature tall tree does store plenty of what could be CO2 equivalent, but the growth rate gets reduced in terms of volume for most (which is something some bioengineers try to change to create trees that basically get really really thick, grow faster, or grow taller when chemical help is given to their root network, or their DNA is changed so that trees are able to produce what they lack themselves). However for Beech they take roughly 20 years to get to strong volume growth, before they are so small that they have little volume added per year. That changes for very old trees again.
What does that mean for climate change? It means that we have to account for multi tree forests in which tree planting, growth and mix are to be under rational control especially when reforesting. There are a couple of trees that grow fast and enable other trees to not have to deal with so much wind, but if you keep them then you will have cultures that aren't resilient and are also not the best in terms of volume gain for long term CO2 storage.
Large scale tree planting as geoengineering, definitely a thing that won't have any effect on deep ecology (like how for the Amazon to exist, you need the Sahara to fertilise it with dust blown over the Atlantic.)
Obviously rewilding is good and cool, but emphasis on the wild part.
