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Not to be too snarky, but my first reaction to the headline was, “only 1.2 trillion? What are we waiting for!” More seriously, though: the article claims there
by burlesona 8y ago
Not to be too snarky, but my first reaction to the headline was, “only 1.2 trillion? What are we waiting for!”
More seriously, though: the article claims there’s “ample acreage” for such an endeavor but I didn’t see where exactly they’re referring to. Are we supposed to imagine these are sprinkled here and there around the earth, and that there’s plenty of space just waiting for a tree to be planted, or is this something where we need to create or re-create vast forest lands for it to work?
- jandrese 8y agoThat's only 160 trees for every man, woman, and child on Earth... It doesn't seem like a particularly practical solution.
- oliwarner 8y agoBut it might be part of a solution.
- dota_fanatic 8y agoHow hard is it to plant a tree? Especially if it's young and there is very clear guidance as to which native trees should be planted in which contexts you have available to you locally (account for full size growth and sunlight / water needs). If over one year everyone planted 3 trees per week, and we employed a work force of people to cultivate them further, we would make a huge dent in our catastrophic risk exposure? Sure, it's seemingly impractical alongside the status quo of land distribution and use ( $$$ into develop all the land and farm humans for rent!!), but... more green will be good for the health of nearly all the living things on Earth, and at the very least give us more time to find even better solutions.
- village-idiot 8y agoIt’s cheap to plant baby trees, and baby trees are the ones that are about to go through their main carbon absorption cycle anyways.
- pvaldes 8y agoWith everybody trying to burn it, or steal it, or pour concrete over it, can be very hard. Is an 80 years' work in any case.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bjourne 8y agoIt is not difficult but doing it without the right machinery requires back-breaking labor. It looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUzeruQT8xE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUzeruQT8xE I did it one full weekend and I was totally exhausted. Of course, there exists machines to do that, but then you can't have every person in the world chipping in. But planting is just the first step. If you own a growing forest it needs to be culled periodically, meaning that you cut down the worst performing 10-20% of all trees.
- ip26 8y agoThat video is what you consider back-breaking? I planted ten trees on my property with a mattock & shovel over the course of two weeks, removing maybe fifty gallons of clay for each hole, and while it was hard I wouldn't describe it as back-breaking. You'd also adapt to it as you got stronger...
- ALittleLight 8y agoIt seems incredibly practical to me. I've seen a quote for 40 dollars to plant a thousand trees. That's something like 50 billion to offset a decade of global warming? Doesn't sound so bad. Spread the cost out worldwide, 5 billion a year, split between a few big countries? http://forestandrange.org/southernpine/magement/planting/reasons/costs.html http://forestandrange.org/southernpine/magement/planting/rea...
- ed_balls 8y agoI don't think planting trees is the biggest issue. Access to water is. More practical solution would be to fill some desert with sea water and grow plankton, kelp etc.
- slothtrop 8y agoDeforestation is one of the reasons some deserts have spread so rapidly. trees behave as a shield to that encroachment
- Latty 8y agoI recently saw a video about doing this - apparently the desert is actually a really bad option if we want to combat climate change - the core problem is that the desert currently reflects a lot of light from the sun. If we cover it with forest or whatever, then suddenly we adjust the albedo of the earth and absorb more heat, negating some of the impact. Combined with the energy need to pump (and desalinate for trees - your suggestion of kelp would presumably help there) water, etc... make it not really work. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfo8XHGFAIQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfo8XHGFAIQ I recommend watching the video - it explains it better and goes into detail - it cites its own sources.
- nojvek 8y agoI assume trees are good at trapping the energy from sunlight + combining it with c02 and water to produce carbon, oxygen and more water. So planting trees in deserts with somewhat decent access to underground water tables should help cool the planet and create a great renewable resource right?
- jessriedel 8y agoThe cost of global warming and the benefits we've reaped from its cause (cheap power) are both a significant fraction of world GDP. Planting 160 trees per person would be cheap, and even easily do-able by an individual in a few weekends (though it's obviously way more efficient to hire specialists to do it en mass). The total suitable land area needed (more than the area of the USA, by my estimate) is much more likely to be the limiting factor than the per-person difficulty.
- 14 8y agoI dislike the US prison system but perhaps we could use prisoners to do it. They could plant hundreds If not thousands within a sentence and one day return to visit the forest they planted.
- lyxsus1 8y agoI like how we instinctively turn to slavery when there's a grand project that becomes vital.
- Aeolun 8y agoAll the grand projects of the past few centuries were based on it. Why change a winning strategy?
- lyxsus1 8y agoWell, we have better means for automation now. But I'm just fascinated how quickly that solution pops up in such discussions as soon as it's convenient.
- lamarpye 8y agoI like how we instinctively characterize prisoners as slaves. Seems like it trivializes actual slavery, but I have been out of school for awhile, so the conventional wisdom is probably different now.
- mikestew 8y agoOne could plant that many pine saplings in a weekend with good hand tools. Mechanize it, spread the cost amongst many, I believe it wouldn’t cost, relative to what it offsetting, all that much. Land acquisition would probably be the larger obstacle.
- strainer 8y agoI once worked for a short spell in a tree-planting squad in the highlands of Scotland. The seasoned planters were olympically fit and each planted around 100 saplings an hour across rough mountainside.
- alkonaut 8y agoFor comparison, in Sweden, Finland etc there is 5-10000 trees per capita already. Adding a 1000 more per head would be easy in terms of space. So that would cover say 100M people.
- WalterBright 8y agoThe great plains have little vegetation on them, and take well to having trees planted on them. The trees in Kansas, for example, were planted by early settlers to break the wind, and have thrived. (The historical reason trees were absent from the great plains was periodic fire.)
- tspike 8y agoThey were also once home to tallgrass prairie, now the most threatened biome on the planet.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]