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Frustrating not being able to support this. The planet has a fever and religious US congress members, scynical chinese and russian cleptocrats won't do anything

Frustrating not being able to support this. The planet has a fever and religious US congress members, scynical chinese and russian cleptocrats won't do anything.

sanxiyn 12y ago
China plants more trees than the rest of world combined. Your cynicism against China is misdirected.
- hueving 12y ago
  China emits more CO2 than any country as well. Not as misdirected as you would think.
  - IkmoIkmo 12y ago
    Mostly as the world's factory, I would add. For all the criticism of China's environmental standard we tend to fail to mention that we procure many of the products that are built in unsustainable ways, largely unwilling to pay a premium to make it more sustainable. Add to that the apples/oranges comparison where hundreds of millions of people in China live in 1800s industrial-revolutionesque environments, it's hardly fair to hold them to a standard of modern, efficient, sustainable 21st century production processes we find in many OECD countries today. Anyway, I don't mean for this to be a giant cop-out for China. But its environmental record should be contextualized. An interesting part of that context is that it's one of the most rapidly advancing countries in terms of investments and capacity of sustainable energy. Policy makers definitely do not look the other way and ignore the problems as if they don't exist. It appears the environmental issues are acknowledged, but not always prioritized over trying to lift hundreds of millions of people into a lower-middle class from de facto poverty. One may be more sympathetic to that than some of the global-warming denier policy makers we see in the west, who are either ignorant of the problem or prioritize economic goals while the average American or European already makes 10x more than the average Chinese. (who, again, use a significant chunk of this money to move their CO2 production out of the country, and to China, benefiting from the production but offloading the CO2 onto China's record, and in the process moving any affects of local pollution onto relatively poor Chinese. If it's waste, we call it toxic dumping and outlaw it. If it's air and water pollution from a factory that creates jobs, it's but an unfortunate side effect of globalism). At least, that's the Chinese's perspective. There's more to it, but I think it's important to be aware of the above in any case.
    - hueving 12y ago
      It's inexcusable. They choose to accept the money for manufacturing without imposing environmental regulations. The only way people will pay for protection of the environment is if it's priced into the market. China does not care to price it, and that's why we are where we are. They definitely turn their head the other way and even actively bury environmental issues. Look what happened with the smog station on top of the US embassy. They told them to take it down because they didn't like their citizens getting real air quality data.
  - est 12y ago
    How about per capita?
    - hueving 12y ago
      Doesn't really matter when we need to reduce global CO2. Yeah, it might be lower there than many other places, but part of that is because much of the population is still very poor. At their current trajectory, their emissions will just continue up, not down.
kszx 12y ago
The US (Great Plains Shelterbelt project), China (Great Green Wall, or Three-North Shelter Forest Program), and Russia (Siberia) are precisely the inspirations for this project.

Frustrating not being able to support this. The planet has a fever and religious US congress members, scynical chinese and russian cleptocrats won't do anything.

sanxiyn 12y ago

China plants more trees than the rest of world combined. Your cynicism against China is misdirected.

hueving 12y ago
China emits more CO2 than any country as well. Not as misdirected as you would think.
- IkmoIkmo 12y ago
  Mostly as the world's factory, I would add. For all the criticism of China's environmental standard we tend to fail to mention that we procure many of the products that are built in unsustainable ways, largely unwilling to pay a premium to make it more sustainable. Add to that the apples/oranges comparison where hundreds of millions of people in China live in 1800s industrial-revolutionesque environments, it's hardly fair to hold them to a standard of modern, efficient, sustainable 21st century production processes we find in many OECD countries today. Anyway, I don't mean for this to be a giant cop-out for China. But its environmental record should be contextualized. An interesting part of that context is that it's one of the most rapidly advancing countries in terms of investments and capacity of sustainable energy. Policy makers definitely do not look the other way and ignore the problems as if they don't exist. It appears the environmental issues are acknowledged, but not always prioritized over trying to lift hundreds of millions of people into a lower-middle class from de facto poverty. One may be more sympathetic to that than some of the global-warming denier policy makers we see in the west, who are either ignorant of the problem or prioritize economic goals while the average American or European already makes 10x more than the average Chinese. (who, again, use a significant chunk of this money to move their CO2 production out of the country, and to China, benefiting from the production but offloading the CO2 onto China's record, and in the process moving any affects of local pollution onto relatively poor Chinese. If it's waste, we call it toxic dumping and outlaw it. If it's air and water pollution from a factory that creates jobs, it's but an unfortunate side effect of globalism). At least, that's the Chinese's perspective. There's more to it, but I think it's important to be aware of the above in any case.
  - hueving 12y ago
    It's inexcusable. They choose to accept the money for manufacturing without imposing environmental regulations. The only way people will pay for protection of the environment is if it's priced into the market. China does not care to price it, and that's why we are where we are. They definitely turn their head the other way and even actively bury environmental issues. Look what happened with the smog station on top of the US embassy. They told them to take it down because they didn't like their citizens getting real air quality data.
- est 12y ago
  How about per capita?
  - hueving 12y ago
    Doesn't really matter when we need to reduce global CO2. Yeah, it might be lower there than many other places, but part of that is because much of the population is still very poor. At their current trajectory, their emissions will just continue up, not down.

kszx 12y ago

The US (Great Plains Shelterbelt project), China (Great Green Wall, or Three-North Shelter Forest Program), and Russia (Siberia) are precisely the inspirations for this project.