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- Hacker News
- This sounds big but its less than the bare minimum required. Their coal emissions are insane. In my opinion its all anyone should be talking about when it comes to climate change.by AuthAuth
- Aren’t they bringing on incredible amounts of solar we could only dream about?
Edit: for the downvoters
by Mistletoe - “Their” coal emissions
- Not counting the gobi desert , China is only 5x the size of Texas so it’s nothing to sneeze atby hammock
- This is propaganda. It's impossible to take this comment in good faithby geysersam
- Well they're releasing 9.2ton CO2 per Capita, the US is releasing 13.5ton CO2 per Capita. And this while the US and the rest of the world is doing all of their manufacturing in China.by voxelghost
- Can you tell everyone what their per capita emission is? While you're at it, compare that with the US per capita emissions. Also let us know the accumulated emissions for China and US in the last 50 years.
Thanks.
by lbrito - The project wasn't started as a global warming fix. As the article notes, it was about preventing desertification:
> Over the last three and a half decades China has planted roughly 120 million acres of forest, according to U.N. figures, much of it added to contain the spread of deserts. Last year China completed a project, begun in 1978, to plant a 2,000-mile-long belt of trees around the Taklamakan Desert in the west. Work continues on a belt of trees around the massive Gobi Desert in the north.
by nitwit005 - How much of this is the result of reversing the deforestation caused by the Great Leap Forward and other anti-nature policies of the mid twentieth century?
It's not a bad thing if this is mostly just restoring forests ravaged by bad policy, but it's a bit odd to compare this reforestation, quantitatively, to what's going on in countries that didn't have a "war against nature".
by beloch - They've been doing deforestation for thousands years. The "Yellow" River is one of the results.by feverzsj
- It's really hard to understate how deforestation ravaged China - their forestry cover declined by almost half during The Great Leap Forward as the CCCP at the time pushed hard to exploit the land. As a result, there were severe and noticeable problems with flooding and desertification. So starting in the 70s they invested heavily in the "Three-North Shelter Forest Program" (aka the Great Green Wall). Although, probably more importantly, economic liberalization meant farming became more efficient and people could move towards cities and free up the land again.
I think more fascinating has been Russia's surge in forestry growth, also very notable in the report. Unlike China their forests have expanded almost completely accidentally. Communist-era collective farmlands have slowly been getting abandoned. Their frontier has been shrinking and the forests have crept in, tree growth being aided by longer growing period and thawing permafrost.
by legitster - According to WWF, there was some targeted effort on reforestation and sustainable forest management in Russia, which they claim to have assisted.by ivan_gammel
- as an American that was my understanding also.. small nit (understate deforestation) -> (overstate deforestation).. the phrase means "even if I talked for ten minutes with all the emphasis I can find, it would not be enough to show it.. you cannot OVERstate how serious the impact was..by mistrial9
- China was already extensively deforested in the Ming and Qing dynasties.by RobotToaster
- Canada has added 20 million acres,
India 22 million acres,
Russia 52 million acres - an area about the size of Kansas.
by lovegrenoble - Thanks for the info.
Honest questions how much forest the US and UK added since they are probably the loudest in the issue of deforestration?
by teleforce - Texas is ~172 million acresby 867-5309
- The US reforested significantly in the twentieth century as well, which helped keep some of the US cooler than it should have been relative to the climate change norm.
https://news.agu.org/press-release/a-century-of-reforestatio...
by softwaredoug - I've been binging a lot of videos on things like rewilding and other approaches that can be used to restore landscapes. The Chinese have successfully executed a number of large scale projects over the decades. They started this early. Where other countries talked about doing things, the Chinese went ahead and did those things.
One of their projects is allowing them to undertake infrastructure projects in the desert. They simply stick bales of straw into ditches to stop soil being blown away by wind. The straw traps soil, water, and breaks down over a few years allowing plants to take hold. It's a simple approach that works. Very pramatic, dig a ditch, stick in some straw. Done. Repeat.
Outside of China, the green wall in Africa is a very pragmatic approach that involves digging a lot of half moon shaped ditches to trap rain water. Simple and effective.
Other approaches involve using fences to stop sheep and other grazers from preventing anything vaguely green tinted shoots from being eaten and giving them a chance to actually turn into trees.
What I like about these approaches is that some relatively simple measures can have big effects. People spend a lot of time hand wringing over seemingly insurmountable problems. The Chinese are showing that in addition to the power to destroy landscapes, we also have the power to remake them. It works. They aren't tree huggers. Better landscapes also mean local economies benefit. Deserts don't feed people. Water retention means agriculture gets a second chance.
What I admire in the Chinese is the pragmatic can do attitude. Their motivations are of course self serving. They value having clean air in their cities, clean drinking water, and a landscape that can support agriculture and infrastructure. And in the end that's the best kind of motivation you can get. It's something worth copying. Whenever economy, science, and environment align, everybody wins.
A lot of areas in the rest of the world that are subject to desertification, pollution, etc. are fixable. And there's value in fixing them that needs more attention. I don't see this as a green/left topic. If you exist on this planet, why wouldn't you want something to be done to clean up the mess we've all created in the last centuries? Breaking out this topic from the usual left/right day to day politics is key. The rest is just work. The Chinese put the rest of us to shame with hard work.
- This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qwshdtijFY and his whole channel are a great binge for this topic.
No nonsense, an actual practitioner, and not very "YouTubey"
by aarondf - Any YouTube playlist that you can share?by seb1204
- Do you know why the mounds with half-moon shapes? Why is it more effective than simply digging a circular hole in the ground?
- I think they’re doing a great thing.
My area has seen some wildfire smoke season near the end of summer. It never happened when I was a kid. Now every summer there’s wildfire smoke for several days or several weeks.
The climate appears to be changing and heavily forested areas of midwest US and canada are on fire every summer.
Planting trees could be great for the environment, but without the moisture it could become a tinderbox for wildfires.
- Wildfires are only a problem for the matchboxes filled with trinkets we build adjacent to the pretty trees and live in - the forest likes the cleansing.by blitzar
- How do you know whether that is caused by climate change or worse management of forests.
I suspect many governments are spending less on prevention because they can blame the consequences on climate change - whereas if climate change is increasing the risk they should be spending more on reducing it.
> Planting trees could be great for the environment, but without the moisture it could become a tinderbox for wildfires.
Trees also change the climate locally so might be part of the solution for that too.
by graemep - Wondering if I should also pitch in a backhanded compliment for doing something good or if we already have enough of those in this thread.by ksynwa
- NYTimes in 4 days: "Analysts mention that the radical forestry has military applications for Chinese forces training for a potential Western European conflict."by carabiner
- My immediate thought, yeah isnt that because they don't really naturally have the kinds of softwoods forests good for making boards and paper? And until more recently they were taking recycled paper/fiber from america in empty shipping containers returning.
The real news is that it's also slightly happening in other developed countries too, another rhetoric point towards Steven Pinker's concept that as nations get richer they become more environmentally conscious, cause they can afford to care about it.
by maerF0x0 - > Steven Pinker's concept that as nations get richer they become more environmentally conscious, cause they can afford to care about it.
I think in this case it's more of a correlating factor. The countries struggling with deforestation have very little state capacity to enforce property rights or any sort of environmental regulations. Whereas in the developed world it's much easier to stop illegal logging or homesteading.
by legitster - > as nations get richer they become more environmentally conscious, cause they can afford to care about it.
Thus far, getting rich has been dirty business. This is what leads people to care more so than them being able to afford to care. Their richness is a side effect of their pollution, thus, caring is a side effect of richness but that's not the root cause. Pollution -> Money -> Caring. If you removed the money, people still care they just can't afford to do anything about it.
I'm not familiar with Pinker or this theory, just poking at it :)
by conductr