[HN Gopher] China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990
___________________________________________________________________
China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 206 points
Date : 2025-10-28 13:42 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (e360.yale.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (e360.yale.edu)
| yesbut wrote:
| finally some good news.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| 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.
| smallnix wrote:
| At least some projects run longer I understand: > Last year
| China completed a project, begun in 1978, to plant a
| 2,000-mile-long belt of trees
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| I've seen some neat videos on YouTube that sound impressive.
| Are they impressive in real life? Anyone have any personal
| experience?
| vondur wrote:
| I'd heard that project wasn't going so well. The trees
| weren't really suited to the areas where they were planted,
| and many died off. I suppose even if only a small percentage
| survive, it's still better than desert.
| FooBarWidget wrote:
| They had setbacks for sure, but they learned from them and
| continuously adjusted their methods.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| China is very large, has 90% of the population living on 40% of
| the land in the southern and eastern portion of the country,
| and some massive deserts that they don't want to expand. This
| leaves a lot of room for tree planting programs.
| dj_gitmo wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I'm not sure it's environmentalism. It's efficiency. From the
| article.
|
| > In richer countries, where farming has become more efficient,
| deforestation has slowed or even reversed
|
| You simply don't need as many people living in villages,
| farming marginal land. New England re-forested because the land
| was never that good for farming, and it made a lot more sense
| to work in factories.
| legitster wrote:
| > 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.
| munk-a wrote:
| I agree and would also add that food security is also a
| massive factor. With a high food insecurity clamping down on
| illegal expansion of farmland is politically toxic - but as
| land use efficiency rises and cities grow conservationalism
| becomes a much more important agenda to back.
|
| People like nature - all things held equal we want to live in
| a beautiful natural world... but if that world comes at the
| cost of having food on the table. Whether that inefficiency
| is technologically, environmentally (e.g. New England's poor
| soil) or conflict driven doesn't significantly change public
| opinion.
| conductr wrote:
| > 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
| :)
| renewiltord wrote:
| Much of Europe used to be forest. It just all got whacked in the
| few centuries prior to today. So you have Europeans making tiny
| recoveries to their rampant destruction of their environment
| celebrating that fact while preventing others from doing what
| they did. There is one path to this: first clear cut your forests
| so you can build your industry; then build your industry so you
| can be prosperous; then rebuild your forests. If you had 100
| acres of forest, and cut it down to 1 acre, then you can build 1
| acre at the end and claim a 100% improvement. The next year
| another acre still is 50% improvement. Can any who have retained
| their forest boast such improvement?
|
| China is following this path and we will celebrate it. As always,
| do not do what the developed nations say you should. Instead do
| what they did. After all, Norway did not become prosperous by
| keeping their oil in the ground.
| sarchertech wrote:
| > There is one path to this: first clear cut your forests so
| you can build your industry; then build your industry so you
| can be prosperous; then rebuild your forests.
|
| Sure if you need to bootstrap to the 18th century. It's much
| faster and cheaper to skip a few hundred years ahead by
| importing equipment.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| Checking in on the relative wealth of the countries who are
| only just now developing
| evoseven wrote:
| You are wrong. In Gaule, most of the country was farmland. Wood
| consumption was huge.
| aiauthoritydev wrote:
| India too has been adding more green cover than ever. Higher CO2
| in atmosphere leads to faster growth of forests. But more
| important factor is urbanization for India. As people move to
| cities the need to cut down trees goes down.
| navigate8310 wrote:
| Doesn't that put pressure on the cities itself especially the
| peripheral counties to pave way for housing and concrete roads?
| roncesvalles wrote:
| Cities tend to expand up. Almost all buildings in Mumbai that
| are under 5 stories are targeted for "redevelopment" i.e. a
| developer buying it out and building something taller in its
| place.
| navigate8310 wrote:
| That is too costly for cities that have cheap and abandoned
| agricultural land waiting to be deforested and build upon.
| mulmen wrote:
| [delayed]
| devnullbrain wrote:
| Yes, and it's a good thing.
|
| Either way, you need to fit the needs of the same number of
| people. If they're in a dense city near everything they need,
| they use less space.
|
| Policies to limit urban sprawl just an expensive way to
| create more sprawl elsewhere - and roads to it.
| mc32 wrote:
| Guess it depends on whether subsistence living is more
| resource intensive than urban living where on average
| urbanites own more possessions per capita.
| cyberax wrote:
| > Higher CO2 in atmosphere leads to faster growth of forests.
|
| Sigh. No, unfortunately it doesn't. Natural plants are very
| rarely rate-limited by the CO2 concentration. So forests don't
| grow faster.
|
| However, higher CO2 does make the forests a bit more drought-
| resistant.
| deadbabe wrote:
| So why are the forests growing faster
| cyberax wrote:
| The TLDR is that they aren't. Global warming made some
| areas more hospitable to forests (warmer, more
| precipitation) and increased drought resistance counteracts
| some of the increased aridity in other ares:
| https://e360.yale.edu/features/greening-drylands-carbon-
| diox...
| kulahan wrote:
| This is opposite to everything I've ever read. A brief
| "greening" period was expected (and is now nearing its end)
| as climate change started taking off due specifically to this
| effect.
|
| Edit: to clarify, I'm saying the greening thing already
| happened due to increases in CO2 levels (though it's possible
| this is due to heat and not CO2 itself, I guess?).
| torginus wrote:
| One nice thing about these developing countries is due to the
| power infrastructure tends to be not very good - which prompts
| people to take things into their hands and install solar, not
| to save the planet but to stave off brownouts, and be able to
| run the AC around the clock to stave off the heat.
|
| For residential, solar + batteries straight up beats legacy
| infra on cost, and with the upcoming cheap sodium batteries,
| things are only going to get better.
| Freedom2 wrote:
| Does this mean that you can drive in the forest for an entire day
| and still be in the forest?
| iagooar wrote:
| Probably, yes. This is possible in Sweden, if you go from South
| to North, you can travel for multiple days by car and if you
| avoid highways, you will not leave the forest at all.
| Freedom2 wrote:
| The joke I'm making is that many Texans like to make that
| statement about Texas (with regards to size and driving) and
| claim it's unique to that state and to the US without
| realizing that it's common for many other parts in the world
| as well.
| coliveira wrote:
| This is common in Brazil.
| supportengineer wrote:
| You can do that in Virginia if you drive slowly enough, stay
| off the Interstate.
|
| For example if you go from Cumberland Gap to Virginia Beach, a
| distance of 499 miles, it will take you 10 hours and 25
| minutes.
| trhway wrote:
| While Russia cuts more and more timber for export to China. In
| return for the support in the war (drone components, etc) China
| asks for even more and more timber and fresh water from Baikal.
| coliveira wrote:
| I don't think they're giving away the timber. It is a
| commercial exchange like any other.
| trhway wrote:
| Yes, it is a massive sale of natural resources with huge
| discounts in exchange for the war support.
| cpursley wrote:
| Source for the discounts? (reddit and x are not a sources
| btw)
| themafia wrote:
| They've been selling forestry products for decades. North
| Korea is also a big customer. Unsurprisingly, nations with
| existing and exclusive economic ties, tend to "support"
| each other.
|
| North America does this with South America readily.
| olalonde wrote:
| What "war support"? China trades with Russia, as it does
| with Ukraine. It doesn't support a side in particular.
| trhway wrote:
| There are a lot of thing which are clearly "war support",
| yet it would be a long and frankly pointless discussion,
| so i'll just refer to China's own words:
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/04/europe/china-ukraine-eu-
| war-i...
|
| "Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told the European
| Union's top diplomat that Beijing can't accept Russia
| losing its war against Ukraine..."
| cpursley wrote:
| This would happen war or not. Btw, they sell the same off-the-
| shelf drone components to Ukraine and anyone else willing to
| pay for them.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| The same article says Russia is on 2nd place in reforestation.
| They do export timber and can export more, while increasing the
| share of sustainably managed forests. But export of Baikal
| fresh water? That's fake news. Didn't happen and won't happen,
| unless you mean just some bottled water.
| trhway wrote:
| >The same article says Russia is on 2nd place in
| reforestation.
|
| Reforestation alone doesn't matter. What matters is total
| result of deforestation and reforestation. Russia reforests
| only about 1Mha/year :
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1059300/russia-
| reforeste...
|
| while the total resulting loss is
|
| https://www.globalforestwatch.org/dashboards/country/RUS/?ca.
| ..
|
| "In 2020, Russia had 748 Mha of natural forest, extending
| over 44% of its land area. In 2024, it lost 5.59 Mha of
| natural forest, equivalent to 816 Mt of CO2 emissions."
|
| >But export of Baikal fresh water? That's fake news. Didn't
| happen and won't happen
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/07/parched-
| chines...
|
| in Russian, that another waterpipeline - from river Ob' was
| approved at some Russian Parliament "roundtable on strategic
| projects with China and Kazakhstan".
|
| https://topwar.ru/159671-bajkal-xxi-veka-druzhba-
| druzhboj-a-...
|
| and there were strong leaks, not officially dispelled, that
| Baikal water was raised during the most recent Putin/Xi
| meeting.
| cpursley wrote:
| Kind reminder - this is not reddit.
| trhway wrote:
| >Are you from country 404 by any chance? Because that's
| how these posts read.
|
| You may read it whatever way you like. If we look at the
| facts - statista and globalwatch is some Western
| sites/orgs, topwar is straight Russian and Guardian is
| Great Britain.
|
| >Kind reminder - this is not reddit.
|
| This is why you're using that offensive "404" notation
| (Russian propaganda point that Ukraine isn't a sovereign
| inedpendent state) when referring to Ukraine?
| legitster wrote:
| 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.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| 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..
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| According to WWF, there was some targeted effort on
| reforestation and sustainable forest management in Russia,
| which they claim to have assisted.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| China was already extensively deforested in the Ming and Qing
| dynasties.
| holoduke wrote:
| And Europe in the golden era. A squirrel could jump tree to
| tree from north Scotland al the way to the south. Timber,
| grazing, charcoal are the prime reasons why everything is
| gone
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| 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.
| seb1204 wrote:
| Any YouTube playlist that you can share?
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Just search for things like "green wall", "china straw
| landscape", etc.
|
| A few good ones that I watched:
|
| - Inside Africa's Food Forest Mega-Project
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbBdIG--b58
|
| - China Buried Tons of Dead Plants Under the Desert Sand
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev8DsPH_82Y
|
| - Green Gold: Regreening the Desert | John D. Liu
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3nR3G9jboc
|
| There are way more. One channel that I might call
| https://www.youtube.com/@MossyEarth. They basically use
| donations to take on projects to do smalls scale nature
| restoration. I am actually considering making a donation to
| them because I like what they do. There are more examples of
| such channels.
|
| Not everything on this front is without controversy of course
| and I'm not blind to that. But I like the positive,
| constructive nature of these approaches. Just the simple
| notion that it's fixable with a bit of cleverness and lots of
| hard work. China is of course an autocracy that you can
| criticize for a lot of things. But they are doing a few
| things right as well. And it's worth calling that out and
| learning from them.
| profsummergig wrote:
| Do you know why the mounds with half-moon shapes? Why is it
| more effective than simply digging a circular hole in the
| ground?
| nkmnz wrote:
| Same effect for half the work. Look up the videos on youtube,
| it's manual labor on very hard ground.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Why is it manual? If I had a mission to plant millions of
| trees, I am going to invest in a ditch witch.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| assuming you're not joking, construction equipment is
| incredibly expensive for countries to whom profiting from
| importing it is not a "sure thing", doubly so if their
| roads are not developed. This is why a 2000s hummer in
| central America still costs as much as a nice modern car.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| A basic trencher is little more than a push lawnmower
| frame with a chain saw attached. Not enormous industrial
| equipment, but still a large boost to productivity vs a
| shovel.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| The idea is that rain flows downhill, you dig the half moon
| shape to capture the water on the end without a ditch and
| then it sinks into the ditch instead of flowing unobstructed
| to the river and taking all soil with it.
|
| It's an ancient practice that was forgotten and rediscovered.
| The beauty of this approach is that it shows results within a
| few short years. Basically in Africa if there's water, nature
| shows up and consumes it. So you get lush growth and rapid
| soil restoration. Trees, vegetables, etc. on what was a
| heavily eroded flood plain before.
|
| It's easy to explain, the locals get why it works. And they
| get a very fast response from nature and all the produce and
| riches that come with that. And all they need is shovels and
| some elbow grease.
| aarondf wrote:
| 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"
| pksebben wrote:
| This seems like gross, and I wonder what the net is. It seems
| impossible that there's no deforestation in the places mentioned
| int the article, and unlikely that the net is positive.
| AuthAuth wrote:
| 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.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Aren't they bringing on incredible amounts of solar we could
| only dream about?
|
| Edit: for the downvoters
|
| https://gemini.google.com/app/a5beb50ff8200b36
| kulahan wrote:
| They're building an insane amount of nuclear. It's the only
| thing with a hope in a country where a "small" city has like
| 6 million people.
| pinkgolem wrote:
| Are they?
|
| They build 10x more solar power (total numbers compared, in
| percentages solar nearly tripled since 2021, nuclear had a
| 10% increase)
|
| That seems more like a modest increase.
|
| Honestly solar seems to have an exponential growth, nuclear
| linear at best.
|
| Numbers from:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
| munk-a wrote:
| And nuclear power - they have a large carbon deficit to make
| up so you shouldn't think of them as a green economy by any
| measure but... I think their strongest advantage is that
| there is a strong environmental pressure within the country
| and (while industrialists will be industrialists) there is no
| faction or movement within China that is dedicated to an
| anti-environmental agenda.
|
| There's a lot of work to be done and there's a lot of
| friction, corruption and economic pressures constraining that
| work but there seems to be a genuine desire to do that work.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I wonder what kind of forest China is making? I was
| watching a really fascinating PBS documentary on Kanopy and
| it was talking about a lot of the planting efforts haven't
| been very good worldwide because planting a monoculture of
| trees doesn't do much and an old forest with tons of
| diversity stores twice as much carbon or more, which I
| thought was neat. So protecting existing forests is much
| better from a climate change standpoint. But either way,
| planting trees is better than nothing.
|
| https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/15418989
| mliker wrote:
| would you prefer zero trees being added?
| munk-a wrote:
| Of course not - but it is quite fair to examine articles like
| this with a critical eye given all the greenwashing that
| takes place.
| moron4hire wrote:
| Liking waffles!= Hating pancakes.
| dumbledoren wrote:
| Their emissions are the emissions of Western companies for whom
| they are doing manufacturing.
| kwanbix wrote:
| AS if they don't consume the products themselves with their
| 1.2 billion people?
|
| My home country we are only 40 million. I am sure they
| consume much more than us.
| geysersam wrote:
| So what? I'm sure I personally consume much less than your
| country of 40 million
| quacked wrote:
| The global economy is so China-dependent it doesn't even make
| sense to talk about an individual country's emissions profile
| unless we look at their imports.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| There are import corrected CO2 emissions data you can check
| if you care. Tl;Dr it's not as big as you think it is.
| philipkglass wrote:
| [delayed]
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| You should check the stats on that, it is not the case.
| benjiro wrote:
| > Their emissions are the emissions of Western companies for
| whom they are doing manufacturing.
|
| Spoken like somebody that never stept a foot in China.
|
| Sure, manufacturing for the West is part of it, but up to a
| few years ago, entering Beijing alone resulted in your naval
| cavities burning, the moment the airplane door opened.
|
| Because of the usage from coal in households. It was only
| until a few years ago, that they banned the usage of
| wood/coal around the city. Outside the city, its coal
| everywhere for the normal class people who own their
| (country)house. Near other large cities its still very coal
| centric in the winter.
|
| And the heating (communal for apartments) is mostly coal and
| while the coal may burn a bit more clean, and there is some
| filtration going on, its not a ton. So while open coal
| burning was reduced directly in the cities like Beijing, they
| simply moved a lot of it outside the 6th ring.
|
| All those EV's ... great, no more gasoline/oil usage but ...
| wait, where does a lot of the electricity come from? Oeps...
|
| But wait, all that crypto mining, where do you think that
| electricity comes from?
|
| And now AI...
|
| And the consumer goods.
|
| Your statement ignore a large part of the coal consumption in
| the country.
| lbrito wrote:
| 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.
| mulmen wrote:
| Per capita emissions aren't relevant to climate impact.
| Neither are relative emissions between countries. This is a
| global issue.
| kvirani wrote:
| Great question. Let's indeed make it a point of discussion
| then. I'd like to know too.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Chinese CO2 emissions per capita are only about 60% as much
| as the USA, but in the past 25 years US per capita emissions
| have dropped by about a third and Chinese emissions per
| capita have almost tripled and are still rising rapidly.
| Considering that China is about 4 times as populous as the
| US, this is a huge problem for the world. (US emissions are
| also a huge problem; we all need for them to decrease very
| quickly.)
| vasco wrote:
| If they are still at 60% of USA unless your opinion is that
| Chinese people don't deserve air conditioning as much as
| Americans, you don't really have a point.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Air conditioning is a relatively small part of global CO2
| emissions (3%). Heating is the one you should be most
| worried about.
|
| I would expect air conditioning to also be among the
| easier energy uses to match with solar power as we go
| forward.
| vasco wrote:
| The point is about quality of life.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Everyone is going to have a bad quality of life, to the
| extent they're able to live at all, if we don't act
| quickly at massive scale in a coordinated fashion.
| hmm37 wrote:
| Is the per capita still rising rapidly? China's CO2 growth
| levels have already started leveling off, and actually
| showed a slight decline as of late.
|
| https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-just-
| put-c...
| whoevercares wrote:
| China has been a developing country for most the time of
| the past 25 years. It is indeed a huge problem if it is
| still rising rapidly. But it is also not fair to limit
| China's per capita growth for most of the past two decades
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| The earth doesn't give a shit about per capita, and us and eu
| are net reducing CO2 emissions since 2014 (even during trump
| I)
| mtmickush wrote:
| The earth isn't a person. I think it seems valid to
| consider the harm and or benefits being caused on a per
| person basis. Why should an individual in the US be allowed
| to release more CO2 emissions than an individual in China?
| whoevercares wrote:
| It is 8.89 China vs 14 according to
| https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-
| pe...
| voxelghost wrote:
| 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.
| geysersam wrote:
| This is propaganda. It's impossible to take this comment in
| good faith
| nitwit005 wrote:
| 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.
| gnarlouse wrote:
| I'm starting to think that we're the baddies.
| kulahan wrote:
| Ecologically speaking, the US is an absolute monster of a
| nightmare. The American carbon footprint is incredible.
| munk-a wrote:
| The US was positioned to leverage technological and economic
| advantages to embrace and profit massively off of next gen
| energy infrastructure. It is a tragedy of our era that anti-
| conservationalism was able to gain such a strong foothold in
| the body politic.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| > It is a tragedy of our era that anti-conservationalism
| was able to gain such a strong foothold in the body
| politic.
|
| It was the entirely predictable result of the policies we
| adopted.
|
| Kicking the industrial layers of the economic pyramid
| overseas and telling people to learn to code is what you do
| when you want a quick win and don't care if people will
| rightly hate you in a couple decades.
|
| Behaving that way isn't socially/politically sustainable
| and it doesn't take a genuys to figure it out.
| porknaut wrote:
| It doesn't even come close to China. So if we're a
| nightmarish monster, I would hate to think what that makes
| China.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| China is also deploying a ton a renewables though. Its the
| worlds leading producer of renewables. It's a mistake to
| think they won't ween off carbon where they can. The US has
| a president that said "drill baby drill".
| tzs wrote:
| China has 4 times the population. In any rational divvying
| up of the world's total emissions allowance by country
| China's share would be 4 times that of the US, but they are
| only emitting twice what the US is emitting.
|
| Both are over their fair share, but the US is over by a
| larger factor so is farther behind on getting to where they
| need to be.
|
| (This is not taking into account trade. Divvying up the
| world emissions budget by population gives the fair amount
| for each country if there is no trade. If there is trade
| the best way to handle it is probably to count the
| emissions for making things in country X that get consumed
| in country Y as being emissions in Y. With that correction
| China comes out even better).
| Waterluvian wrote:
| It's becoming very hard to see China as the adversary and not
| the U.S. There isn't even a pretend moral high ground anymore.
| porknaut wrote:
| What does your comment have to do with ecology? Just because
| China plants trees (news flash, so does the US) doesn't erase
| the fact they are far and away the biggest emitter of carbon
| emissions and have high levels of pollution.
|
| Glad they are trying to do good things though.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| US is far higher per capita and doing nothing about it.
| DSingularity wrote:
| It was the trees not the million Iraqis huh?
| mc32 wrote:
| During the same period the US also added 18MM acres and so has
| Canada, but additionally Russia, India and Europe have also net
| added forest... so the "baddies" are still Brazil, Indonesia
| and the democratic Republic of the Congo.
| marricks wrote:
| This and Bill Gates saying...
|
| > "the doomsday outlook [on climate change] is causing much of
| the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions
| goals, and it's diverting resources from the most effective
| things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world."
|
| I guess it's cool there's something to be hopeful about,
| westerner's just seemed excited to make money off of melting ice
| in Greenland.
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