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on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990
Stevvo wrote 36 min ago:
I'm curious how much of it is fake; at-least some of it is.
To get financial incentives from the central government, local
governments have pained rocks green and planted plastic trees to make
it look like they planted trees in satellite photos.
swagasaurus-rex wrote 1 hour 38 min ago:
I think theyâre 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 thereâs 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.
blitzar wrote 20 min ago:
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.
beloch wrote 2 hours 34 min ago:
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".
feverzsj wrote 2 hours 13 min ago:
They've been doing deforestation for thousands years. The "Yellow"
River is one of the results.
dukeofdoom wrote 3 hours 21 min ago:
I always wondered why Western democracies want carbon taxes, when just
reverting more land back to managed forests, seems like a much more
reasoned solution. It would trap carbon, help wild life, and provide
fresh air, and jobs in forestry, and renewable resources like wood.
Seems to me Carbon Taxes primarily benefit the banks, and grow
bureaucracy.
jo32 wrote 4 hours 34 min ago:
One more interesting thing:
URI [1]: https://english.news.cn/20251022/ab149540692140f3836a60e22dde6...
AoifeMurphy wrote 5 hours 17 min ago:
Of course, planting is one thing, maintaining is another. Many areas
turn green for a few years and then fade back to desert. The real
challenge is building an ecological culture, not just a green map.
Myrmornis wrote 5 hours 22 min ago:
A very worrying number of people nowadays seem to think that forests
are a thing to counter climate change. What is the species composition
being planted? Is it appropriate to the location? Reforestation must be
about recreating _forest ecosystems_, not about creating the
photosynthetic counterpart of a vast fucking solar farm.
yanhangyhy wrote 5 hours 35 min ago:
I donât know how it is in other countries, but nearly thirty years
ago when I was in elementary school, a Chinese propaganda slogan stuck
with me: âIf you want to get rich, build roads first; have fewer
children, plant more trees.â
Every part of that slogan has been put into action, continuously, for
decades. Although low birth rates have now become a problem, back then
it seemed like a solution.
Xi Jinping may be a rather dull person, but his most famous saying is
âLucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets.â
As for building roads â the Belt and Road Initiative speaks for
itself. Weâve built bridges in Croatia, in Bangladesh, in Mozambique,
and roads and railways all over the world.
That slogan is probably engraved in every Chinese personâs memory.
j-krieger wrote 2 min ago:
Not to glaze unelected uniparty governments, but this is what you can
actually achieve if you don't have to focus on your new election the
moment you enter office.
shubhamjain wrote 3 hours 10 min ago:
> Although low birth rates have now become a problem, back then it
seemed like a solution.
They haven't, imo. I am from India, and I have been hearing for the
last two decades how we have avoided same mistakes as China and the
latter is headed for a demographic collapse. China is only marching
forward, and focusing more on automation to hedge its bets. While
overpopulation in India has choked almost every city in India. I
honestly don't know what will happen as more people migrate from
rural to urban areas.
India's population will peak in 2065, while China's already has. It's
depressing to imagine that 250-300M more people are left to be added
before we finally see a decline.
Just like 1970s claim "overpopulation will destroy the planet" turned
out to be exaggerated, the modern idea that âa large population is
a blessingâ feels equally misguided.
yanhangyhy wrote 1 hour 16 min ago:
I believe automation can solve this problem. Perhaps the government
believes it too. But there are still many people who donât
believe it. I sincerely hope automation can solve this problem.
sometimes_all wrote 2 hours 22 min ago:
In my opinion, we might have avoided some of the mistakes, but that
is still costing us.
The best usually leave the country after getting the prime
education India can provide, and support the retirement plans of
other countries' aging populations more than their own - the Indian
government actively seems to encourage this, looking at how our PM
tries to negotiate for more visas during every first-world trip.
Even with the demographic dividend, we do not have enough jobs, so
the elderly are not supported neither fiscally, nor
infrastructure-wise, since old people cannot walk on bad roads or
take advantage of non-existent programs anyway. For the younger
people, the insane competition makes both work and personal life
hell.
Whenever I see videos of China and their cities, and then look out
of my window, it makes me both depressed and angry. I still don't
understand how India can even be compared to China any more.
unglaublich wrote 2 hours 45 min ago:
The nice thing about being a growing, underpopulated country, is
that you're very attractive to immigrants. China can just fill the
demographic gap with migration policies.
GolfPopper wrote 2 hours 45 min ago:
>Just like 1970s claim "overpopulation will destroy the planet"
turned out to be exaggerated
Seems to me like that prediction is pretty on track.
zdragnar wrote 1 hour 22 min ago:
The predictions of Ehrlich in "the population bomb" and the club
of rome were undone within a few years with the "green
revolution" which saw massive increases in food production.
Ehrlich in particular was suggesting mass starvation by the
1980's. Conceivably, it is possible that too many people will
cause problems, but nothing like what they actually predicted has
come to pass.
Unearned5161 wrote 18 min ago:
I encourage you to revisit what you know about the club of rome
and what was actually published in the Limits to Growth paper.
We have been disturbingly on track for a lot of the variables
that were of interest back then in the âbusiness as usualâ
model.
People tend to dismiss anything and everything around resource
constraint thinking by doing the quick Ehrlich quip, and never
really dig deeper into where people like Ehrlich ever got their
ideas to begin with.
shubhamjain wrote 2 hours 41 min ago:
Partially, yes! Population is #1 strain on resources. However,
the political climate around 1970s was more like population would
create large scale food shortages, famines, and without
interventions, population would keep on growing forever. We at
least now know that population peaks with prosperity, and food is
largely a solved problem.
darkmarmot wrote 1 hour 21 min ago:
We're on the verge of ecological collapse, undergoing an insane
mass extinction event with ocean acidification and methane
release going off the charts. I can't even begin to conceive of
your reality.
dgfl wrote 51 min ago:
The point is that this is not what people were worried about
in the 70s. Even halving the population weâd still have all
of these problems. While we obviously donât suffer from
famine, at least not globally.
Those predictions have completely failed and were replaced by
new issues.
catmanjan wrote 2 hours 21 min ago:
>food is largely a solved problem
It really isn't...
dragonwriter wrote 1 hour 7 min ago:
Distribution is an issue, but the imminent capacity issue
perceived in the late 1960s when The Population Bomb was
written was already being solved when it was entering the
popular consciousness (but the impact of the solutions had
not been fully appreciated) by the Green Revolution through
high-yield crop varieties and other advanced in agriculture.
adrianN wrote 1 hour 22 min ago:
Production of calories is a solved problem. Distribution of
food to people in need on the other handâ¦
samarthr1 wrote 1 hour 22 min ago:
*logistics of food is not solved?
jl6 wrote 58 min ago:
Neither production nor logistics is solved at all. We have
bought ourselves time, largely by racking up environmental
debt on our planetary credit card. Food is still massively
dependent on fossil fuel consumption (machinery, transport,
fertilizer).
The good news is that the answer is to reduce the cost and
carbon impact of energy production, and weâre making
great progress here, but we cannot afford to take our foot
off the gas, because although Ehrlich was wrong about the
timing, he wasnât wrong in his fundamental observation
that the Earth has a finite carrying capacity.
yndoendo wrote 3 hours 16 min ago:
Are low birth rates a problem? The job market keeps being published
about lack of employment. Recent was this UK having a 1,200,000 plus
college graduates and less than 100,000 job placements. The USA
market is also bad with very limited economic mobility based on years
past.
Is the job market too restrictive with maximize profit over maximum
knowledge transfer and upkeep? Not properly balancing older and newer
labor. That is the reason for "low birth rate problem"?
ML is being pushed to condense the labor market even more. Along with
growth of larger and more powerful businesses. Number of businesses
are pushing to be an oligopoly and more to a duopoly or monopoly.
The current and future labor market with modern business ideology
does not seem to match the statement _low birth rate problem_. The
problem seems to be elsewhere.
yanhangyhy wrote 2 hours 26 min ago:
Based on my understanding, thatâs still the case. I think the
problems you mentioned are currently beyond what any government can
handle, even one with extremely strong control like China. China is
now facing both rising unemployment and a low birth rate. In the
past, when Chinaâs birth rate was higher, unemployment was not
this high. The fundamental problem is not that there are too many
people, but that the economy lacks vitality. Moreover, a declining
birth rate will cause systems like pensions and healthcareâwhich
rely on the next generation to support the previous oneâto
collapse.
seizethecheese wrote 3 hours 3 min ago:
The relationship between the job market and employment is not so
straightforward as you presume. After all, fewer people means less
demand for labor as much as it means more supply. In general a
falling population is considered an economic risk.
BurningFrog wrote 4 hours 47 min ago:
"Have fewer children" implies that people are a burden, which can be
true in a dysfunctional society, like perhaps China under Mao.
But in a well functioning system, more people get more things done
and make society wealthier.
The old idea was that the planet can only produce enough food for a
certain number of people. But it turned out that people produce the
food, not the planet!
Unearned5161 wrote 13 min ago:
Haha, what a delightfully backwards way to look at things. This
ranks closely with âhumans are not part of the ecosystemâ.
You should look into what carrying capacity means, and in
particular how our access to abundant cheap oil enabled us to
overclock our chip in a manner of speaking.
mitthrowaway2 wrote 4 hours 14 min ago:
Probably neither "larger n is always better, for any value of n"
nor "smaller n is always better, for any value of n" adequately
captures the nuance involved in assessing whether having more or
fewer children will increase wealth.
It also turns out that producing food requires some amount of both
planet and people.
goatlover wrote 4 hours 30 min ago:
There's only so much food people can grow on planet Earth, so it
remains true, even if the number varies depending on the means
available for producing that food. So yeah we can grow more food
than people thought decades ago, but the Earth and the energy
available to it, along with arable land are still finite.
yanhangyhy wrote 4 hours 45 min ago:
So most people believe it was a mistake. We were misled by some
so-called experts at the time. Conspiracy theorists claim that many
of those experts werenât Han Chinese, since the one-child policy
only applied to the Han population.
scoopertrooper wrote 4 hours 36 min ago:
The policy last about 35 years and didnât end till 2015. Even
today there a limit on procreation as the cap was only increased
to three children in 2021. At some point the CCP has to own its
mistakes.
The problem isnât that China instituted the policy (although
its use of forced abortions to enforce was⦠problematic),
itâs that its system of government prevented open discussion,
reflection, and self-correction.
yanhangyhy wrote 4 hours 34 min ago:
at least on this topic, i agree with you
devsda wrote 4 hours 54 min ago:
> a Chinese propaganda slogan stuck with me: âIf you want to get
rich, build roads first; have fewer children, plant more trees.â
Why call it propaganda though ? That doesn't sound like a biased,
deceptive or misleading policy.
It hasn't been thought through much which is universally common for
some govt policies everywhere, but it results have been positive for
the most part ?
hunglee2 wrote 47 min ago:
propaganda is not necessarily a lie, it's more a call to action
(which can sometimes be a lie)
yanhangyhy wrote 4 hours 43 min ago:
I probably often use that term in a neutral sense.
londons_explore wrote 4 hours 50 min ago:
Not all propaganda is deceptive.
The best propaganda is 100% true and still achieves it's goal.
steve_adams_86 wrote 3 hours 17 min ago:
Propaganda is deceptive or misleading by definition.
msl wrote 19 min ago:
What definition is that?
Merriam-Webster: "the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor
for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause,
or a person" and "ideas, facts, or allegations spread
deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing
cause" [1] Cambridge Dictionary: "information, ideas, opinions,
or images, often only giving one part of an argument, that are
broadcast, published, or in some other way spread with the
intention of influencing people's opinions" [2] Wikipedia
(quoting Encyclopedia Britannica): "Propaganda is communication
that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to
further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be
selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular
synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an
emotional rather than a rational response to the information
that is being presented." [3] Wikipedia further quotes NATO's
2011 guidance for military public affairs definition:
"information, ideas, doctrines, or special appeals disseminated
to influence the opinion, emotions, attitudes, or behaviour of
any specified group in order to benefit the sponsor, either
directly or indirectly" [4] I that OP's use of the word is well
in line with each of those definitions. [1] [2] [3] [4]
#Definitions
URI [1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/propaganda
URI [2]: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/pr...
URI [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda
URI [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda#Definitions
nextaccountic wrote 3 hours 9 min ago:
You can deceive while telling the truth, like this ad from a
Brazilian newspaper (dubbed in English) [1] Truth needs to be
put in context. Truth needs to be interpreted. There is no such
thing as objective truth.
Effective propaganda is like a filter that is everywhere you
look. You don't know it's there because you never see the world
without it.
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PShbxd42JN8
devsda wrote 3 hours 21 min ago:
So, the term is mainly used to convey an author's opinion on the
subject of the topic and not necessarily related to the topic
itself ?
MangoToupe wrote 4 hours 50 min ago:
> That doesn't sound like a biased, deceptive or misleading policy.
Propaganda doesn't imply any of these things; it just implies a
polemic.
andrewflnr wrote 5 hours 7 min ago:
I would really respect the hell out of the nation of China if it
wasn't for the authoritarianism and imperialism.
blitzar wrote 32 min ago:
I would really respect the hell out of the nation of America if it
wasn't for the authoritarianism and imperialism.
csomar wrote 1 hour 1 min ago:
We can argue and discuss the authoritarianism of China (and state
control). But imperialism? Really?
carabiner wrote 1 hour 52 min ago:
How much is "freedom" worth to you? Do you think your average
homeless person in San Francisco would be worse off with free
healthcare, housing, and no right to vote?
ImHereToVote wrote 2 hours 44 min ago:
China isn't imperialist.
somenameforme wrote 3 hours 24 min ago:
Not to be coy, but what do you mean by that? The reason I ask is
because I think many of us use these terms, but without ever
thinking about exactly which behaviors we're critiquing, or how
they relate to what we truly value. For instance both the Roman and
Greek Empires deserve immense respect, yet they were both often
imperial empires ruled by dictators. The same is no less true of
many societies that played key roles during The Renaissance, and
patrons of the talents of the era.
I hold immense respect for China, because I think they're achieving
great things. I also think there is a high probability that they
will be the first society to start creating permanent off-planet
colonizations, which is what will probably signal the birth of the
next era of humanity, so that in the future a name like Wang Yie
might lie right alongside Neil Armstrong.
On the other hand I certainly don't think the US should emulate
them. It's important for the world to be multipolar, not only in
alliances, but also in ideology, perspective, and behavior. What
will happen to China once they inevitably find themselves with a
leader who is not socially motivated, or who is incompetent? In
such a centralized system outright collapse is not out of the
question. Or perhaps they'll be just fine? Who knows? By
maintaining a wide diversity of systems across the world, I think
we maximize our chances of collective success and minimize our
chances of collective failure.
hunglee2 wrote 56 min ago:
this is the way - 'multi-polarity' is another word for
'diversity' which is another way to understand resiliency. We
have seen in recent days what over dependence on single point of
failure looks like (AWS outage), so from a species level
perspective, it is better that we have many different forms of
organisation and narrative. We just have to ensure that these
narratives are not evangelical and intolerant!
BrenBarn wrote 1 hour 11 min ago:
I wouldn't think the Roman empire was a good thing if we had it
today. We can "respect" those older cultures in their context
while still recognizing that they were in many ways horrifying by
modern standards.
coffeebeqn wrote 1 hour 25 min ago:
> who is incompetent
I just hope we never go back to Mao-levels of incompetence
ggm wrote 1 hour 5 min ago:
Must.. resist.. temptation..
Killing all sparrows, compared to defunding vaccine science in
the wreckage of a pandemic..
Village Steel making compared to literally cancelling
construction projects for advanced wind turbines
yanhangyhy wrote 57 min ago:
Maybe this is a surprise. Nowadays, young people are
increasingly fond of Mao. He wasnât a perfect person, but
he spent his entire life exploring communism and trying to
finally eliminate wealth inequality and privileged classes.
Older people might not like him as much, because they were
more influenced by the West and dislike Chinaâs system
more. But with Chinaâs rise and Trumpâs hypocrisy, I can
predict that Mao will become increasingly popular in China.
andrewflnr wrote 3 hours 5 min ago:
Indeed, I think Rome, Greece and other conquering powers get more
respect than they deserve. There's no actual reason so many
people have to die for these countries' national ambitions. Feel
free to generalize to the US, etc.
foxglacier wrote 1 hour 59 min ago:
Didn't Rome save a lot of lives by pax romana? Perhaps it was
actually better in terms of loss of life to be conquered by
Rome than have endless wars among yourselves. Applies to the US
too.
jmyeet wrote 3 hours 28 min ago:
Have you not been paying attention to what's going on this country?
We're building concentration camps. We have the Gestapo rounding up
brown people. We have people being deported to supermax prisons in
countries they have no connection to for protesting America's
material support for genocide on college campuses. We have a media
that is increasingly owned by lackeys of this administration (just
look into CBS and Bari Weis as the latest example). Every aspect of
our government is for sale from pardons to merger approvals and
ending SEC investigations. There is functionally no law and order
where we may start simply ignoring inconvenient parts of the
Constitution like the 22nd Amendment. We have the military in our
streets to incite violence. We have the Navy blowing up random
small boats off Venezuela, arguably to incite a hot war with
Venezuela. We have people who are rapidly unable to afford a place
to live, food or both (and that's a bout to get a whole lot worse
when SNAP gets suspended in November as the administration refuses
to use the $6 billion set aside to fund it). We have a Speaker who
won't swear in a duly elected House representative because she'll
be the 218th vote on a discharge petition that will force a vote on
release of the Epstein files, which the president will be forced to
veto and he doesn't want to be put in that position.
I think about all these things when people bring up so-called
"authoritanism" in China. Do you not see how dire the situation is
not only in the US but basically all of the developed world?
France, Germany and the UK are poised to have actual Nazis win
their next elections due to these economic crises that governments
absolutely refuse to address.
And imperialism? What imperialism? Pretty much every conflict on
Earth currently can be traced back to the US, either because a US
ally is a proxy doing war crimes or simply because the US turns a
blind eye because one or both sides are buying US arms to commit
those same war crimes.
Just this month the Nobel committee handed the Peace Prize to an
opposition leader in Venezuela who has promised to make Venezuela
more Israel-friendly and to privatize all the resource extraction
to Western companies. "Peace".
We are in 1930s Germany. Worrying about China seems crazy to me.
andrewflnr wrote 2 hours 54 min ago:
What makes you think I disagree with any of that? These are dark
times. Honestly, the West is so profoundly stupid right now that
a part of me wishes China could be a beacon of respectability.
It's just a shame about their being ahead of the curve on the
malicious government.
endorphine wrote 2 hours 56 min ago:
Don't know why you're downvoted, this seems a pretty accurate
take to me.
It seems most of us in the West are mostly incapable of
self-criticism and have been fed so much propaganda that we
forgot how to see through all the bull**.
marricks wrote 3 hours 37 min ago:
I don't think any super power looks fantastic, and we definitely
should not idolize China.
But also, we should let that be an excuse for western powers. We
have corporations forcing most of the decisions in our country for
extremely short term gains.
In the US we have... decrypt public transit, horrible healthcare,
halting progress on renewable energies, we're probably going to
make less than our parents while billionaires make more.
Like it sucks, and if anyone tells you well at least you don't live
in China you should roll your eyes, why does where we live have to
suck. Oh, and we even have awful imperialism too.
vishnugupta wrote 3 hours 43 min ago:
Iâm really curious to better understand what aspects of Chinaâs
government would hurt your day to day life.
From what I read online the people there are free to rant and get
things fixed. Their local government representative is held
accountable if the people in his/her province are unhappy. Not too
different from a typical democratic setup I guess? But this could
be off because I donât know anyone personally there.
piperswe wrote 1 hour 16 min ago:
I mean, here are the obvious for this minority member:
- My marriage is invalid in China
- There are multiple clinics that can prescribe me
gender-affirming care with little gatekeeping in my city (for now
at least). My understanding is that there is significantly more
gatekeeping in gender-affirming care in China
- The government actively censors discourse related to my sexual
orientation and gender identity
While it appears the US is looking to become more like China in
this regard, for now life under the Chinese government would be
comparatively untenable for me.
otikik wrote 42 min ago:
> for now at least
So much in such few words. It sucks immensely.
yanhangyhy wrote 2 hours 16 min ago:
I can answer this question. Iâm a native-born Chinese, and
Iâve never studied abroad. This year I just completed my first
trip overseas, visiting the UAE. First of all, I donât think
China is a fully democratic system, but itâs not an outright
dictatorship either. At the same time, I donât think the
two-party voting system in the U.S. qualifies as democracy
either. One of the biggest drawbacks of Western criticism of
China for being âundemocraticâ is that many Chinese people
travel abroad and are exposed to the outside world. If the West
had a better system, we would definitely be willing to follow it,
but their proposals are worse than oursâespecially after Trump
took office, things have only gotten more chaotic.
In China, the only real restriction is that you cannot severely
criticize the Party and its leaders. I mean, minor criticism is
acceptableâfor example, pointing out areas that arenât
working wellâbut you cannot completely reject them. For
instance, you cannot post offensive memes about leaders. This is
different from the U.S., but I think the comparison is
interesting. By sacrificing this particular freedom, we actually
gain many other freedoms.
The most typical case this year was a food poisoning incident at
a kindergarten. The staff, ignoring safety regulations, added
toxic chemical elements to the food. This incident went viral on
the Chinese internet, and the public criticism was focused on the
government and relevant medical authorities, but people did
not(dared not)âblame the Party itself. In the end, a large
number of the responsible personnel were punished or sentenced.
The problem was resolved, and it did not implicate the Party
itself.
Many people donât realize Chinaâs major advantages, and I
only understood them by observing foreigners who run businesses
in China( i mean this video if anyone is intreseted [1] ) . China
has a system of accountability. If anyone travels in China, I
highly recommend observing rivers, streets, and even treesâthey
all have markers indicating who is responsible. This means that
if something goes wrong in that area, someone is accountable. Of
course, corruption can undermine this, but the system is still
operational. China doesnât have problems like Californiaâs
high-speed rail, the UKâs HS2, or the charging stations under
Biden that were barely built and with almost no one held
accountable.
As for why I chose the UAE: honestly, Europe has disappointed me
too much these days. Our social media is full of reviews about
being stolen from or robbed while traveling in Europe, and the
same applies to Southeast Asia. Theyâre basically at the same
level of insecurity. Even in the UAE, which is considered a
relatively safe country, I was still worried about my credit card
being lost or fraudulently charged. In China, I never have to
worry about such things. Of course, Japan, South Korea, or
Singapore might also be safe, but those countries are just too
boring for me.
Do I care about politics? Of course I do. The more sensitive
topics can always be navigated with wordplayâeveryone is
familiar with these strategies. For more serious matters, a VPN
works perfectly.
(My English writing isnât very good, so I often write in
Chinese and use ChatGPT to help me translate.)
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-ozoOKhUO4&t=329s
dgfl wrote 20 min ago:
Donât you think youâve been influenced by propaganda? You
have admitted yourself that you couldnât even find
information on Naomi Wu.
Iâve lived in Europe my whole life. Iâve never been robbed
or felt unsafe. Itâs also a very diverse region so itâs
hard to generalize. But the supposed âdecay of the westâ is
mostly internal propaganda from our very own anti-migration
right wingers.
But regardless, Iâd take having a 0.001% chance of my wallet
(which contains zero valuables) being stolen versus being
silenced by the government for criticizing the regime or being
unable to acknowledge your sexual orientation. Let alone all
the history rewriting and censorship.
wahnfrieden wrote 1 hour 46 min ago:
What do you think of Naomi Wu's case?
yanhangyhy wrote 1 hour 36 min ago:
To be honest, I roughly searched around, including asking AI,
but I couldnât really figure out what happened. I hardly
have any impression of her; her videos can be found on
Chinese internet, but the recommendation algorithms have
never suggested them to me. From what Iâve found so far,
she seems quite controversial. She might have been limited in
reach on Chinese internet. Maybe the government found a
suitable reason, or maybe not â I really havenât
clarified that part.
Also, Linux is invovled?
wahnfrieden wrote 1 hour 25 min ago:
It seems she was silenced for publicly advocating for LGBT
and visited by agents multiple times about it. But there
are a lot more details I'm sure.
bryan_w wrote 1 hour 19 min ago:
I think she got in trouble for exposing multiple
companies that were violating GPL. They came after her by
threatening her GF's family with deportation to the camps
(allegedly)
yanhangyhy wrote 1 hour 19 min ago:
Itâs possible. LGBT issues and religion in China fall
into a category of âyou can exist, but donât promote
it.â There are cities, bars, and celebrities known for
being LGBT, but the government never officially
acknowledges them and doesnât allow public advocacy.
Discussion among ordinary people is fine. Some other
places might not agree with this approach, but for me and
most Chinese people, we really like it. In China,
transitioning isnât actually difficult: once you
complete the psychological evaluation and surgery, the
government will verify it and issue a new ID. But
youâll never see it publicly promoted because, in the
eyes of the authorities, it doesnât exist.
eks391 wrote 3 hours 19 min ago:
I'm not sure where you are reading, but people are not free to
rant in China. Many of my friends would lose privileges because
they were foolish enough to openly speak poorly regarding certain
topics, and suddenly they were banned from Wechat, which is
equivalent to being banned from the internet, and from using
money in noncash form. My sister was visiting and was dumb enough
to get herself banned from way more services and she was scared
she wouldn't be able to get back home. In a very few places, they
check your social score to ensure that you aren't low-life enough
to be barred from there too. I only spoke freely after checking
an area for no cameras, so I always had all of my privileges, but
me and a Chinese friend, after coming to the USA (I am not
Chinese, only went there for school), hope we never end up back
in China.
Regarding day to day life in the USA, I am unaffected by China.
SR2Z wrote 3 hours 23 min ago:
> Iâm really curious to better understand what aspects of
Chinaâs government would hurt your day to day life.
For tech workers in particular, the structure of the economy
would prevent high equity-based compensation. I also distinctly
recall China's heavy-handed enforcement of COVID lockdowns, and
the sudden about-face when discontent reached a boiling point.
Then there's the censorship too - disagreeing on low-stakes local
issues is one thing, but if you disagree with national policy,
you cannot exactly discuss it in the open the way that we do
here.
I have known a few Chinese people, and they downplay this stuff.
Some of them are even political refugees from the purges
following Mao's death, and they downplay the level of
authoritarianism in the country. As bad as the US has gotten
recently, we're still not at that level.
It really does seem like both nations are slowly converging on
similar systems of government, but hopefully this authoritarian
swing in the US can be limited.
LAC-Tech wrote 4 hours 10 min ago:
Really? I always thought people made a massive deal about an
incredibly poor country that become... middle income, and seems to
be stuck there.
I'm glad they don't have self-induced famines anymore I guess, but
it's not exactly japan in the 80s.
FpUser wrote 4 hours 24 min ago:
>"if it wasn't for the authoritarianism and imperialism"
Oops, my hypocrisy meter just broke.
andrewflnr wrote 3 hours 4 min ago:
You may be making assumptions about me.
scoopertrooper wrote 4 hours 53 min ago:
They go hand in hand. The authoritarianism of China allows it to
undertake generational projects of immense scale with mass popular
support through propaganda.
It works well when the government is pursuing welfare maximising
initiatives, but limits self-correction when the government goes
off track.
A small example of it going wrong, was when Mao convinced peasants
to exterminate Sparrows and other âpestsâ only to severely
disrupt the ecosystem and cause a famine.
jopsen wrote 4 hours 27 min ago:
> They go hand in hand. The authoritarianism of China allows it
to undertake generational projects...
Lack of free press makes it easy to look successful.
It was the same thing with the Soviet union, was it ever really
successful at any point?
ActorNightly wrote 2 hours 17 min ago:
You don't need press for everyone to see that China is straight
killing it in almost every sector. Manufacturing, compute, you
name it. Sure, they aren't without problems.
And as for free press, look at where freedom of press took
United States. You have companies like Fox news that "aren't
actually news, just entertainment", who blatantly lie about
election fraud. You have podcasters like Joe Rogan who are at
the same time "just bullshitting", while also pushing
ideological narratives. And most republicans still believe
election was stolen in 2024.
And overall, the party that was all about free speech, free
trade, and small federal government power is pretty much doing
the exact opposite in every single aspect, and people voted for
them.
Im glad China has reigns on all of that. It allows them to pass
laws like this [1] And yes, from a pure statistical standpoint,
having centralized power isn't optimal since you don't want
someone crazy having lots of centralized power, but at the same
time, you also don't want what US has, where on the average
7/10 people simply just don't give a fuck about US being
destroyed financially and socially.
URI [1]: https://www.cnbctv18.com/world/chinas-new-influencer-l...
forgotoldacc wrote 2 hours 51 min ago:
You can go to China and see it for yourself. The USSR made
itself inaccessible to foreigners for the most part, but you
can hop on a train and visit nearly any place in China freely.
It's pretty easy with their extensive train system.
I see a lot of cope with "c-China is lying! It's not really
that good!" But lots of tourists such as myself have been all
over the country, and tbh, I think the "propaganda" undersells
it a bit. I thought there was no way it could be as nice as the
travel videos I saw, but it was even better.
deadfoxygrandpa wrote 3 hours 21 min ago:
> It was the same thing with the Soviet union, was it ever
really successful at any point?
yes. the soviet union was wildly successful for most of its
history. it went from a backwater poor agrarian country to an
industrial superpower near peer with the US in a single
generation, while simultaneously going through multiple brutal
wars and crushing nazi germany at immense cost. despite all
that, the soviet union had the fastest and greatest economic
and quality of life rise of any country in the 20th century.
of course it had problems that led to its collapse but you
cannot be serious and say it was never successful at any point
overfeed wrote 4 hours 0 min ago:
> It was the same thing with the Soviet union, was it ever
really successful at any point?
America had to go to all the way to the moon to win a "first"
against the Soviet Union in space.
dangus wrote 4 hours 13 min ago:
China is plainly and obviously many times more successful than
the Soviet Union ever was, even if you ignore all the
propaganda and just rely on yourself as a primary source -
I.e., âhop on a plane and see for yourself.â
chii wrote 4 hours 8 min ago:
China's success has come _after_ they economically
liberalized in a way that resembles the west's free markets.
Soviets never did any of this. They "stubbornly" kept to a
command economy. While china does have their 5-year plans and
command economy, they have loosened that up for private
individual's enterprises, and allowed special economic zones
for which free market capitalism thrives.
With a bit of state help in infrastructure etc, this enabled
china to leverage their enormous human capital to simply
out-muscle their way into industrial dominance. Now with such
a dominant position, they can call shots in a way that irks
the US. Compounding the problem is that the authoritarian
style of gov't in china enables long term strategic planning
and execution - something that seems sorely lacking from the
US for the past 3 decades.
dangus wrote 4 hours 4 min ago:
Why does the added qualifier in your first paragraph
matter?
Youâre literally just explaining why the Soviet Union was
less successful.
Nothing stopped the Soviet Union from liberalizing their
economy and running it better like China. They just
didnât do it. Which loops us back to my original comment.
I didnât bring my point up as some kind of communism
versus capitalism thing, Iâm just plainly stating that as
far as single-party mostly-authoritarian governments go,
China is far more accomplished than the USSR was.
leodler wrote 4 hours 33 min ago:
Somehow we (the United States) accomplished generational projects
that are currently out of the realm of possibility such as the
interstate system without risking anything like a famine. I think
a lot of people in America have been overly-empowered to stand in
the way of the most modest progress through NIMBYism, litigation,
local government, etc. To a lot of people it increasingly feels
like a form of private authoritarianism over tiny fiefdoms for
absolutely no benefit to a vast majority of people.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote 3 hours 40 min ago:
I'm a yimby but to be fair the welfare system is so broken in
the US that it's kind of a de facto ongoing famine
EGreg wrote 3 hours 46 min ago:
Actually, the US didnât have a famine, it had the opposite.
Automation like combines and tractors obviated the need for
oxen and farmhands to plow and reap manually. The farmers
competed in a race to the bottom (depleting the soil and
causing the dust bowl). They fired most farmhands and still had
a surplus. Food prices plummeted while giant dust storms became
the norm.
The government had to step in and pay farmers NOT to plant, to
extricate them from the downward spiral / race to the bottom
that the âfree marketâ had producted in the face of
automation / massive supply shocks.
Meanwhile, the laid-off farm workers (20% of USA used to be
employed in farm-related jobs) migrated to cities but it would
be a decade before the manufacturing base was built up to
employ them. They lived in Hoovervilles and shantytowns set up
to house them. A third of the countryâs banks failed and the
money supply shrank. The fed sat that one out. You can read
books by John Steinbeck and others describing life at that time
(eg Grapes of Wrath).
So eventually, projects like the Interstate Highway System, and
even weapons manufacturing and mobilization for WW2 caused mass
employment. At a time when people needed jobs, this was a good
thing for the economy and didnât need communist propaganda to
attract workers. Capitalismâs race to the bottom created the
desperation the workers needed for undertake large state
projects. And it is about to happen again.
Ironically, around the same time the US had a massive surplus,
Russia and China were experiencing massive man-made famines
under collectivization. Whether that horrific economic
experiment ultimately led to more prosperity through 5-year
plans is a contentious question (ideological leftists like Noam
Chomsky have told me, quoting Amartya Sen, that supposedly
China had less deaths from malnutrition afterwards than India,
but thatâs hardly a high bar considering their population
density).
PS: I donât mean to pick on communism alone for extreme
ideological economic system enforcement leading to famines. The
Irish Potato Famine could probably be squarely put into the
ideological capitalism column (landlords and property rights
trumping peopleâs lives), or how Britain (a capitalist
country) exploited India and the famines in Bengal were also
largely due to requisition of grain, similar to the Volga
famine during the Russian civil war.
tshaddox wrote 3 hours 59 min ago:
Presumably many of the people who currently attribute Chinaâs
ability to build infrastructure to authoritarianism would also
attribute Americaâs past ability to build infrastructure to
authoritarianism. They would presumably also decry any future
attempts to build ambitious infrastructure in America as
authoritarianism.
omikun wrote 4 hours 8 min ago:
The interstate was for the military. The new deal was in part
thanks to left wing communists/unionists voicing for the gov to
do more for the people. Then came McCarthyism.
chii wrote 4 hours 12 min ago:
> To a lot of people it increasingly feels like a form of
private authoritarianism over tiny fiefdoms for absolutely no
benefit to a vast majority of people.
that is what it means to have property rights.
It prevents your interests from being usurped by someone else
without first consulting you. Of course, like anything, it can
be taken too far, but getting the balance right is important.
If it tips too far towards gov't authoritarianism, the people
who are not connected tends to suffer silently (while the
majority who gets told these "nation building" projects
benefits them).
If it tips too far towards the private individual, then you get
nimby-ism and such.
BrenBarn wrote 1 hour 4 min ago:
More and more I think the mistake is seeing it as a tradeoff
between "property rights" and "government authoritarianism".
First, because authoritarianism is not much better when it
happens to be non-government authoritarianism (i.e., when
corporations become more powerful than government). And
second, because it treats "property rights" as a single fixed
notion, rather than recognizing that we can have property
rights that are not independent of the amount of property
owned. Just because "property rights" means that Paul the
Peon has absolute dominion over his hovel, there's no
particular reason it also has to mean that Oliver the
Oligarch has absolute dominion over his dozens of mansions,
factories, private security forces, etc. We can have a
system where your rights over property decrease the more of
it you have, so that in the limit there is effectively a
maximum on how much property can be owned or controlled by a
single individual (and therefore by a group of individuals).
ryandrake wrote 3 hours 43 min ago:
America's elevation of individuality and property rights
above everything else, its inability to work together
collectively to achieve a goal, and its citizen's infighting,
distrust of and belligerence toward each other, are the main
reasons it is incapable of doing big things anymore.
The minute we had a huge health emergency that should have
united the population, it was immediately politicized such
that half the country was trying to fix it, and the other
half were trying to prolong it and grief the fixers.
We're done for if we can't stop pitting half the country
against each other over literally every issue.
Arainach wrote 4 hours 29 min ago:
"Somehow" we did that back when we believed in a strong federal
government working for the benefit of the people. It's no
wonder that we lost the ability after decades of
anti-government propaganda and regulatory capture.
brabel wrote 39 min ago:
Thereâs a good argument for America having been able to do
all it did despite being a democracy without a strong central
government, not because of it. Look around the world and see
how many countries managed to achieve similar success using
the same liberal principles? Most of Europe became rich under
imperialist, authoritarian governments not with their current
system. I would love to see a good counter argument thatâs
convincing since I find this realization extremely sad as for
all my life I believed the propaganda about democracy and
liberalism being the route to success just to see most
countries that tried to emulate that fail miserably.
somenameforme wrote 3 hours 0 min ago:
It's not that people turned against the government just
randomly. Who was the last genuinely socially motivated
President we had? I idealize JFK, but I think that's largely
because of his charisma, how he ended, and obviously the
space program. Yet how did he not just immediately condemn
and completely dismantle the entire CIA when the proposal for
Operation Northwoods [1] reached his desk, and was one
signature away from execution? And that'll probably look
benign as the actions from more recent decades are
declassified in the future.
And after his assassination everything went downhill fast
with divide and conquer, all alongside global self
destructive geopolitical nonsense that continues to this very
day. We have spent, just since 2000 upwards of a very
conservative baseline of $10 trillion on war and military
related expenses. That's a starting point of about $30,000
for every single man, woman, and child in America. Think
about all of the amazing things we could have done with that
money. Instead we just blew it on pointless wars and have
literally less than nothing to show for it since they not
only made the US far less safe, but made the world far less
stable. [1] -
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
otikik wrote 52 min ago:
> literally less than nothing to show for it
Thatâs not true! Some guys got really really rich with
it. So, working as indented.
wahnfrieden wrote 2 hours 13 min ago:
FDR was not generally socially motivated. He was responsive
to labor pressure and other organizing.
Arainach wrote 2 hours 57 min ago:
LBJ made more progress on social issues than any President
with the possible exception of FDR. Certainly dramatically
more progress per year in office. Jimmy Carter was also
socially motivated.
Reagan changed the game, Newt Gingrich destroyed
cooperation, and now we're living in the world they
created.
yonaguska wrote 3 hours 29 min ago:
I don't believe we are capable of a strong government that
will also work for the benefit of the people today. Anti
government sentiment didn't just spring up from a vacuum.
Arainach wrote 3 hours 18 min ago:
It sprung up from capitalist propaganda and intentional
sabotage of the government by conservatives.
> I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to
reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom
and drown it in the bathtub.
Grover Norquist said the quiet part out loud in 2001, but
conservatives have been running that playbook since the New
Deal.
GolfPopper wrote 2 hours 37 min ago:
>*"conservatives have been running that playbook since
the New Deal"
I think one of America's many failures is allowing a
radically revolutionary right-wing (that is currently
headed full speed to fascism) to keep calling themselves
"conservatives" when that label is about as incorrect as
can be. They don't "conserve" anything. They're not
actually reactionary, although they often pretend to be.
They are not trying to be defenders of Chesterton's
Gate[1]. They're radicals, who want to reshape society to
their own whims and prejudices. And they ought to be
address and treated as such.
1.
URI [1]: https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/
questionableans wrote 32 min ago:
I agree. Of the two major US political parties today,
one is primarily radical right with a small
conservative branch that is struggling to stay in their
party. The other is conservative to moderate with a
small liberal branch that is fighting to make their
party stand for something.
kaptainscarlet wrote 4 hours 57 min ago:
As long as the cat catches the mice... :-)
jama211 wrote 4 hours 57 min ago:
And oppression of Tibet and the Uyghur people and other human
rights violationsâ¦
omikun wrote 4 hours 1 min ago:
Have you heard of this thing called the new Jim Crow?
onethought wrote 4 hours 55 min ago:
A mean not to go too deep into whataboutism⦠but at least they
only persecute their own Muslims rather than picking random
countries on a map and persecuting them.
rangestransform wrote 3 hours 50 min ago:
I would rather live in a country that points the guns outward,
rather than inward
free652 wrote 4 hours 50 min ago:
Ohhh so they aren't like selling weapon to Russia? Right. Keep
going.
omikun wrote 4 hours 6 min ago:
Is that better or worse than aiding/supporting genocide?
picture wrote 4 hours 47 min ago:
I see your point but, they're really not selling much more
than golf carts and drones. If they go all-out with selling
their actual military hardware (which they have a large
stockpile and production capacity of), it would be get much
more difficult for Ukraine to keep up the balance without
increasing support from the west.
It's really quite interesting to see China being labelled as
imperialist mean while the western powers have been
colonizing and meddling in all kinds of affairs for
generations... (see Operation Northwoods as one example)
jopsen wrote 4 hours 21 min ago:
Everybody makes mistakes.
The US is able to mention its past mistakes.
China still can't talk about students it murdered over 30
years ago.
Yet, recent American presidents have no problem admitting
that Afghanistan and Iraq wars weren't the best of ideas.
sometimes_all wrote 1 hour 55 min ago:
> The US is able to mention its past mistakes.
The entire point of being able to mention past mistakes
is for future generations to be able to learn from them
and avoid making the same mistakes. It seems, in recent
times, that while this liberty is "afforded" to
US/Europe, they're not able to use it effectively, if at
all. Meanwhile, even though the Chinese might not be able
to talk about their mistakes publicly, it seems evident
from their progress and events that they have not
forgotten them, and that it is in their minds, at the
very least.
Edit: Not to mention, looking at how your current
president is going after Canada just because of an ad,
don't keep your hopes up on US citizens being able to
"mention" things either.
onethought wrote 4 hours 59 min ago:
Imperialism? Expand.
andrewflnr wrote 3 hours 8 min ago:
They're plainly trying to expand their territory in Taiwan and
the South China Sea. Building invasion barges that can only be
used for invading Taiwan, harassing Phillipine ships. It's not
subtle.
z2 wrote 4 hours 39 min ago:
The most charitable interpretation I can think of, if OP didn't
misuse the word, would be, the generic "China bad" narrative
being applied to things like equating the Belt and Road (loans,
infrastructure projects) to centuries of old-fashioned
exploitation of Africa. After all, it takes one to know one.
lwansbrough wrote 3 hours 53 min ago:
Itâs not that hard to find examples. Chinese incursions in
the south China sea and the development of artificial islands
to project power and control over the region. Their plans for
Taiwan. The annexation of Tibet. Xinjiang ethnic cleansing.
Erosion of democratic freedoms in Hong Kong SAR. And yes the
entire Belt and Road initiative which is basically loan
sharking.
z2 wrote 3 hours 45 min ago:
No. That list shows coercive or authoritarian behavior, not
classical imperialism.
Imperialism means establishing colonies or directly ruling
foreign territories for economic extraction. China today
doesnât occupy or govern other sovereign states. The South
China Sea, Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan are all
disputes within--except Taiwan + the South China
Sea--undisputed national boundaries.[1] Belt and Road loans,
while allegedly predatory, are contractual and do not create
colonial rule. So itâs perhaps aggressive nationalism and
coercive influence, but not imperialism.
1. Yes, looking way back, the occupying Qing dynasty
established said boundaries through quite a lot of
imperialism about a century before the US got busy
manifesting its destiny.*
ivell wrote 1 hour 7 min ago:
Tibet was a self governing entity until Chinese invasion.
Though China would disagree. Tibet's leaders are still in
exile and one of the key issues of China with India.
If the argument is that Tibet was not a country, then the
same applies to Taiwan. Taiwan is not internationally
recognized as a country, except for a few nations.
AniseAbyss wrote 4 hours 13 min ago:
To be fair China challenging white people rule is kinda bad if
you are white.
I suppose us Westerners can now kinda feel how the Ming must
have felt in the 19th century?
uvaursi wrote 5 hours 24 min ago:
My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I ride a
Mercedes, my son rides a Land Rover, and my grandson is going to ride
a Land Roverâ¦but my great-grandson is going to have to learn
Mandarin.
yanhangyhy wrote 5 hours 19 min ago:
LOL. Probably no longer needed. China currently has no real
solution for the low birth rate. I guess they are 99% relying on
industrial robots and household robots(in the future).So China will
desperately invest in the robotics sector. (The recently released
15th Five-Year Plan likely includes this). By then, language likely
wonât be an issueâAI can replace everything.
uvaursi wrote 5 hours 17 min ago:
Enlighten me - hasnât Xi and the government recently demanded
2-3 children from each woman? I imagine theyâll push heavily
for births again.
yanhangyhy wrote 5 hours 8 min ago:
the government is trying to encourage more births through
subsidies and other measures. In fact, experience from
developed countries has already shown that this approach
doesnât work. Moreover, the subsidies the Chinese government
provides are far lower than in developed countries and far
below the actual cost of raising a child.
The most common nationwide subsidy is 3,600 RMB per child per
year, which is basically ineffective. For a woman on maternity
leave, the government will subsidize her based on her salary,
which can be substantialâin places like Shanghai it could
reach 200,000â300,000 RMBâbut still not enough to stimulate
population growth.
To put it in a darker perspective: the only way to truly boost
birth rates would be to reduce womenâs rights or
compensation, which is unlikely in any civilized country. A
historical example is Romania.
So in my understanding, China has only two viable paths: solve
the cost of raising children through household robots or by
means of coercion, the government could require state-owned
enterprise employees and Communist Party members to have
children. China has 100 million Party members and roughly tens
of millions of SOE employees. SOE employees usually have stable
benefits and income, so childbirth could be tied to salary,
benefits, or promotion opportunities. To some extent, this
could be argued as reasonableâafter all, they are supported
by taxpayers and arguably should contribute to society. But it
still counts as a rather dark idea, and I imagine it would be a
last-resort option.
hollerith wrote 4 hours 45 min ago:
>the government could require state-owned enterprise
employees and Communist Party members to have children.
Or Beijing could ban birth control and rely on the natural
human sex drive to increase the birth rate.
yanhangyhy wrote 4 hours 41 min ago:
China is a country that does not prohibit abortion at all.
Maybe this could be a starting pointâ¦
onethought wrote 4 hours 57 min ago:
Immigration would be another option⦠but not sure how
willing China is to adopt that
yanhangyhy wrote 4 hours 47 min ago:
Iâve actually thought a lot about this issue. My
conclusion is that itâs not feasible. China has never
been good at integrating other ethnicities and races. Even
managing the 56 recognized ethnic groups within mainland
China hasnât gone very well; it has copied many mistakes
from the Soviet Union, which has now led to a certain
degree of backlash.
So Iâve always felt that Chinaâs ambition extends only
to Taiwan, and Taiwan is the endpoint. After all, the
people on Taiwan are Chinese too, sharing the same culture
and ethnicity. Another point that people might overlook is
that Chinaâs approach to incorporating outsiders is based
on cultural identity rather than racial identity, which is
the opposite of the U.S. In the U.S., you can come in,
bring your own culture, help reshape American culture, and
still become an American. In China, you can only be
considered Chinese if you adopt Chinese culture.
Of course, sometimes we discuss online hypotheticals like
whether it would be good for China to annex Mongolia or
Myanmar. From a purely military perspective, it would be
very easy for China. But almost no one supports it, because
our way of thinking dictates that it would require an
enormous cost to transform those populations into Chinese
culture, and that cost is simply not worth it. Trade and
cooperation are the best approach.
zahlman wrote 6 hours 52 min ago:
> Since 1990 ... surpassed by China, which managed to add a staggering
173 million acres....
> Over the last three and a half decades China has planted roughly 120
million acres of forest
Where did the rest come from?
paulcole wrote 6 hours 50 min ago:
When a mommy tree and a daddy tree love each other very muchâ¦
zahlman wrote 6 hours 43 min ago:
I would have expected that to cause infill rather than spreading.
paulcole wrote 6 hours 23 min ago:
Well youâre the tree expert, not me. So I dunno?
abhaynayar wrote 7 hours 26 min ago:
How many football fields is that though?
zahlman wrote 6 hours 56 min ago:
[1] About 130 million.
URI [1]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i2d=true&i=Divide%5Barea+...
lovelearning wrote 7 hours 59 min ago:
> Drawing on national reports prepared for FAO, ...
> Since 2005, the FRA has relied on data provided by a network of
officially nominated national correspondents...
My understanding is that these reports are heavily based on data
reported by respective governments. I think "officially nominated
national correspondents" means bureaucrats of different governments.
But the governments of Russia, India, China are all known to lie. A
lot. About a lot of things. I would know.
My default stance is to be skeptical of such claims based on national
reports. Independent verification using satellite imagery seems like a
better approach.
hereme888 wrote 8 hours 26 min ago:
Wise to use forests to contain deserts. Problem is that China still
plays a big role in importing deforestation-linked commodities and fund
overseas projects that exacerbate global loses. There are low tree
survival rates and falsified coverage, like the Three-North Shelterbelt
program which is plagued by inefficiencies over its 40 years of
operation.
It's also hard to balance afforestation without causing scarcity of
water and displacement of native forest habitats. For example,
instances where shrubs are misclassified as forests inflate the report
figures. China seems to be the global leader in biodiversity loss, with
about 80% of its coral reefs and 73% of its mangroves gone since 1950.
Everyone knows their abusive fishing practices, and the millions of
tons of plastic pollution into the ocean every year.
So, keep up the good environmental efforts, China, and hope you do even
better.
seanmcdirmid wrote 5 hours 58 min ago:
Itâs hard to reason about where China is today with forestation.
Obviously their efforts from 20 years ago didnât do much good,
probably due to corruption and mismanagement. Today they seem to have
solved so issues, is it could really be working. The primary resource
they need to manage is water, and any effort that requires too much
water (especially water diverted from local farmers) isnât
sustainable.
rattan12138 wrote 6 hours 15 min ago:
yeahh,hope china will do better
gchamonlive wrote 7 hours 14 min ago:
Honest question, aren't coral reefs also very sensitive to climate
change? How much of that loss is because of regional activities and
how much is due to global environmental changes?
wraptile wrote 49 min ago:
Regional activties is a huge factor, much bigger than global imo.
For example, South China Sea coastlines from Vietnam and China side
are basically completely dead. There zero ocean environmental
awareness in both countries and it's all about just devouring all
ocean creatures with no self awareness.
This is especially apparent if you take a look at the other side of
the same sea. Philipines coasts are absolutely beautiful, full of
life (well as much as you can get these days). Huge conservation
efforts and really strong indigenous culture that respects the
ocean made much more difference than global warming ever could.
Completely different views from two vastly different regional
activities.
andai wrote 6 hours 0 min ago:
So, something has been bugging me. Coral is one of the oldest
animals.
They've been around for over half a billion years.
They survived the Great Dying, which killed 80-95% of marine
species.
And now the ocean gets 0.9 C warmer and it's game over for coral?
mikeyouse wrote 4 hours 57 min ago:
Nobody's claiming that all coral is going to go extinct.. the
reef environment that has existed for the past few thousand years
is at great risk though. Water temperatures that we know have
been relatively stable for several hundred years are suddenly
rapidly warming. Bleaching events due to high temps which
infrequently occurred in the past are happening nearly every year
now, which gives the reef no time to rejuvenate between them.
The evolutionary process which protects species in their niches
takes hundreds or thousands of generations to adapt to new
selection pressures and the changes are happening over dozens of
generations instead, which may be too fast for most species to
respond.
Coral and coral reefs will surely exist for the next few hundred
million years but e.g. the Great Barrier Reef as an example of a
vibrant reef ecosystem might not. We don't know exactly where the
tipping point for these extremely complex systems lies, but we
know that it's some point in the direction we're heading and
we're starting to see examples of the outcomes that scientists
predict to see near those tipping points.
zol wrote 5 hours 41 min ago:
My guess is as a species it will relocate to somewhere with the
right temperature zone but because coral takes so long to grow
from the perspective of those of us alive the existing âold
growthâ coral will die.
jncfhnb wrote 5 hours 54 min ago:
0.9 C warmer on average vs location specific volatility +
acidification
margalabargala wrote 6 hours 1 min ago:
Considering that China is responsible for ~25% of cumulative CO2
emissions to date, there's not much difference between the regional
and global inputs.
ethegwo wrote 5 hours 15 min ago:
Request the source? I researched and calculated the cumulative
percentage of global carbon emissions from major economies since
the industrial revolution:
- United States: 24%
- China: 15%
- Russia: 6.7%
- Germany: 5.2%
- United Kingdom: 4.4%
- Japan: 3.8%
- India: 3.5%
- France: 2.2%
- Canada: 1.9%
- Ukraine: 1.7%
source from Global Carbon Project, is this reliable?
margalabargala wrote 1 hour 49 min ago:
I added up the 2023 numbers from here:
URI [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emiss...
Someone wrote 12 min ago:
You must have made a mistake in doing that. If you add
âworldâ to the selection, Our World in Data adds them up
for you, and you only have to divide 27253/181000. That gives
you 0.1506, very close to 15%.
URI [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emi...
gchamonlive wrote 5 hours 42 min ago:
Isn't this 75% less responsibility than total responsibility in
case it's only due to regional activities?
margalabargala wrote 1 hour 47 min ago:
Sure, but 25% of responsibility for something like this is well
into "consequences of your actions" territory.
If the world had 25% less GHG emissions to date, warming may
well still be sub 1C, and the reefs might be fine.
lovegrenoble wrote 8 hours 45 min ago:
Canada has added 20 million acres,
India 22 million acres,
Russia 52 million acres - an area about the size of Kansas.
867-5309 wrote 8 hours 29 min ago:
Texas is ~172 million acres
TiredOfLife wrote 8 hours 40 min ago:
[flagged]
tomhow wrote 1 hour 3 min ago:
Please avoid generic tangents and flamebait on HN.
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
teleforce wrote 8 hours 41 min ago:
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?
softwaredoug wrote 8 hours 44 min ago:
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.
URI [1]: https://news.agu.org/press-release/a-century-of-reforestatio...
dustractor wrote 8 hours 47 min ago:
Meanwhile we're speedrunning DustBowl 2.0 just in time for its 100th
anniversary.
chemotaxis wrote 8 hours 34 min ago:
How so? US forest cover bottomed out in the 1920s or 1930 and has
been going up since. If anything, in the West, the forests aren't
logged enough, which increases wildfire risk.
China isn't following a particularly unique path, they just did a
speedrun of economic development - they had nearly everyone living in
extreme poverty in the 1980s. Before long, they'll be looking for
cheap markets to outsource manufacturing and extractive industries
to... which is why they're lending money to forgotten African
nations. Keeping Russia an international pariah and making them
economically dependent on China is probably up their alley too.
marricks wrote 9 hours 23 min ago:
This and Bill Gates saying...
> âthe doomsday outlook [on climate change] is causing much of the
climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and
itâs diverting resources from the most effective things we should be
doing to improve life in a warming world.â
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.
9dev wrote 8 hours 40 min ago:
Bill Gates is fundamentally anthrophilic, so his concern is above all
human suffering. I think thatâs a valid viewpoint, but also
shortsighted; keeping this planet habitable will require tough
decisions and sacrifices, and should stay the utmost priority, out of
sheer necessity.
conception wrote 7 hours 35 min ago:
Anthropophilic perhapsâ¦
hooverd wrote 8 hours 13 min ago:
ah, the classic "you are a sacrifice I'm willing to make"
mcdeltat wrote 3 hours 59 min ago:
Oh no, to save the world we'll have to take the train to work
instead of a car...
telchior wrote 8 hours 21 min ago:
The population as a whole has a rapidly dwindling appetite for tech
billionaires trying to impose "tough decisions and sacrifices" on
everyone else, so Bill's probably in the right lane. He has already
been the target of a vast array of conspiracy theories.
gnarlouse wrote 9 hours 37 min ago:
I'm starting to think that we're the baddies.
k4rli wrote 44 min ago:
100% true. The US defaultism "we" is a cherry on top.
raincole wrote 2 hours 19 min ago:
Who the hell are 'we'? The US? The western countries?
By the "forest baddies index", South America is the baddies.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_by_continent#/me...
reissbaker wrote 3 hours 6 min ago:
Based on forest cover? The US has nearly 50% more forest cover than
China, and has been steadily growing it since the 90s as well.
thesmtsolver wrote 6 hours 33 min ago:
Great quality comment.
We shouldn't consider the fact China did much more deforestation to
start with and even after all this reforestation China has lesser
forest area than the US despite being larger in size: [1] [2] > The
US claims: "China is the world's largest consumer of illegal timber
products."
> And, according to studies, that is true.
> The Environmental Investigation Agency says: "The immense scale of
China's sourcing [of wood] from high-risk regions [of the world]
means that a significant proportion of its timber and wood product
imports were illegally harvested."
And research by Global Witness last year said there were "worrying"
levels of illegality in countries from which China sources more than
80% of its timber.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_forest_ar...
URI [2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54719577
deadfoxygrandpa wrote 3 hours 11 min ago:
well, china also has gigantic northern and western regions that
cannot be forested. the us doesn't have an equivalent of the
tibetan plateau or the gobi desert
z2 wrote 4 hours 48 min ago:
Just as with CO2, a better comparison would look at per-capita
figures and the destinations of consumption--for instance paper and
furniture for export.
It may also take into account the viable land area, lest we also
want to condemn Australia for having so much less forest area
despite being similar in size to the US.
switchbak wrote 7 hours 24 min ago:
Ahem: "China consumes over half of the worldâs coal and contributes
more than 20% of global CO2 emissions from coal combustion."
But trees are nice.
Source:
URI [1]: https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.918
seanmcdirmid wrote 5 hours 50 min ago:
Are you trying to say something like perfect is the enemy of good?
ehsankia wrote 5 hours 50 min ago:
is that per Capita? Also, At least they are going in the right
direction with most metrics (switching to electric, installing
renewable, planting trees, etc), whereas the US (under Trump) is
hellbent on getting rid of renewables, focusing on coal/fossil
fuel, slowing down electric cars, destroying national parks, etc.
lvturner wrote 6 hours 28 min ago:
Your point reads strangely, it's almost like saying "Why even
bother when CO2 emissions are so high" - surely ANYTHING that they
are doing to turn that around should be celebrated and encouraged
rather than saying "Yeah but..." - Rome wasn't built in a day and
all.
adrianmonk wrote 7 hours 53 min ago:
Who is "we"?
gnarlouse wrote 7 hours 36 min ago:
The US. Admittedly, itâs a kneejerk reaction.
mc32 wrote 9 hours 25 min ago:
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 âbaddiesâ are still Brazil, Indonesia and the
democratic Republic of the Congo.
Waterluvian wrote 9 hours 32 min ago:
Itâs becoming very hard to see China as the adversary and not the
U.S. There isnât even a pretend moral high ground anymore.
refurb wrote 5 hours 16 min ago:
There is the whole totalitarian human rights thing, so if you
overlook that small, insignificant issue, then yeah, China is doing
great!
mrits wrote 8 hours 31 min ago:
I could see how you would come to that conclusion if your knowledge
of China started 5 minutes ago
thegreatpeter wrote 8 hours 44 min ago:
Texas has the most wind farms & largest solar arrays in all of the
US
porknaut wrote 9 hours 24 min ago:
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 9 hours 2 min ago:
US is far higher per capita and doing nothing about it.
mdeeks wrote 8 hours 26 min ago:
This is one of the places where per capita doesn't matter as
much as total emissions. We have one planet. The yearly total
and cumulative matters the most.
China is by far the leading emitter. Over double of the US as
of 2023 (latest available data I can find). China's emissions
also aren't falling, they are skyrocketing. The US emissions
ARE falling.
The US dominates in cumulative, which is essentially the
measure of the total damage done to the planet. The US is doing
something about it though. Yearly emissions have been dropping
since 2007.
URI [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-greenhouse-gas-emis...
seanmcdirmid wrote 5 hours 46 min ago:
Per capita most definitely matters. Every human is equal,
there is no reason why one human has the right to emit much
more than another. If we go by your reasoning, then all
developing countries should figure out how to raise living
standards without consuming more resources so the Americans
donât have to reduce theirs.
You are incorrect that China isnât doing anything to lower
its impact. Itâs emissions would be much much much worse
for the standard of living increases it achieved without
investments in clean energy and EVs, tech that it is
exporting abroad to the benefit of the world and to the
dismay of Americaâs petro dollar dependence.
With such thinking, I now get why the rest of the world is
beginning to hate America so much.
mdeeks wrote 3 hours 24 min ago:
I didn't say China isn't doing anything. They are rolling
out a mind boggling amount of clean energy right now. More
than any other country by far. It's honestly incredible
scale. It unfortunately isn't keeping up with their
emissions though. The data is from 2023. It's very possible
that in the last two years China has been able to stabilize
emission growth.
I actually disagree a bit on the first part. I think
developing countries have a right to have higher per capita
emissions as they raise their standard of living and
economy where they can get to the point of widely adopting
clean energy.
seanmcdirmid wrote 2 hours 18 min ago:
I visited Beijing in April and it was much cleaner than
it was before, electric vehicles everywhere, but people
were also much richer, before a car was some sort of
luxury and now it was just something you could get if you
could find a place to park it. Itâs hard to describe.
The o the thing to consider is that China isnât really
a full on consumption economy yet, that they develop a
lot of infrastructure and make a lot of stuff for export,
all that would be counted in per capita emissions even if
it wasnât to the benefit of a per capita member. The
infrastructure building is going to slow down someday
(like it did in Japan), China should seriously consider
its exports next (especially rare earth refining which is
really dirty and resource intensive).
voxelghost wrote 7 hours 41 min ago:
Why wouldnt per capita matter? By that logic, you are saying
it would be OK for Tuvalu to emit the same amount as the US?
Or actually, if per capita doesn't matter. Then China could
fracture into 10 separate nations, and their output would
sudenly be negliable?
raincole wrote 1 hour 45 min ago:
Per captia doesn't matter.
> Then China could fracture into 10 separate nations, and
their output would sudenly be negliable?
Don't you see the argument goes both ways? If the US merge
with a few Africa countries, does it count as an
"improvement" in regard of carbon emission?
mdeeks wrote 7 hours 14 min ago:
Qatar emits FAR more than the US per capita, but the total
emissions are extremely small. The impact on the climate is
tiny comparatively.
rtpg wrote 8 hours 6 min ago:
In the "we only have one planet" angle, I think it's worth
considering that China is not just burning coal for domestic
purposes for fun. The fossil fuel consumption is an input to
some output, a lot of that going abroad.
If China is the factory for all of these products sold in the
US (and elsewhere of course), then isn't China just
accounting for even more US emissions?
In that sense, some sort of eco-Trump could put all the
tariff money into green tech or something, to balance out the
exporting of emissions.
Though to be fair, I gotta imagine that... a lot of chinese
emissions are purely for domestic purposes.
thesmtsolver wrote 6 hours 29 min ago:
>If China is the factory for all of these products sold in
the US (and elsewhere of course), then isn't China just
accounting for even more US emissions?
China can't have it both ways, they are glibly blaming the
rest of the world for their emissions while reforesting due
to importing timber from rest of the world illegally.
> The Environmental Investigation Agency says: "The immense
scale of China's sourcing [of wood] from high-risk regions
[of the world] means that a significant proportion of its
timber and wood product imports were illegally harvested."
And research by Global Witness last year said there were
"worrying" levels of illegality in countries from which
China sources more than 80% of its timber.
URI [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54719577
rtpg wrote 1 hour 55 min ago:
I'm not talking about China's position, but thinking
about texture of the emissions reductions in the rest of
the world.
It's probably fairly unknowable what percent of emissions
are for products that will be exported back out from
China, but I think it's reasonable to say that when I buy
some random wooden table from China and import it into
Australia (for example), that I am at least somewhat
responsible for those emissions, even if per-country
emissions data doesn't reflect that!
I don't think this is some free pass for Chinese
ecological behavior overall. My general hypothesis has
been that at least some part of emissions reductions in
the US and Europe are due to outsourcing. I just don't
know how much of it is that.
XorNot wrote 6 hours 53 min ago:
Theres going to be a very entertaining set of mental
gymnastics people will start doing once China's emissions
growth peaks and starts falling compared to the US. They're
building a lot of renewables, a lot of nuclear plants and
are very obviously tooling up to replicate fusion from
whoever nails it.
Whereas the US is trying to increase its fossil fuel
industry and cancelling renewable projects.
mdeeks wrote 3 hours 13 min ago:
They aren't just building "a lot" of renewables and
nuclear, they are building an absolutely mind boggling
amount of it. Last year it was more than the rest of the
world combined!
Who cares about mental gymnastics. It's a win for
literally everyone and I hope you ca see it that way
instead. Competition is good. It drives others to keep
up.
Despite what the current US govt wants, the economics of
solar and other renewables will drive it. Worst they can
do is slow it down a bit.
mdeeks wrote 7 hours 9 min ago:
Thatâs a really great point. Maybe their emission curve
is what matters. Itâs the measure of if they are
investing enough into reducing emissions despite their
production needs.
rtpg wrote 1 hour 53 min ago:
The thing is it's not _their_ production needs if they
are the factory of the world.
If the US put a 1000% tariff on Chinese goods tomorrow,
emissions in China would likely go down a decent amount,
right? But is that an indicator of their production
needs? Or the US's consumption patterns?
Not that this is some bilateral thing, there's a lot of
people buying a lot of stuff from many places. Just
thinking about a very simple example, and how I would
like to see quantification on this front, but I don't
know how doable it really is.
kulahan wrote 9 hours 35 min ago:
Ecologically speaking, the US is an absolute monster of a nightmare.
The American carbon footprint is incredible.
jandrewrogers wrote 4 hours 56 min ago:
How do you figure? Carbon footprint only matters per unit of
output.
Americans produce 2-2.5x more output per ton of carbon emitted than
the average country. And this despite the fact that the US is (1)
the second largest manufacturer in the world, (2) one of the
largest agricultural producers in the world, and (3) the largest
oil producer in the world.
The US has a surprisingly low per capita carbon footprint given its
vast per capita carbon-intensive production.
refurb wrote 5 hours 17 min ago:
You canât look at carbon footprint in isolation. All carbon is a
result of the production of something, often production which
improves the state of human suffering.
What is more important is efficiency.
Otherwise the logical argument is âthe US should have remained
poor with more human suffering because our carbon footprint would
be smallerâ
Thatâs an insane statement
gorwell wrote 5 hours 54 min ago:
For context, here are the top 10 biggest footprints
1. China 26.16%
2 United States 11.53%
3. India 7.69%
4. Russia 3.75%
5. Brazil 3.16%
6. Indonesia 3.15%
7. Japan 2.15%
8. Iran 2.06%
9. Saudi Arabia 1.60%
10. Canada 1.54%
The top 10 countries account for about ~60% of global COâ
emissions.
almaight wrote 4 hours 16 min ago:
0.Earth 100%
moefh wrote 5 hours 25 min ago:
That's not great context: China and India have huge populations,
it's expected that they should be at the top.
Better context can be found here[1] (countries by emission per
capita). It's still not great because it shows a lot of small
countries at the top. For example: Palau is the first, but it has
a population of a few thousand people, so their emissions are a
rounding error when compared to other countries.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbo...
free652 wrote 4 hours 43 min ago:
Why? I would expect China to be at the top since it's #1
manufacturing country? But India is like behind Germany at (5).
How about GDP per emission? And that would make China way
higher than US.
URI [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-intensity
gorwell wrote 4 hours 44 min ago:
Per capita isn't the useful metric in this regard for the
reason Palau illustrates. The climate cares about volume.
Per capita emissions is a way to assign relative sin by those
who feel guilty about living large.
Bill Gates today, "This is a chance to refocus on the metric
that should count even more than emissions and temperature
change: improving lives. Our chief goal should be to prevent
suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions
who live in the worldâs poorest countries. The biggest
problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have
been. Understanding this will let us focus our limited
resources on interventions that will have the greatest impact
for the most vulnerable people.â
ebbi wrote 7 hours 48 min ago:
Not intending to make this political, but it's a relevant point to
consider: we should also take into account the carbon footprint of
all the bombs that were dropped by America and its proxies into the
equation as well.
The environmental impact from these would be immense, I'd imagine.
cman1444 wrote 7 hours 26 min ago:
...do nuclear bombs release significant amounts of CO2? I didn't
think they did.
selcuka wrote 7 hours 9 min ago:
Not the detonation itself (if we don't count the fires it may
cause), but the total CO2 cost of nukes is high [1]:
> A bomb on its own does not emit carbon dioxide⦠Itâs the
infrastructure, the construction (cement emits a lot), fossil
fuel use, manpower, consumption, supply chains etc that all
contribute.
> A study published in the Energy & Environmental Science
journal has documented that using 1/1000 of the total capacity
of a full-scale nuclear war weaponry would induce 690 tonnes of
CO2 to penetrate the earthâs atmosphere. This is more than
the annual carbon footprint of the United Kingdom.
URI [1]: https://lakenheathallianceforpeace.org.uk/carbon-footp...
chrneu wrote 6 hours 13 min ago:
I feel it's worth pointing out that this is where some folks
brains kind of break when the "cost" of a good is mentioned.
It's the massive infrastructure to do the things profitably
at scale that is often the problem with much of the stuff we
consume and use. Then the "cost" of the environmental damage
down the line. The "intangibles" get split up.
Then we see these insane figures when these intangibles are
all lumped together. This further disconnects people's brains
from the real scale of what's going. Cuz our brains suck with
big numbers.
JBiserkov wrote 7 hours 42 min ago:
I mean, just the nukes alone are incomprehensible, adding all the
conventional munitions ... I'm out of words.
A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945 - by Isao
Hashimoto [1] 1 second = 1 month
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY
LMYahooTFY wrote 2 hours 12 min ago:
All nuclear explosions themselves aren't even going to be
statistically detectable.
IIRC from assessments of the US military's carbon footprint,
cumulative footprint of nuclear weapons infrastructure is
probably significantly less than .1%
There's a hundred other things to worry about first IMO.
jaza wrote 8 hours 41 min ago:
I would have thought that, in saying "we", OP was referring to all
of humanity, rather than just the US and/or the Western world.
porknaut wrote 9 hours 29 min ago:
It doesn't even come close to China. So if we're a nightmarish
monster, I would hate to think what that makes China.
IAmGraydon wrote 8 hours 7 min ago:
It's funny this myth persists, primarily in conservative circles,
it seems. We are far worse per capita than China. In 2023, the US
emitted 13.83 tons of carbon per capita. In that same year, China
emitted 9.24 tons per capita. There are few countries that are
worse than us - that list includes Russia and Saudi Arabia.
corimaith wrote 7 hours 24 min ago:
Shanghai's carbon per capita is 11.4. It's not really that
different if you equalize the wealth per capita.
manoDev wrote 8 hours 40 min ago:
Not per capita.
tzs wrote 9 hours 4 min ago:
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).
jimbokun wrote 6 hours 48 min ago:
Assigning blame and guilt is pointless. Just look at how well
it has worked to motivate the US to change. That is to say,
not at all.
The only thing moving the needle is renewables and nuclear
generating power more cheaply than fossil fuels, so it becomes
stupid to not switch to them even if you have no regard for the
long term health of the environment.
abdullahkhalids wrote 5 hours 23 min ago:
It's not about assigning blame.
Per capita emissions give us a better idea of which groups of
people require the largest change in their lifestyle in order
to hit net zero. The current numbers suggest that the typical
person in the US will have to do a lot more to hit net-zero
than the typical person in China. Obviously, you can do
better and estimate per capita emissions for each
province/state/city or by wealth level. For instance, in many
poor countries, most of their emissions come from the top
5-10% of the population. Everyone else emits basically
nothing.
On the other hand, the total emissions of a country, absent
other information, has little actionable value. It can only
be uses to assign blame, so quite useless.
whatevertrevor wrote 4 hours 3 min ago:
That still sounds like assigning blame and a vague call to
"change lifestyle", instead of concrete action plans for
energy, manufacturing, transportation and agricultural
sectors. That is where the bulk of emissions are, not some
billionaire's yacht or private jet.
throwaway6734 wrote 8 hours 18 min ago:
> 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).
Why?
dghlsakjg wrote 7 hours 54 min ago:
A huge portion of China's emissions come from making things
for people that aren't in China. The argument is that if a
Chinese factory makes only widgets used in the US, those
emissions from the Chinese factory are probably more
accurately counted as US emissions.
Its like saying that you are 0 emissions because you have an
electric car with no tailpipe while ignoring where the
electricity is coming from.
corimaith wrote 7 hours 28 min ago:
The counter argument is that they'd have mass unemployment
and would be in poverty without it. Virtually all rapid
modern industrialization is reliant on exporting to foreign
markets so characteizing it as American emissions is
largely a misomer as it is really global emissions.
Tadpole9181 wrote 5 hours 48 min ago:
While I fundamentally disagree, do you really not see how
that would then mean all Chinese emissions are therefore
a result of the United States? So that's... worse?
corimaith wrote 5 hours 15 min ago:
What? No, because China is also exporting to other
markets. The counterfactual is that we don't do global
industrialization and let the global poor remain poor.
Tadpole9181 wrote 4 hours 47 min ago:
The US introduced China to western manufacturing
markets. So if they would otherwise be poor and
non-industrialized, the US is responsible for it all.
We can't claim we rose them from poverty while also
denying culpability for the consequences thereof...
Though I think everyone is just saying Chinese
emissions should be counted, proportionally, against
the people they're making products for. And the US is
one of their biggest customers.
corimaith wrote 4 hours 11 min ago:
>The US introduced China to western manufacturing
markets. So if they would otherwise be poor and
non-industrialized, the US is responsible for it
all.
Who is "We" here? I am speaking from a global
perspective. Chinese industrialization has internal
agency, drivers and motivation, the US did not
force China to industrialize. Secondly Global
Demand is not US-Specific, Europe, Japan and other
markets contributed with their own agreements so
the claim that the US is "responsible" is
overstated here.
>Though I think everyone is just saying Chinese
emissions should be counted, proportionally,
against the people they're making products for. And
the US is one of their biggest customers.
That's not what anyone serious is saying because
it's just splitting hairs. Everyone buys from
China, the US accounts for 15% of China's total
imports so clearly their role here is exaggerated
again. China also consumes much of their own
manufacturing, while the US also exports many
services elsewhere, so should US emissions be
counted in other countries? And then there are also
structural dynamics in how surplus economies
intentionally suppress their demand to run
surpluses.
In a world of comparative advantage, I don't see
the particular value in performing funny
calculations to divy up moral blame according to
shifting trade dynamics, just much easier to point
it out as shared global responsiblity in the path
for Modernity.
fwip wrote 7 hours 56 min ago:
Because China makes more things that are used in the US than
the other way around.
enraged_camel wrote 8 hours 27 min ago:
>> 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.
For now. Look at the rate of growth on their per capital carbon
emissions. Then compare it with that of the USA.
2muchcoffeeman wrote 9 hours 17 min ago:
China is also deploying a ton a renewables though. Its the worlds
leading producer of renewables. Itâs a mistake to think they
wonât ween off carbon where they can. The US has a president
that said âdrill baby drillâ.
munk-a wrote 9 hours 32 min ago:
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.
votepaunchy wrote 8 hours 24 min ago:
> embrace and profit massively off of next gen energy
infrastructure
Our childrenâs generation will never forgive us for abandoning
nuclear energy abundance. Truly a crime against humanity.
golem14 wrote 7 hours 45 min ago:
I used to be a true believe in nuclear (in the 80s, 90s).
Recently, I thought (with good justification) that it's a folly
to build out nuclear if renewables' economics continue on the
current path.
Recently, I wonder if a nuclear winter (I mean this in the cold
war context) is likely enough to make renewables massively less
efficient. If the current administration were more competent,
I'd assume that they are pushing non-renewables for that
reason.
But then again, after a nuclear winter, our energy consumption
will probably drop to near zero (the population being near
zero), so it probably wouldn't matter either way.
Spooky23 wrote 5 hours 24 min ago:
Nuclear doesnât work in a market based electricity market.
The capital costs are high and itâs difficult to make money
if you arenât paying down those expenses.
IMO, the old style regulated public utilities were cheaper
and more reliable.
chrneu wrote 6 hours 16 min ago:
I was pretty into nuclear as well but it's pretty obvious
that solar/wind with battery storage is the future. For the
price of a single reactor you can build out like 5x the
capacity with other renewables. That's also accounting for
the down periods.
It's kinda fitting that NOW trump jumps on board with
nuclear, once the data says it isn't really necessary
anymore. It's possible we can maybe build some useful small
reactors for some stuff, but yeah.
Ericson2314 wrote 5 hours 6 min ago:
Don't forget to count storage and grid updates.
PeaceTed wrote 7 hours 45 min ago:
That will be one of many things they will not forgive us for.
Alas most of us in developed countries have treated the world
as a dumping ground for our excess.
rtpg wrote 8 hours 10 min ago:
There was still a perfectly nice window of opportunity even
scratching nuclear from the list.
My other glib thing about nuclear is that France, a much denser
nation than the US (though of course density is a local
property...), has a bunch of nuclear, but even with "full"
buy-in it's hard to make the whole thing profitable, and a lot
of the nuclear reactors are running at like 80% capacity.
Electricity is pretty fungible at smaller scales but when you
start building reactors you need water and you need consumers
of a lot of electricity to be close by, and that does cause its
own sets of constraints.
Would still be better if the US had built a bunch more nuclear
reactors, but my assumption has often been that there are
limits to how much it could be expanded in the US given those
constraints.
xethos wrote 4 hours 0 min ago:
> a lot of the nuclear reactors are running at like 80%
capacity.
This is presumably intentional. Beyond longevity, being able
to shift one plant to 0 and take up the load across other
plants allows for continued uptime even with a plant down (or
just below capacity).
> it's hard to make the whole thing profitable
Considering France had the second-cheapest electicity for
industrial use in the EU (in 2015, the most recent date from
Wikipedia), this feels more regulatory-bassed than a properly
fair shot at "Look how expensive nuclear is"
rtpg wrote 1 hour 49 min ago:
> This is presumably intentional
It's intentional in that people are making decisions to do
things, but the people running the power plants really
would rather run at much higher capacity
I get what you're saying, but the line of comfort for these
plants is above where it's at. I think the target is like
90% or something?
> Considering France had the second-cheapest electicity for
industrial use in the EU (in 2015, the most recent date
from Wikipedia), this feels more regulatory-bassed than a
properly fair shot at "Look how expensive nuclear is"
Well... the State is present to make the whole thing work.
This isn't a bad thing per se, though I think it goes
against some US narratives of "well if the state didn't put
in a bunch of regulations then nuclear would just be
everywhere".
It's more I guess a point about how there's unlikely to be
magical economies of scale that make this whole thing work
out.
And the industrial use electricity point goes hand in hand
with the reactor usage levels: there's a lot of electricity
that EDF would like to sell but have few buyers for! It's a
buyer's market!
I like nuclear stuff in general, just think it's worth
being clear eyed that nuclear power generation has Real
Problems that even full state and societal buy in didn't
solve in France's case. Though they did get cheap power for
trains etc from the deal, so not like France's situation is
bad by any stretch of the imagination.
potato3732842 wrote 9 hours 12 min ago:
> 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. You don't get to be sloppy and shortsighted and then
sail off into the sunset without consequences.
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 (IMO it's a miracle we're discussing this now and
not in 2002).
Behaving that way isn't socially/politically sustainable and it
doesn't take a genius to figure it out.
PeaceTed wrote 7 hours 43 min ago:
Humans think on a scale of seconds, minutes, hours, and days.
Nature operates at a scale of years, decades, centuries, and
millennia. This mismatch is our biggest problem.
AuthAuth wrote 9 hours 48 min ago:
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.
erikpukinskis wrote 8 hours 44 min ago:
âTheirâ coal emissions
hammock wrote 8 hours 45 min ago:
Not counting the gobi desert , China is only 5x the size of Texas so
itâs nothing to sneeze at
nitwit005 wrote 9 hours 8 min ago:
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.
geysersam wrote 9 hours 17 min ago:
This is propaganda. It's impossible to take this comment in good
faith
voxelghost wrote 9 hours 17 min ago:
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.
GenerocUsername wrote 8 hours 54 min ago:
Maybe the rest of the world should stop doing their manufacturing
in china.
miroljub wrote 8 hours 47 min ago:
It's called China, not china.
ben_w wrote 8 hours 38 min ago:
If we're going to pick nits, I'm fairly sure most of the
Chinese population don't speak English, making it neither China
nor china but ä¸å人æ°å
񆆫
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Eng...
lbrito wrote 9 hours 22 min ago:
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.
AuthAuth wrote 8 hours 13 min ago:
I couldnt care less what their per captia emissions are they have
1.5b people. Accumulated is about the same as the EU and will very
soon overtake the US.
jurip wrote 1 hour 55 min ago:
EU isn't a country, it's a union of 27 countries with their
separate legislatures. I live in Finland, a country of five
million people. According to your math I think I'm allowed to
basically burn a lake of oil every day, right?
whoevercares wrote 9 hours 10 min ago:
It is 8.89 China vs 14 according to
URI [1]: https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-...
throwawaymaths wrote 9 hours 13 min ago:
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)
8ytecoder wrote 8 hours 29 min ago:
US: 335M / 5,000M ton / 15 ton
Indonesia: 275M / 650M ton / 2.3 ton
Pakistan: 240M / 225M ton / 1 ton
Nigeria: 220M / 110M ton / 0.5 ton
Brazil: 215M / 475M ton / 2.2 ton
I can go on and on about the countries that are emitting less
than the US.
People and animals live in areas that are liveable. So countries
near the equator and fertile countries will always be more
populous. So how else do you propose we compare countries? Which
are themselves mostly arbitrary lines as far as the earth is
concerned - so why chunk by countries? It has to be per person
right?
amalcon wrote 8 hours 52 min ago:
The earth also doesn't care about national borders, so why are
national numbers more useful in this regard?
ben_w wrote 8 hours 46 min ago:
Governments have a lot of control over things within their
borders, and are held responsible when bad things happen within
them.
malshe wrote 9 hours 0 min ago:
I am with you on this one. I have seen people making similar
arguments about plastic dumped in the oceans where at least until
about a decade ago China was well ahead of every nation. The
oceans don't care about the per capita plastic polluting them.
throwawaymaths wrote 8 hours 43 min ago:
Yeah currently the biggest source of oceanic plastic is
phillipines IIRC
mtmickush wrote 9 hours 6 min ago:
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?
ben_w wrote 8 hours 44 min ago:
> Why should an individual in the US be allowed to release more
CO2 emissions than an individual in China?
The lack of a single world government is why.
Agreements between nations are only enforced by honour, and
while that's more than nothing, it's not great.
The practical outcome of this is that who is "allowed" to do
anything is dynamic, and who may do something the most can be
inverted extremely quickly.
GenerocUsername wrote 8 hours 55 min ago:
Yes thats right.
jacobolus wrote 9 hours 15 min ago:
Chinese COâ 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.)
cma wrote 8 hours 56 min ago:
China was exiting poverty and heavily industrializing during that
period, along with building up massive amounts of infrastructure
that could save some emissions over time, though of course also
things like coal plants are included in the infrastructure
numbers. But if we look at absolute instead of per-capita for
some odd reason, an aspect to also look at is that a lot more of
those CO2 emissions are from China manufacturing for the US and
the world than vice versa.
If we focus on rates of growth, China is building much more solar
and nuclear than the US per-capita. And they don't have as much
available domestic gas which with shorter carbon chains makes
much less CO2, and that's the big problem. The US has twice as
many natural gas reserves as China, with 1/4 the population, so,
post-dissemination of fracking technology, that's largely down to
geographical luck.
There's going to be big spikes in data center energy consumption
in both countries. It's still somewhat marginal at the moment at
a little over 4% here and less there but it is going to be a main
driver of energy consumption growth going forward.
Banning China from leading nodes may result in doubling or more
their consumption in this area as a direct US policy outcome.
whoevercares wrote 9 hours 5 min ago:
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 Chinaâs per capita
growth for most of the past two decades
hmm37 wrote 9 hours 8 min ago:
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.
URI [1]: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-just-p...
jacobolus wrote 8 hours 55 min ago:
That would be great. I was looking at
URI [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
ben_w wrote 8 hours 55 min ago:
Much as I wish to be optimistic, one year does not a trend
make. As per the link:
The shallow decline in 2015 and 2016 was due to a slump that
followed a round of stimulus measures, while zero-Covid
controls caused a sharper fall in 2022.
We might be on the right path, but also the very rapid
decarbonisation of primary energy and transport may be
overwhelmed by growth in other sectors like cement, metal oxide
reduction, or beef.
(Or not, there's at least theoretical paths to make those
examples better, this is just meant to moderate hope rather
than to deny it entirely).
vasco wrote 9 hours 11 min ago:
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 9 hours 10 min ago:
Air conditioning is a relatively small part of global COâ
emissions (3%); you should be more worried about heating.
I would expect air conditioning to also be among the easier
energy uses to match with solar power as we go forward. Better
building design and more efficient AC devices also make a huge
difference.
vasco wrote 9 hours 9 min ago:
The point is about quality of life.
ben_w wrote 8 hours 49 min ago:
There's many ways to achieve improved quality of life. Our
fancy-insulated new German house with triple glazing and a
heat pump used an average of 250 W grid power last month,
despite our PV being (1) a Balkonkraftwerk and therefore
only 800 W peak, (2) summer's over, lots of clouds now, and
(3) in a very sub-optimal location due to a builder's skip.
(Still, the neighbours have trimmed the hedge last weekend
and the skip has now goneâ¦)
vasco wrote 1 hour 50 min ago:
There's easy ways and hard ways, the point is a country
which has done the easy way cannot tell another country
with less impact per capita they need to do it the hard
way before cleaning up its act. Or you can but you're
huge hypocrites.
jacobolus wrote 9 hours 4 min ago:
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.
kvirani wrote 9 hours 15 min ago:
Great question. Let's indeed make it a point of discussion then.
I'd like to know too.
mulmen wrote 9 hours 20 min ago:
Per capita emissions arenât relevant to climate impact. Neither
are relative emissions between countries. This is a global issue.
umanwizard wrote 8 hours 47 min ago:
Per capita emissions are relevant in the sense that if China
broke into ten separate countries tomorrow, with each new country
maintaining their current level of emissions, the effect on the
planet would be the same even though an entity called âChinaâ
is no longer at the top of the leaderboard.
There is some per capita carbon emissions budget such that if
each human on earth stayed within that budget, climate change
could be mitigated[0]. The average Chinese person exceeds that
budget, but does so by significantly less than the average
American. So the average American is more at fault for climate
change than the average Chinese person is.
Of course, your second claim, that this is a global issue, is
correct. But if we solved the global issue in a fair way, China
would still emit a few times more CO2 than the US.
0: âMitigatedâ rather than totally solved, because to go back
to pre-industrial temperatures the budget would have to be
negative. But letâs say weâre talking about staying within 2C
or some similar goal.
vkou wrote 8 hours 56 min ago:
> Per capita emissions arenât relevant to climate impact
They aren't relevant to the climate, but they are relevant to how
much energy and wealth you allow each person to have.
Does a person in China deserve to have less energy or wealth than
a person in America?
the-smug-one wrote 8 hours 59 min ago:
Per capita emissions are relevant, because it shows how much each
separate country needs to improve in a relative manner. Absolute
emissions doesn't matter to what each state needs to do.
mulmen wrote 8 hours 22 min ago:
We all breathe the same air. Every state needs to do
everything it can.
vanviegen wrote 8 hours 59 min ago:
No, but if some people are outputting way more CO2 than others,
these are the ones we should be focussing on first.
AuthAuth wrote 8 hours 9 min ago:
Yes China is outputting way more C02 than the next 6 biggest
pollutors combined. Lets focus on them first. They are the only
ones not reducing their emission growth.
api wrote 8 hours 16 min ago:
[1] The US is fairly high but below Canada, Russia, and many
Middle Eastern countries. US emissions have also consistently
fallen for the past 25 years or so.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_car...
mulmen wrote 8 hours 24 min ago:
Serialization is a losing strategy here. âFocusâ is
irrelevant. We need fundamental shifts in energy production.
dumbledoren wrote 9 hours 30 min ago:
Their emissions are the emissions of Western companies for whom they
are doing manufacturing.
benjiro wrote 9 hours 8 min ago:
> 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.
throwawaymaths wrote 9 hours 10 min ago:
You should check the stats on that, it is not the case.
quacked wrote 9 hours 23 min ago:
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 9 hours 10 min ago:
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 9 hours 0 min ago:
These are 3 relevant data sets from Our World in Data:
"Per capita consumption-based COâ emissions" (emissions
adjusted for imports/exports) [1] "Imported or exported COâ
emissions per capita" (shows the effects of imports/exports
alone, as tons) [2] "Share of COâ emissions embedded in
trade" (shows the effects of imports/exports alone, as
percentage of total)
URI [1]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per...
URI [2]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/imported-or-exporte...
URI [3]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-co2-embedded-...
kwanbix wrote 9 hours 24 min ago:
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 9 hours 16 min ago:
So what? I'm sure I personally consume much less than your
country of 40 million
kwanbix wrote 7 hours 36 min ago:
The point is China consumes a lot, for the rest of the world
and for itself.
Was pretty obvious, but I wrote it down for you as you seem to
be having trouble understanding the concept.
mliker wrote 9 hours 42 min ago:
would you prefer zero trees being added?
moron4hire wrote 9 hours 28 min ago:
Liking waffles!= Hating pancakes.
munk-a wrote 9 hours 34 min ago:
Of course not - but it is quite fair to examine articles like this
with a critical eye given all the greenwashing that takes place.
Mistletoe wrote 9 hours 42 min ago:
Arenât they bringing on incredible amounts of solar we could only
dream about?
Edit: for the downvoters
URI [1]: https://gemini.google.com/app/6da2be1502b764f1
munk-a wrote 9 hours 35 min ago:
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 9 hours 14 min ago:
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.
URI [1]: https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/15418989
chrisweekly wrote 8 hours 47 min ago:
Given the goal is to introduce trees to prevent
desertification, in this case the relative benefits of old
growth are irrelevant.
kulahan wrote 9 hours 38 min ago:
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 9 hours 11 min ago:
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:
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Chin...
pksebben wrote 9 hours 58 min ago:
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.
jillesvangurp wrote 10 hours 2 min ago:
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.
aarondf wrote 9 hours 37 min ago:
This video [1] and his whole channel are a great binge for this
topic.
No nonsense, an actual practitioner, and not very "YouTubey"
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qwshdtijFY
profsummergig wrote 9 hours 51 min ago:
Do you know why the mounds with half-moon shapes? Why is it more
effective than simply digging a circular hole in the ground?
jillesvangurp wrote 9 hours 21 min ago:
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.
nkmnz wrote 9 hours 42 min ago:
Same effect for half the work. Look up the videos on youtube, it's
manual labor on very hard ground.
0cf8612b2e1e wrote 9 hours 38 min ago:
Why is it manual? If I had a mission to plant millions of trees,
I am going to invest in a ditch witch.
blitzar wrote 12 min ago:
local labour is cheaper
WorldPeas wrote 9 hours 26 min ago:
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 9 hours 4 min ago:
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.
WorldPeas wrote 3 hours 46 min ago:
again this is in a country that may have little to no debt
infrastructure, so no way to take out a proper loan to buy
the equipment, and many hoops to import it. The fact that
it's small isn't the matter, it's that it's specialized. A
used/legacy backhoe or skid steer maybe, but even if you
can afford it, there's no tractor supply co or home depot,
you are likely handling lading the thing yourself
taeric wrote 8 hours 43 min ago:
I think the basic trencher would almost certainly still
count as manual labor? Nobody is expecting that they are
out there digging with bare hands.
jillesvangurp wrote 12 min ago:
> Nobody is expecting that they are out there digging
with bare hands.
Most of these ditches are dug out by the locals with
shovels. We're talking subsistence farmers here in areas
where people are more or less trying to live off the
land. Their hands and some primitive tools is all that's
there.
seb1204 wrote 9 hours 55 min ago:
Any YouTube playlist that you can share?
jillesvangurp wrote 9 hours 7 min ago:
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 [1] - China Buried Tons
of Dead Plants Under the Desert Sand [2] - Green Gold: Regreening
the Desert | John D. Liu [3] There are way more. One channel that I
might call [4] . 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.
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbBdIG--b58
URI [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev8DsPH_82Y
URI [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3nR3G9jboc
URI [4]: https://www.youtube.com/@MossyEarth
legitster wrote 10 hours 28 min ago:
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.
RobotToaster wrote 10 hours 5 min ago:
China was already extensively deforested in the Ming and Qing
dynasties.
holoduke wrote 9 hours 37 min ago:
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
ivan_gammel wrote 10 hours 15 min ago:
According to WWF, there was some targeted effort on reforestation and
sustainable forest management in Russia, which they claim to have
assisted.
mistrial9 wrote 10 hours 23 min ago:
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..
trhway wrote 10 hours 38 min ago:
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.
ivan_gammel wrote 10 hours 18 min ago:
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?
Thatâs fake news. Didnât happen and wonât happen, unless you
mean just some bottled water.
trhway wrote 9 hours 58 min ago:
>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 : [1] while the total
resulting loss is [2] "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 COâ emissions."
>But export of Baikal fresh water? Thatâs fake news. Didnât
happen and wonât happen [3] in Russian, that another
waterpipeline - from river Ob' was approved at some Russian
Parliament "roundtable on strategic projects with China and
Kazakhstan". [4] and there were strong leaks, not officially
dispelled, that Baikal water was raised during the most recent
Putin/Xi meeting.
URI [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1059300/russia-refores...
URI [2]: https://www.globalforestwatch.org/dashboards/country/RUS/?...
URI [3]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/07/parched-chin...
URI [4]: https://topwar.ru/159671-bajkal-xxi-veka-druzhba-druzhboj-...
ivan_gammel wrote 7 hours 35 min ago:
Regarding your Global Forest Watch source I recommend to look
below the tagline. The numbers that you picked have very specific
meaning and the same page says that most of the loss (ca.75%) was
due to wildfires and it grew more forest than it was lost due to
logging. When including the loss for wildfires, the total balance
is negligibly negative.
Regarding you Guardian and Topwar links, you are citing the
sources that speculate about rumors about some science fiction
projects. Russia does not export water from Baikal or Ob River
and wonât export it.
trhway wrote 5 hours 27 min ago:
>Regarding you Guardian and Topwar links, you are citing the
sources that speculate about rumors about some science fiction
projects. Russia does not export water from Baikal or Ob River
and wonât export it.
Official state news [1] "Moscow invited Bejing to discuss fresh
water transfer project from Russia to China - stated the
Russian Minister of Agriculture"
and the further description of the proposed project is exactly
the second project described in the topwar link.
URI [1]: https://ria.ru/20160503/1425318933.html
cpursley wrote 9 hours 9 min ago:
Kind reminder - this is not reddit.
trhway wrote 9 hours 5 min ago:
>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 (an
expression of the Russian propaganda point that Ukraine isn't a
sovereign independent state) when referring to Ukraine?
cpursley wrote 8 hours 12 min ago:
Well, they arenât. Never have been and never will be.
Geopolitics is a ruthless game and those in the middle
sometimes get crushed. Which is why you generally want
natural borders (mountains, coast, etc).
trhway wrote 6 hours 19 min ago:
>Well, they arenât. Never have been
Like Ukranians a number of nations - for example
Hungarians, Chezh, Finnish, Latvians, Estonians, etc. - for
centuries didn't have their own state and were parts of
larger empires and got their own states only relatively
recently.
Like any other, the Russian propaganda thrives on people's
ignorance. In this case "Ukranian people and Ukraine don't
exist and never have existed, it is just an inferior kind
of Russians on historically Russian territory". That is why
nor Russian textbooks nor wide Russian info space never
mention the 1651 book by French engineer D'Beauplan
"Description of Ukraine, a Province of the Kingdom of
Poland situated between Moskovia and Transilvania" where he
clearly describes in detail a separate Ukrainian ethnicity
living on their own separate territory (which is pretty
close to the territory of modern Ukraine. Also note that
Russia din't even exist back then, it was just a "Moscovia"
duchy).
>and never will be. Geopolitics is a ruthless game and
those in the middle sometimes get crushed. Which is why you
generally want natural borders (mountains, coast, etc).
The same applies to all the above mentioned nations, and
this is why they joined NATO, and why Ukraine is trying to.
cpursley wrote 10 hours 25 min ago:
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.
coliveira wrote 10 hours 35 min ago:
I don't think they're giving away the timber. It is a commercial
exchange like any other.
trhway wrote 10 hours 26 min ago:
Yes, it is a massive sale of natural resources with huge discounts
in exchange for the war support.
olalonde wrote 9 hours 31 min ago:
What "war support"? China trades with Russia, as it does with
Ukraine. It doesn't support a side in particular.
trhway wrote 9 hours 11 min ago:
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: [1] "Chinese Foreign Minister
Wang Yi told the European Unionâs top diplomat that Beijing
canât accept Russia losing its war against Ukraine..."
URI [1]: https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/04/europe/china-ukraine-eu...
cpursley wrote 8 hours 15 min ago:
Him or some other pointed out to some important EU person
that if they (China, an industrial powerhouse) were actually
supporting Russian war efforts, the war would already be
over.
themafia wrote 10 hours 19 min ago:
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.
cpursley wrote 10 hours 24 min ago:
Source for the discounts? (reddit and x are not a sources btw)
Freedom2 wrote 10 hours 41 min ago:
Does this mean that you can drive in the forest for an entire day and
still be in the forest?
supportengineer wrote 10 hours 22 min ago:
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.
palata wrote 8 hours 16 min ago:
Well if you drive slowly enough, you can do that in my backyard :D
coliveira wrote 10 hours 35 min ago:
This is common in Brazil.
iagooar wrote 10 hours 38 min ago:
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 10 hours 19 min ago:
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.
PeaceTed wrote 7 hours 25 min ago:
Pretty much. Try driving from Perth to Broome in a day. It is
about 24hours of straight driving and it is still a good 10 hours
to the boarder.
iagooar wrote 8 hours 46 min ago:
Fun fact is: I heard Texans saying it only a few weeks back. Now
I get what you meant ;)
aiauthoritydev wrote 10 hours 47 min ago:
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.
profsummergig wrote 8 hours 39 min ago:
India doesn't do it in an organized way though.
You'll read about some 70 year old woman/man in an obscure village
who's reforested thousands of acres on their own, or resuscitated a
lake (e.g. the lake guy in Bengaluru).
But there's little effort to harness their knowledge in a systematic
way, add knowledge from others into the knowledge bank, do peer
review, and then systematically dispense the knowledge in the form of
a kit to environmentalists and bureaucrats across the country. China
did this, and that's why they're so successful.
PeaceTed wrote 8 hours 16 min ago:
Yeah another example of the saying "India is a disappointment to
both optimists and pessimists".
torginus wrote 9 hours 8 min ago:
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.
jkestner wrote 6 hours 13 min ago:
Like how mobile payments took off in Africa early because they
weren't held back by existing infrastructure.
cyberax wrote 10 hours 0 min ago:
> 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.
gamblor956 wrote 3 hours 43 min ago:
The scientific research says that drought resistance is due to the
increased vegetation growth. [1]
www.igb.illinois.edu/article/stronger-drought-resistance-urban-vege
tation-due-higher-temperature-co2-and-reduced-o3
URI [1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S098...
kulahan wrote 9 hours 37 min ago:
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?).
Terr_ wrote 3 hours 57 min ago:
Hmmm, separately of plant-types, I wonder if there may be a
distinction here between how a surge in individual growth doesn't
necessarily translate to a surge in the forest.
Imagine a higher CO2 concentration allows a tree to reach
maturity a whole +25% faster, taking 16y instead of 20y. However
its happening in an established forest, already bounded by
mountains, rivers, etc, where mature trees sustain for another
100y before they finally die off and take 10y to decompose,
opening the spot for a replacement.
In that case, the number of simultaneous trees doesn't go up very
much, because the main effect is to reduce "downtime". The
"duty-cycle" for a tree-sized patch of ground goes from having a
mature tree ~77% of the time to ~79%.
mitthrowaway2 wrote 4 hours 6 min ago:
So, it turns out that there are two types of plants: those whose
growth is rate-limited by available CO2, and those whose aren't,
as the latter evolved a more efficient pathway during a previous
era of low CO2 concentrations.
So depending on which kinds of plants, you can both be right.
deadbabe wrote 9 hours 53 min ago:
So why are the forests growing faster
Spooky23 wrote 5 hours 32 min ago:
Climate patterns are changing. My kids will retire with the cheap
old farmland we bought that Iâm planting black walnuts on.
Upstate NY was ideal maple syrup production territory for years.
Now, weâve changed from USDA Zone 5 to 6, so the region will be
more like western Virginia in 20 years.
cyberax wrote 9 hours 40 min ago:
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:
URI [1]: https://e360.yale.edu/features/greening-drylands-carbon-...
galagawinkle489 wrote 6 hours 29 min ago:
The atmosphere has so far barely changed in temperature
compared to natural variations in temperature over time that
had smaller and lesser effects than the effect we are seeing.
The abnormally rapid rise in CO2 levels we are seeing is
unusual and accords better with the unusualness of rapid global
greening. It isn't climate change that is causing it. It is
CO2, directly.
navigate8310 wrote 10 hours 20 min ago:
Doesn't that put pressure on the cities itself especially the
peripheral counties to pave way for housing and concrete roads?
devnullbrain wrote 9 hours 50 min ago:
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.
worik wrote 6 hours 56 min ago:
> Yes, and it's a good thing
It is. I have seen the data
But I live in a rural area of New Zealand and I also see how
people moving onto farm land greatly increases tree cover (not
forrest) and biodiversity, I assume because people plant
gardens, and closely husband them
In New Zealand farmers are grossly damaging to the environment.
They clear everything and plant mono cultures and treat water as
exhaustable and rivers as waste dumps
So yes people in cities is a good thing, but people in rural
areas are good, to
mc32 wrote 9 hours 39 min ago:
Guess it depends on whether subsistence living is more resource
intensive than urban living where on average urbanites own more
possessions per capita.
roncesvalles wrote 10 hours 17 min ago:
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 10 hours 11 min ago:
That is too costly for cities that have cheap and abandoned
agricultural land waiting to be deforested and build upon.
nine_k wrote 5 hours 43 min ago:
The time / distance of commute is a natural limiting factor.
mulmen wrote 9 hours 6 min ago:
What does âdeforestedâ mean? Isnât agricultural land
already deforested?
renewiltord wrote 10 hours 54 min ago:
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.
oreally wrote 5 hours 2 min ago:
Have an upvote. Site has too much FUD brigading for any positives on
non-western aligned countries.
nitwit005 wrote 9 hours 0 min ago:
> Much of Europe used to be forest. It just all got whacked in the
few centuries prior to today.
The deforestation goes back much further than that. Europe
experienced significant deforestation in the middle ages. It was a
major issue for many countries long before industrialism.
renewiltord wrote 5 hours 35 min ago:
Yes, all that's happened is that we declared that morality started
on Apr 22 2016. Slash and burn, cut and grow. Three hundred years
from now, when the result is massive prosperity we can pontificate
to whomever is cutting trees then.
nitwit005 wrote 5 hours 20 min ago:
You're not managing to be coherent I'm afraid.
renewiltord wrote 3 hours 51 min ago:
Try an LLM. Sadly even an 8B model will exceed your powers of
comprehension.
evoseven wrote 9 hours 48 min ago:
You are wrong. In Gaule, most of the country was farmland. Wood
consumption was huge.
sarchertech wrote 10 hours 37 min ago:
> 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. Itâs much faster
and cheaper to skip a few hundred years ahead by importing equipment.
ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote 9 hours 59 min ago:
Checking in on the relative wealth of the countries who are only
just now developing
maerF0x0 wrote 10 hours 57 min ago:
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.
conductr wrote 10 hours 19 min ago:
> 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 :)
legitster wrote 10 hours 25 min ago:
> 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 9 hours 27 min ago:
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.
dj_gitmo wrote 10 hours 41 min ago:
> 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.
IncreasePosts wrote 10 hours 41 min ago:
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.
smallnix wrote 10 hours 55 min ago:
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
vondur wrote 10 hours 23 min ago:
Iâd heard that project wasnât going so well. The trees
werenât really suited to the areas where they were planted, and
many died off. I suppose even if only a small percentage survive,
itâs still better than desert.
FooBarWidget wrote 10 hours 19 min ago:
They had setbacks for sure, but they learned from them and
continuously adjusted their methods.
xhkkffbf wrote 10 hours 43 min ago:
I've seen some neat videos on YouTube that sound impressive. Are
they impressive in real life? Anyone have any personal experience?
yesbut wrote 1 day ago:
finally some good news.
DIR <- back to front page