Tree-Planting Schemes Are Just Creating Tree Cemeteries 141
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE World News: Thousands of cylindrical plastic tree guards line the grassland here, so uniform that, from a distance, it looks like a war memorial. This open space at the edge of King's Lynn, a quiet market town in the east of England, was supposed to be a new carbon sink for Norfolk, offering 6,000 trees to tackle the climate crisis. The problem is that almost all of the trees that the guards were supposed to protect have died. Experts have told VICE World News that not only were they planted at the wrong time of year, but that they were planted on species-rich grassland that was already carbon negative, which has now been mostly destroyed by tree planting. Environmentalists also point out that the trees were planted so shallowly into the ground that most were unlikely to ever take root. By planting the seedlings in April, instead of in winter or early spring, they never had a good chance of survival anyway.
A pledge to tackle the climate crisis has turned into the opposite of carbon offsetting -- all using council funding (they declined to tell VICE World News how much). "Councils don't have a lot of money," Dr Charlie Gardner, a conservation scientist and local climate activist, told me as he showed me through the site. "There was a lot of good that could have been done with that money. But it's clear to me that doing good wasn't ever an objective, it was just seen to be doing something. That's what makes me sad about the whole thing."
A number of regional and national governments have announced enormous tree planting schemes in the past few years as momentum has built to tackle the climate crisis -- and many of them haven't gone to plan. Hackney Council's partnership with charity Trees for Cities, which was funded by Coca Cola's company Honest Organic, was criticized in 2020 when it appeared that most, if not all, of the 4,000 trees planted had died. Environmentalists have criticized Pakistan's "10 billion trees" project for being an expensive waste of resources and Egypt, which will host the next UN climate conference, claims it will plant 100 million trees across the country. "There are no quick fixes with this crisis," Dr Charlie Gardner, a conservation scientist and local climate activist, said. "Simply planting trees isn't the answer. If we want these trees to have a real impact, they've got to still be alive in 100 years and that means it's a 100-year commitment, not a 1-day commitment."
"The most important thing is to stop burning fossil fuels. The second most important thing is conserve the nature we already have. Trying to create new nature to absorb our fossil fuel emissions is way down the list of priorities."
A pledge to tackle the climate crisis has turned into the opposite of carbon offsetting -- all using council funding (they declined to tell VICE World News how much). "Councils don't have a lot of money," Dr Charlie Gardner, a conservation scientist and local climate activist, told me as he showed me through the site. "There was a lot of good that could have been done with that money. But it's clear to me that doing good wasn't ever an objective, it was just seen to be doing something. That's what makes me sad about the whole thing."
A number of regional and national governments have announced enormous tree planting schemes in the past few years as momentum has built to tackle the climate crisis -- and many of them haven't gone to plan. Hackney Council's partnership with charity Trees for Cities, which was funded by Coca Cola's company Honest Organic, was criticized in 2020 when it appeared that most, if not all, of the 4,000 trees planted had died. Environmentalists have criticized Pakistan's "10 billion trees" project for being an expensive waste of resources and Egypt, which will host the next UN climate conference, claims it will plant 100 million trees across the country. "There are no quick fixes with this crisis," Dr Charlie Gardner, a conservation scientist and local climate activist, said. "Simply planting trees isn't the answer. If we want these trees to have a real impact, they've got to still be alive in 100 years and that means it's a 100-year commitment, not a 1-day commitment."
"The most important thing is to stop burning fossil fuels. The second most important thing is conserve the nature we already have. Trying to create new nature to absorb our fossil fuel emissions is way down the list of priorities."
missing info (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:missing info (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. The title and focus should be "Poorly-Implemented Tree-Planting Schemes Are [failing]". Doing something, especially hastily, w/o thinking it through and w/o having the appropriate people, with the appropriate knowledge, working on it is often worse than doing nothing. In this case, trees shouldn't have even been planted:
Experts have told VICE World News that not only were they planted at the wrong time of year, but that they were planted on species-rich grassland that was already carbon negative, which has now been mostly destroyed by tree planting.
That they even planted the trees at the wring time of the year shows that whoever was in charge didn't know what they were doing, or didn't listen to people who did. Perhaps they just wanted to do *something* and/or be seen as doing something -- and (probably) get paid for it, of course.
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The shallow planting suggests that they were not in fact trying to succeed, but trying to fail. A seedling has a root some length. It is not rocket surgery to figure out you need a hole that deep.
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The shallow planting suggests that they were not in fact trying to succeed, but trying to fail.
A seedling has a root some length. It is not rocket surgery to figure out you need a hole that deep.
Or they simply didn't care if they succeeded / failed. Planting a tree properly takes more time and effort -- ...
and, of course, from Volunteers [wikipedia.org] we know that time is money
Chung Mee: Speed is important in business. Time is money.
Lawrence Bourne III: You said opium was money.
Chung Mee: Money is Money.
Lawrence Bourne III: Well then, what is time again?
Re:missing info (Score:4, Interesting)
Attempting to fail seems implausible. Indiference to success somewhat less so, but I'd be surprised if there wasnt at least SOME intention to succeed, even if half arsedly. Don't confuse incompetence for malice.
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Not confusing these two is usually one of my guidelines, too.
But the regular incompetence (which I would assume for myself as for any politician as a default) would be: I don't know how to plant a tree. I have to ask someone how to do it (or watch a youtube video) and will get information on how to properly plant a tree.
But here we either had someone who THOUGHT they knew how to plant trees (a politician? I don't think anyone would feel ashamed for admitting to not know how to do that. And it's the job of m
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Don't confuse incompetence for malice.
Don't mistake malice for incompetence, either. (I assume your word choices were mistakes, though. If you wanted to use the word "confuse" then you'd want "with" and not "for", because of the meaning of the word confuse.)
It's not a mystery how you get tree farming projects to work out. One of them is that you put them where they make sense. Another is that you let the trees get big enough before you abandon them. If they failed at either of these things then they are at best incompetent, but more likely mali
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That is the lesson.
And it should just be the default starting point when dealing with anything complex. First, do no harm. Another great example is in the stories that Allan Savory gave in his TED talk.
How to fight desertification and reverse climate change (NOTE: Statements in this talk have been challenged by scientists worki [ted.com]
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Tree planting should only be done with "native" trees, and unfortunately this isn't what happens in most parts of the world. Only trees that are cheap, male (so they don't flower or grow fruit, to attract animals) and "pretty" are used.
The way to solve this problem ultimately is by focusing on using native trees and other native "soil-fixation" vegetation to the climate, alternating between clusters of male and female trees (perhaps even designing it so that the female trees are grown over brambles (eg rasp
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Tree planting should only be done with "native" trees
Nope. Native trees are dying out in many locations due to AGW. Blindly planting natives is as bad as blindly not planting natives. They may literally no longer be viable in an area due to climate change.
I'm not someone that has done a lot of research on the subject.
We know
Re:missing info (Score:5, Interesting)
I spent 3 years of my childhood on an army base that was taken over the the government after it was strip logged to the point where it turned into a desert. WW II era pics show tents and buildings surrounded by a sandy dust bowl. Someone started tree planting probably 20 years before I lived there and parts of the base had trees in perfect rows but large parts were still sandy. Every year the whole base shut down for a day and everyone (including the students) planted trees. Many of those trees didn't survive but enough did that the next year it was easier to bring life to the area.
Re: missing info (Score:2)
The summary is clear: there have been "a number" of tree planting schemes and "many" have not gone to plan.
So the success rate is (all - many) / (a number).
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The summary is clear: there have been "a number" of tree planting schemes and "many" have not gone to plan.
So the success rate is (all - many) / (a number).
This is Science, don't bring Math into it -- geesh. :-)
[And the other STEM letters will get jealous.]
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In my location, almost any planted tree survives unless cut down.
You have to plant the wrong kind of tree in an unforgiving location in order to fail. If you plant an appropriate tree species in bad location, you get a smaller-than-average tree. If you plant an inappropriate tree species in a good location, you get a smaller-than-average tree.
In this case, some idiots did not actually 'plant' the trees, as it says in the summary: ' the trees were planted so shallowly into the ground that most were unlikely
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This was an intentional failure, a passive-aggressive waste of the trees.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity -- Heinlein, Churchill, et al [wikipedia.org]
Ask any homeowner to plant new trees in their yard and almost all of them will do some portion of it incorrectly. Either planting the wrong species, at the wrong time of year, too close together, too near existing structures, incorrect sunlight considerations, incorrect or lack of pruning, etc.
We planted trees that looked cute when they were six feet tall, but when they grew to thirty feet and started c
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Another feature is that it is politically essential to involve everybody possible in the operation so they feel they have some ownership of it. This results sometimes in young schoolchildren small enough not to be able to push a spade into the ground trying to plant. You would hope th
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Planting a seedling shallower than the length of the root is not adequately explained by mere stupidity.
The simplest answer is that the group planting the trees were not uniformly mentally disabled, but instead that they didn't actually want the trees in that location. It is nothing at all like the mistake of planting a tree too close to a house.
Re:missing info (Score:4, Insightful)
Stop saying the people involved are incompetent. That is willfully ignorant, which is a kind of incompetence itself. The people involved are successfully running away with the money. They're not incompetent. They are evil.
Being unwilling to recognize evil when you see it only leads to a stupid idea of what evil is. Then people get all twisted over ideological horseshit that was all made up to distract us from reality anyway. Look at actual actions and consequences, that's how you figure out what people are.
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I agree. There are still tons of people getting rich, or usually richer, by making climate change worse. These people are evil, and no other view on them will accomplish anything.
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There are many many tree planting programs that were succesful. Israel is known for doing
This was caused entirely by incompetence. A key sign of incompetence is that it is done by a local government. Local governments are almost always incompetent, particularly small town. Despite what American GOP believes, small government tends to be failures.
Why?
small talent pool - best person in a small town is average in a big city
small interest in politics - nobody cares enough to learn which person running for e
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Humans and businesses are generally selfish, and profit optimizing by nature. So if there is a more profitable behavior it will be chosen, even if it has zero or negative environmental value. It not easy to figure out how to write rules that will cover all of those possibilities.
I think there are situations where tree planting IS a very effective way to spend enviro
So doing something wrong won't reap benefits? (Score:2)
So yeah, good deeds are only effective if you do them well.
Also, tree planting is REALLY important for reasons beyo
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Something that religious people misunderstand is that their scripture basically made a "god will punish you" fear for pretty much every uncooked food toxicity. This is why we know that eating raw pork is a bad idea, this is why eating raw shellfish is a bad idea. 6000 years ago, people would go "I want to eat the thing, it looks tasty" but not know how to cook it. Hence religious stories were written around inventing reasons why people got sick and died when they ate those.
Today, and for the last 70 years a
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The less often people are exposed to things, the less tolerance they have.
In the wild, predators always eat raw meat and some scavengers eat meat that has been sitting around a while.
That's also why people who live in developed countries with good hygiene standards generally get sick when they go on holiday to a developing country.
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It isn't that hard to properly cook pork to prevent trichinosis. Our ancestors weren't that stupid. Give them a little credit, eh?
It's one thing to know that cleanliness will prevent illness, and it's another thing to have the resources for cleanliness. If you don't have decent soap and hot running water, it's very hard to avoid cross-contamination in a kitchen. Just keeping certain things out of the kitchen completely makes it much safer under those conditions. It absolutely 100% made sense for desert dwellers without modern detergents to simply ban pork. The only benefit pigs really have over goats is that they can eat your feces. B
We know what we need to do (Score:3, Insightful)
We need to give up on prosperity Gospel and accept that the 20,000 people who on 50% of everything can't go on doing that. Then we need to divert those resources into a massive public works project to build out wind and solar farms globally. Well that's going on we need to give up our private automobiles and build walkable cities with public transportation and trains between them. This means no more suburbs and no more moving away from your problems and the urban blight that comes with them.
We know all this but we just don't want to do it. Cars get you laid. Billionaires are cool. And trains are lame.
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You just moved the money to different 20.000 people.
That much power and money in the hand of few will just get stolen.
Governments are also people, few people, people that are already stealing money left and right.
Sadly you have to make saving the planet actually profitable somehow if you want it done.
And it have to be on a individual, spread out level, rather than some super government that will try to force everyone into it and you will end with things exactly like the news.
I personally believe the best wa
Wood vs Plastic vs Global warming (Score:2)
I haven't seen any numbers, but I think it's an interesting perspective.
Limiting plastic is obviously good for the environment, but is it automatically better when it comes to reducing global warming also?
Here's a crazy idea (Score:2)
But you want there to be a ruling class. You're probably hoping or even thinking you're going to be a member but you still want the comfort of knowing somebody above you is in charge. Making decisions for you. And protecting you from something..
The reality is money is power. Absolute power corrupts. I don't think anyone w
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I vote we make you one of the first people to give up western level resource consumption.
No more computer. No more clean running water. No more ordering Chinese crap from Amazon. No more eating food brought to you from around the world. No more lights at night, heat in the winter and cooling in the summer.
You go first and let us know how it works out for you then the rest of us will have the data we need to apply the appropriate level of suffering to everyone else.
Thanks for volunteering because I'm sur
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I vote we make you one of the first people to give up western level resource consumption.
That won't help, tooly mctrollbag. We have to use about 1/2 the resources we are using or we're all doomed. What's especially stupid about your argument is that all we actually have to do is change the habits of the ultra wealthy. They are using most of the resources, and making the decisions that make the rest of us live more inefficiently. Here you are, cheering them on, despite the presence of their cock in your mouth, and their balls on your chin.
When did I say give up consumption? (Score:2)
Basically this is the one problem I don't k
Re:We know what we need to do (Score:4, Insightful)
We need to give up on prosperity Gospel
This strategy has always failed, and will always fail. There's no way to get people to give up their comfortable lifestyles en masse, and no way to get those who are trying to achieve prosperity to stop. Talking up conservation can help slow consumption a little, but only a little, and if that's your primary strategy you're going to fail.
The only way we're going to avoid a severe climate catastrophe is through technology, finding ways to create abundance for all while also reducing carbon emissions. We may also need to apply geoengineering to mitigate the worst of the climate damage while we build the technology we need. This strategy may also fail, but it at least has a chance of working. Yours does not.
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This strategy has always failed, and will always fail. There's no way to get people to give up their comfortable lifestyles en masse
It's called War.
That's not what prosperity Gospel is (Score:2)
There are millions of Americans who believe Donald Trump must be a genius businessman because he's wealthy and never questioned where the wealth came from. They don't know for example his grandfather ran whore houses and
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We need to give up on prosperity Gospel
This strategy has always failed, and will always fail. There's no way to get people to give up their comfortable lifestyles en masse, and no way to get those who are trying to achieve prosperity to stop.
Well, possibly. But the consequence of that is the end of the human race in the next two centuries or so. Unless conclusively proven, I refuse to believe this cannot be done.
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Yep, pretty much. Also, we need to change our lifestyles and that is where so many band together with those 20'000 against all reason.
Things done stupid often go wrong. News at 11. (Score:2)
Humans make mistakes and plenty of us are stupid as a brick, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that crap like this happens.
And what was the council doing financing something without any oversight?
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Likely scenario.
The alternative in my head is that they could have had someone who actually knows a thing or two about trees, but then the bean counters remembered that person would want to have some money for their time and expertise and decided that the presentation looked good so it'll probably be ok.
Yip (Score:2)
At least I got my selfie for Instagram (Score:2)
Didn't I look environmentally friendly on that day?
Everybody liked my pic.
Newer schemes (Score:2)
One day is about our limit (Score:2)
People can't really handle thinking 100 years in advance.
Except landscape gardeners. Maybe we should put them in charge.
The problem is right here (Score:2)
The problem is right here:
"This open space at the edge of King's Lynn, a quiet market town in the east of England, was supposed to be a new carbon sink for Norfolk, offering 6,000 trees to tackle the climate crisis"
What on earth is a quiet market town in the East of England doing, trying to 'tackle the climate crisis'? It has a hospital which is repeatedly in the headlines for poor performance. It has lots of deprivation and child poverty. Its education performance is at best mediocre. And all the Counc
Re: The problem is right here (Score:2)
Trees do not have to live 100 years to sink carbon (Score:2)
A common misconception is that a planted tree must live a hundred years to sink carbon. This is false. A tree sinks carbon the moment that it shows leaves. The sequestered carbon in the tree when grown can be sequestered in lumber. The lumber is, for all practical purposes, a cheap and practically useful carbon storage mechanism.
Generally speaking, as long as the trees are not merely burnt as fuel, nor simply cut down and left to rot (although this is less of a problem as it is prt of the natural forest cyc
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The tree planters aren't going to let you cut down the trees for use as a building material.
The wonderful thing about trees is that they, you know, grow. So you can cut down plenty as long as you keep planting new ones.
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A tree sinks carbon the moment that it shows leaves.
Yes, but for most species, a mature tree sinks much more carbon than a new one. That's because all growth occurs in the cambium, which is a thin layer beneath the bark (you might describe it as the last layer before the bark.) This obviously means that trees with larger diameter can perform more growth, and this is in fact what generally happens.
That's why if your goal is carbon reduction, trees aren't a very good crop. Bamboo makes much more sense, because it fixes the vast majority of its carbon in its fi
Easy answer (Score:2)
Plant trees
Harvest them
Bury the wood in old coal mines
Repeat
There would an obvious business model here if there were a carbon tax.
In every major metropolitan area in the US, we already have something like this.
Trees are planted and harvested.
They are turned into newsprint.
The newsprint eventually ends up in landfills, which is carbon sequestration for decades.
Um, what? (Score:2)
Since someone didn't do it right, we shouldn't do it at all?
I mean, I guess you're right - the money could have been pooled and put into real solutions, like nuclear power or CO2 scrubbing research.
But barring that, how about we just plant trees at the correct depth and time of year?
But it's clear to me that doing good wasn't ever an objective, it was just seen to be doing something.
I know, right, that's such an unexpected outcome when using politics as a tool! It's not like a council is a political entity or anything ...
Vanity projects (Score:2)
"The most important thing is to stop burning fossil fuels. The second most important thing is conserve the nature we already have. Trying to create new nature to absorb our fossil fuel emissions is way down the list of priorities."
I found estimates that around 7,000,000 hectares of forest are cleared each year. That puts these vanity projects into perspective. Use the money & resources more wisely to reduce our impact on the environment more effectively & efficiently. Much of that involves NOT doing things & switching to doing other things instead. The idea that we can carry on doing ha
Interesting climate zone (Score:2)
"By planting the seedlings in April, instead of in winter or early spring, they never had a good chance of survival anyway. "
April is early spring where I live. And you're not planting anything in the winter without a jack hammer.
I'll put it down to marine west coast vs humid continental climates.
And yes the local people should have known better.
Religion (Score:2)
Religious rituals don't always produce rain or higher crop yields.
Just give up (Score:2)
This is all just pissing in the ocean. If you look at China's emissions, they are double the United States emissions and growing. All the oil and natural gas that Europe is not consuming is going to China. You could return Europe to the Stone age and it wouldn't make a difference climate wise because China would just make up the difference.
The Data:
https://www.instituteforenergy... [institutef...search.org]
"shallowly"? (Score:2)
You don't plant trees deeply, you barely cover the topmost roots with a couple inches of dirt. Either the roots were exposed (aka they were not even buried) or they were planted at a reasonable depth.
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Climate change is likely to kill millions of people, driving up food prices even for the rich. If this increased climate change then it's harmful.
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The Wealthy are betting that it won't get as bad as the scientists say it will, and that they will be able to ride out the coming woes in a fortress made of money. But you cannot eat it, or shoot it, or breathe it, and things will get a lot worse than they think. In the mean time, they can do massive damage, and convince us that it's our fault so they can do even more.
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That is a pretty good description of DiCaprio and Kerry's efforts. They talk about how much everyone should do to stop climate change while polluting worse than 100 people's yearly output in a month.
And this was your money? you really have standing? (Score:2)
"so they can be “seen to be doing something” about the climate crisis" This is how the gesture of planting trees made people suffer. Money was spent to virtue signal rather than serving the people.
So this was your money? Also, money spent sub-optimally is not suffering. Opportunity cost? sure...but not tangible suffering. Again...someone tried to do something nice and didn't do it right...akin to you getting an enthusiastic blowjob from a woman who is bad at it.
Would you make fun of the woman and complain to her and insult her and put her down?...or just thank her and go to someone else who does know what they're doing?
Yes, it obviously would be better if these fuckos did it right. Howev
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They destroyed a carbon sink ecosystem to virtue signal so yes it impacts everyone on the planet. I hope no one needs to explain how everything on the planet is connected, for example, destroying the Brazilian rain forest is bad for people in Norway and Mongolia.
It does matter. A lot.
What did they destroy? (Score:2)
They destroyed a carbon sink ecosystem to virtue signal so yes it impacts everyone on the planet. I hope no one needs to explain how everything on the planet is connected, for example, destroying the Brazilian rain forest is bad for people in Norway and Mongolia.
It does matter. A lot.
That's an opportunity cost, not a direct cause of suffering. They didn't tear down a rainforest to plant new trees. They dug a few holes, apparently not deep enough.
Also, you keep saying virtue signaling, which implies they knew they were doing a bad job and didn't care. Doing something nice is not "virtue signaling." Also, cities are in the business of self-promotion. It's tacky, but yeah, you have to justify the dollars spent and convince your voters you deserve reelection, so publicity is necessa
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They didn't destroy the ecosystem. That was one person's opinion. From the picture in the article, the ecosystem is still there, it just has sticks on it now.
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Yes, it obviously would be better if these fuckos did it right.
What the fuck are you talking about? They effectively did nothing. It had zero results.
Again...someone tried to do something nice
Nah, that's just your fantasy inventing an apology for how such a hideously obvious greenwashing scheme could have gone wrong.
However, they tried, they failed...lesson learned: hire someone who knows what they're doing.
Fucking hell, you're Naive with a capital N.
How the fuck do you fail at planting trees at this scale? The whole thing was obviously not planned to any sensible degree. It was a vague gesture with no substance. It was never designed to work. It was a political instrument.
Hanlan's Razor (Score:2)
Fucking hell, you're Naive with a capital N. How the fuck do you fail at planting trees at this scale? The whole thing was obviously not planned to any sensible degree. It was a vague gesture with no substance. It was never designed to work. It was a political instrument.
You're stating it wasn't designed to work. I am saying they want it to work, but didn't know how. They are incompetent. They failed in their mission, that doesn't mean "it wasn't designed to work." That's the difference between a reckless auto accident and assault with a vehicle.
You seem to want to assign nefarious motives and "greenwashing" labels. Someone, who apparently you feel is dumber than you, fucked up. They hired the wrong people and didn't realize they were hiring idiots. Planting tree
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You're stating it wasn't designed to work.
No, i stated they didn't care enough to even get to a design sage. It wasn't designed at all.
I am saying they want it to work, but didn't know how. They are incompetent.
Yeah, but if they were that incompetent they wouldn't be in that position. It is practically impossible they didn't know to ask someone knowledgeable. So the only other option is they knew, but didn't.
Planting trees is very good for many reasons. I think everyone wants more trees.
I never said trees are bad. I like trees.
You seem to want to assign nefarious motives and "greenwashing" labels.
Because that was exactly what this was. Blind greenwashing for political and/or personal gain. It has become a huge problem since the introduction of the international carbon of
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NO INTENTION? NONE AT ALL???? (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you even read the article? ....“There was a lot of good that could have been done with that money. But it’s clear to me that doing good wasn’t ever an objective, it was just seen to be doing something. That’s what makes me sad about the whole thing.”
OK, so that's one person's opinion. You're telling me the city really went through this with NO INTENTION of doing it correctly? By occam's razor it would make a lot more sense that they wanted to do something, but sucked at planning....but you're going with they had ABSOLUTELY no intention of helping?...they went through the trouble of the program and REALLY DIDN'T GIVE A SHIT if it worked or not?
Is this incompetence? Certainly. Does that mean virtue signaling? No...those 2 are not synonymous. No one but them knows their intention...neither you nor that angry resident. It makes a lot more sense that they wanted to help, but did a shit job than they had absolutely zero intention of helping and wanted to look liked they did.
You asked above the insulting question "Did you even read the article?" I'll turn the question back to you..."how carefully did your read the article?" Yeah, the local resident thinks they had no intention of 'doing good.' That is one resident's opinion. It may be true, but logically, I think it makes more sense they had the intention, but lacked the wisdom to hire an arborist...but you've chosen the narrative that people who mean well, but prioritized something differently than you would have and did a poor job implementing, must be virtue signaling. To me, it looks like you're desperate to use the word "virtue signaling" tonight in a sentence or you really lack critical reading skills.
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OK, so that's one person's opinion.
This seems to be the gold standard for "journalism" these days, at least according to the current crop of editor. Nearly everything posted on slashdot got picked because it starts with a sob story of some sort, a single anecdote that is there to legitimise whatever comes after. If you're really lucky you might get two, but wildly disparate ones.
So you're two pages and two anecdotes in, and you know you're in for a treat: Two points to the article! Whoo!
You're telling me the city really went through this with NO INTENTION of doing it correctly?
I'd surmise they wanted to do something, or even just
Re:NO INTENTION? NONE AT ALL???? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd noticed that too, the article is based on a sample size of two. And it's a biased sample, for all we know they cherry-picked the two biggest dumpster-fire projects in the whole country and ran with those, ignoring all the ones that succeeded.
Mind you I guess "We planted some trees, they grew" doesn't make for as much of a story.
Re: NO INTENTION? NONE AT ALL???? (Score:2, Insightful)
Weâ(TM)ve known for a few decades now that planting trees in rows by humans is going to lead to a poor forest only good enough for commercial harvesting.
Monocultures and planting trees in a line give poor protection for both flora and fauna against wind, pests and predators.
But hey, the green idiots can be seen doing something because they said we have to do something. Like their war against nuclear and pro solar/batteries, in the long term they will prove to fuck things up worse.
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We've known for a few decades now that planting trees in rows by humans is going to lead to a poor forest only good enough for commercial harvesting.
Planned forests, with trees organized by species and planted to facilitate harvesting, goes back to the 1200s, so we've known for far more than "a few decades" how this works.
Re: NO INTENTION? NONE AT ALL???? (Score:2)
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I'd noticed that too, the article is based on a sample size of two. And it's a biased sample, for all we know they cherry-picked the two biggest dumpster-fire projects in the whole country and ran with those, ignoring all the ones that succeeded.
Mind you I guess "We planted some trees, they grew" doesn't make for as much of a story.
LOL, article source is Vice, the shittiest clickbait site on the Internet. It's the spiritual successor to the old Gawker. And the editors here love it.
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Did you even read the article? ....“There was a lot of good that could have been done with that money. But it’s clear to me that doing good wasn’t ever an objective, it was just seen to be doing something. That’s what makes me sad about the whole thing.”
OK, so that's one person's opinion. You're telling me the city really went through this with NO INTENTION of doing it correctly? By occam's razor it would make a lot more sense that they wanted to do something, but sucked at planning....but you're going with they had ABSOLUTELY no intention of helping?...they went through the trouble of the program and REALLY DIDN'T GIVE A SHIT if it worked or not?
Yes.. They simply didn't care.
Every plant you buy has a little tag saying when, where and how to plant them. They could have asked their city greenkeepers on how to plant a tree. They did not include who is responsible for trees and forests in that area for even 5 minutes to even plan when to do it. There are people whos job it is to make trees and plants grow well. Not even asking them for such basic information is gross neglect at best. At worst it is even malicious if the planting timeline was set up to
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The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
That's the very best thing that can be said about this story.
My guess is they half assed it because of budget cycles or election dates, thus the project was cynically bound to fail to meet some other unrelated goals.
Getting trees to grow isn't rocket science. If it is so damned hard then they should have asked someone if pure ignorance was the problem and frankly anyone that stupid shouldn't be making -any- public decisions anyway.
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You're telling me the city really went through this with NO INTENTION of doing it correctly?
I'm sorry to be the one telling you, but this is how the world works. If looking 'green' gets you votes, makes the masses shut up, then fuck yeah, that's what you'll do. You're apparently oblivious of what politicians are capable of doing (and indeed, what has been done) to make them look good. This is not about 'green'. 'Green' is simply the new hip thing to swing around if you want to look good.
...they went through the trouble of the program and REALLY DIDN'T GIVE A SHIT if it worked or not?
Well, they for sure didn't go through the trouble of taking up the obvious task of asking a botanist if the pla
Re: NO INTENTION? NONE AT ALL???? (Score:2)
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Ok, new terminology for me...what the heck is a "council house"?
What is it used for?
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The problem is that the priority was focused on publicity (ie virtue signalling) rather than actually achieving a goal.
Plant trees, take photos to show that you planted trees, then abandon the project and let the trees die. If the focus had been on planting trees instead of publicity, then they would have planted them later (thus the photo op would have had to wait), deeper (costs more so less trees for the same money but a small number of live trees is better than a large number of dead ones, except the la
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You're telling me the city really went through this with NO INTENTION of doing it correctly?
I'm not going to tell you that because I haven't looked into it, but you should never be surprised when government does things for corrupt reasons. Sometimes people within government figure out ways to wield it to do that for their own profit, like when the insider traders in Congress just agreed to hand a bunch of money to Intel when they literally have enough cash and liquid assets on hand to build themselves their own chip plant. Instead of solving the problem with tariffs, they solved it with an unneces
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"There was a lot of good that could have been done with that money. But it's clear to me that doing good wasn't ever an objective, it was just seen to be doing something. That's what makes me sad about the whole thing."
We must do something. This is something. Therefore we must do it.
Bleh
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There's not a single sentence in the entire article that says this would have been ineffective if done by an arborist.
How about this?
"[T]hey were planted on species-rich grassland that was already carbon negative, which has now been mostly destroyed by tree planting".
An "arborist" would not have planted the trees in that place. Or, perhaps, at all.
Re:The way forward: Virtual Signaling and Hand Wav (Score:4, Informative)
Planting trees to fight CO2 is like trying to empty the ocean with a thimble.
There have been a bunch of calculations which show that trees are one of the biggest potential carbon sinks available. What's key is to take an area like places where deserts are expanding and where carbon is being dumped into the atmosphere and then reverse that putting in a new, working ecosystem which absorbs much more carbon. If that could be done right then the trees would plant themselves.
Trees are good for wildlife and biodiversity and all sorts of other things but they're not going to fight global warming.
Converting to renewable energy now, as fast as possible, eliminating fossil fuels is more urgent and important. We're dumping megatonnes of carbon into the atmosphere and have to stop. Even when we've done that, however, there needs to some kind of cleanup. Trees, done right, are going to be more efficient at that than building new machines to remove CO2 from the atmosphere is ever likely to be.
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There have been a bunch of calculations which show that trees are one of the biggest potential carbon sinks available.
Sure, but we need to replant the whole surface of the Earth.
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Trees are a very slow long term carbon sink that sinks briefly (on the scale of emissions) and then itself becomes relatively neutral.
You already listed several other reasons we should be planting trees, and there are even more, but defeating global warming is not one of them.
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Do you have any links to contradict this claim that trees are one of the most major potential stores we have [wri.org].
Note 1 it agrees with you about planting - here we are talking about natural regrowth.
Note 2 this is just the first link I could find today - I had plenty of other ones before and can find more if you need.
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Small apartments disrupt a much smaller area than the amount of free-standing houses needed to house the same number of people... (And the gardens are likely also much worse for the environment than undisturbed areas (but better than concrete))
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Rooftops are the logical place for solar panels - the environment was already destroyed when the structure under the rooftop was put up...
(Many of the dessert environments where they are being installed were previously mostly undisturbed due to its unsuitability for agriculture. Desserts still have ecosystems that suffer if solar farms are built.)
(Land-based wind can do with some clear numbers on the impact it has on raptor and bat populations. Offshore wind have a lot less of those issues and dead seagulls
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Rooftops are the logical place for solar panels - the environment was already destroyed when the structure under the rooftop was put up...
It is not a logical place for solar power when it costs double that of onshore wind, geothermal, hydro, or nuclear fission. Also adding to the cost of solar power is the need for storage since the peaks of electricity demand are in the morning and evening where solar power is weak or nonexistent.
Rooftop solar (potentially some with tracking or on East and West facing parts as well) can likely provide almost all of the increased energy demand during the day, which means that the nuclear that should be dealing with the constant demand doesn't need to dump energy to vary its output.
Solar cannot provide the increased demand every day because there are cloudy days, meaning added need for storage or some backup source of energy. A backup source that can be relied upon to be there when needed.
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A lot of the cost of rooftop solar often gets carried by people willingly installing it - it competes with the retail price of electricity, while utility-scale solar competes with the wholesale price... On cloudy days that increased demand tends to be a lot less, since a lot of that is driven by air-conditioning, which is driven by the sun. (absorption chillers using solar as a heat source might make more sense for new AC installs though) (For raw output solar is quite cheap, but getting it at specific time
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The problem with converting solar thermal stations to nuclear is that there might not be sufficient water available for cooling n some of the areas (if they are using steam to convert the heat to electricity, that is likely less of an option though)
Molten salt nuclear uses air, not water, for cooling just like molten salt solar thermal. The water used at a molten salt solar thermal plant would be for cleaning the mirrors of dust and bird droppings, not for cooling. A conversion to nuclear means no mirrors to clean.
The molten salt stuff works for better load-following yes. (With the current reactors there is more load-following than you would expect, but it mainly seems to work by dumping energy instead of using it to generate electricity (which means that the cost per kWh is double if the plant is running at 50% output compared to full output))
Molten salt nuclear would have the same load following capability of molten salt solar thermal. The difference being that a nuclear power plant doesn't have the maximum output power dictated by the time of day and cloud cover. There's go
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The wires leaving a solar power plant will be built for the maximum power output, and the output would presumably be at or near zero at night. Converting this to nuclear means the power plant can provide maximum output at any time of day. This means more energy can be sold over the year on the same wires.
The maximum output of just about any solar power plan tends to be significantly (~a order of magnitude) less than that of any (current) nuclear plant - hiwhc would mena that upgrades would be needed... (Smaller reactors are closer though)
Fuel cells are a horrible idea for grid scale storage. Just burn the hydrogen in a turbine or something. There's no need to get expensive fuel cells because there's no need to save on weight or volume. On top of that a fuel cell produces DC so there would have to be inverters to use this electricity on the grid. The energy density of hydrogen isn't much of a concern at a power plant, they have room for low pressure tanks.
Fuel cells have significantly better efficiency than burning it and converting motion to electricity. (The inverters would take some of that, but there are large scale solutions from things like HVDC transmission lines)
Nuclear with storage makes a lot of sense. With current