Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumThe Miraculous "Just Plant Trees!!" Warming Solution That Probably Isn't
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It outlines over 20 pathways for reducing carbon in the atmosphere through NCS, ranging from converting pastureland to forests, avoiding deforestation in areas, and implementing changes to the logging industry to reduce output, among others. The sheer scale of NCS needed to achieve those results, without taking into consideration the policy implications of such proposals, makes the potential of NCS purely theoretical, according to Lang and Counsell. Its not feasible, Lang said. But even if it was feasible, were talking about covering an area the size of India. Its a vast area of land. And so its going to have enormous social and environmental impacts. Thats something that [the researchers] are just brushing under the carpet.
Counsell and Lang have dubbed some of the assumptions made in the report as nothing more than wishful thinking. One of their main critiques is where to find the land suitable for reforestation or avoided deforestation. The TNC report estimates that hundreds of millions of hectares of land will be needed for NCS to effectively mitigate climate change. Theres obviously an implicit assumption in there that somehow this land can be released from whoever is using it or owning it, or that it is freely available somewhere, Counsell said. That immediately raises questions. Whose land is this? How are we going to remove them? Are they going to be compensated? Bearing in mind that you could be talking about tens of millions of people who would somehow have to sacrifice their land for afforestation purposes.
The problem is the messaging thats being put out there by the likes of The Nature Conservancy and Nature4Climate, which has been picked up by the oil companies and the World Business Council on Sustainable Development and so forth, has been completely separated from the underlying analysis, Counsell said. Its based on these massive assumptions, most of which are completely otherworldly and cannot be fulfilled. And therefore, it is purely a theoretical exercise. It just becomes a sound bite, he added.
While oil companies like Shell tout claims of invest[ing] in natural ecosystems as part of its strategy to act on global climate change, a March 2019 report found that some of these same corporations are spending millions lobbying against climate regulations and in support of oil and gas expansion through industry trade groups. Lang and Counsell fear that the lofty promises made by researchers around NCS such as those made in the 2017 paper tend to steer the conversation away from other, more direct approaches to reducing carbon emissions such as reeling in fossil fuel burning.
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https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/07/06/big-oil-natural-climate-solutions-nature-conservancy
d_r
(6,907 posts)Has the same difficulties meaning you have to do radical changes. This article is just boils down to saying there's nothing that can be done. kind of the purpose of people looking for solutions even if they have to beremarkable or very difficult or what was traditionally be considered impossible is that it will be very difficult to change this if we're going to we're going to have to take unprecedented steps. Or we can just decide what you can't do anything it's too hard to impossible.
hatrack
(59,608 posts)It boils down to saying (A) this is not as simple as it sounds and (B) this is not as wondrous as has been touted.
An India-sized expanse of land that would be needed, and it would be found. . . where?
Whose land, in what nation(s) and currently used for what?
What species of trees, and would they be native or non-native?
How would seedlings be protected in the face of increasingly extreme weather?
How long would it take, especially with the increasing rate of climate breakdown?
Could we even predict where certain trees would grow best, given the speed of warming?
Would we be planting trees to no effect, in areas already fated to become grassland once the trees are burned off (see also Rocky Mountain New Mexico)?
Not impossible. But not simple, either.
enough
(13,273 posts)bronxiteforever
(9,287 posts)mopinko
(70,395 posts)it is, of course, ridiculous to say that we can plant our way out of this catastrophe. but that is a straw man here. no one is saying that.
and no one is saying that states should just grab private land and force them to plant trees.
planting trees and making improvements to agriculture are not takings. if you do it right, it's a win-win. maybe a win-win-win-win.
and as far as landholders-
we the people own a lot of land, on all levels of govt.
from city parks and vacant lots to national parks.
from pristine wilderness to superfund sites.
all have room for more trees, and many have greed induced damage that can be mitigated w trees. at the perp's expense, of course. win-win.
re other countries- i have been to india. they struggle to keep trees in public spaces because they are a resource for the poor. they paint the trunks white so that people know they are "govt trees" and the price of messing w them are high.
everywhere we went, it was pretty darn barren.
seems like a big campaign to plant food forests would go over pretty big. you cant really separate all this from food sovereignty, of course.
likewise banks own a lot of land. there are other types of derelict properties. seems like most of them would welcome help w environmental remediation of any kind. even good expert advice and bulk purchasing power could go a long way. win.
as a private property owner, i can tell you i would be day drinking to celebrate if the govt came to me and offered to plant trees on my property.
i could go on a much longer rant about soil building and farmland restoration.
but this is just contrived controversy. it is no way discredits the role of planting trees in climate change. it discredits greenwashing by the culprits in climate, and piddly offsetting measures that are not even within an order of magnitude the problem.
shit stirring.
disheartening.
unnecessarily disheartening.
Thyla
(791 posts)Stop eating meat argument at least.
It's not only something we can all do and it will actually have some sort of effect. Even if just locally.
Certainly it's more of a complicated issue than that though.