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by Sjoerd
2611 days ago
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I agree that landscaping choices could be more environmentally friendly. However, planting trees in yards will have a limited impact; if 1.2 trillion trees cancel a decade of CO2 emissions, half a billion trees will cancel about 36 hours of CO2 emissions. |
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The truth is that, short of a ground-braking discovery of a kind that is hard to describe we are not going to "save the plante" for thousands of years. No matter what we do.
We need to stop talking about destroying entire economies, solar panels, killing cars, trains and planes, and the ridiculous idea of buying carbon credits (really?) and start talking about the reality of this problem.
It is a planetary scale problem with a natural rate of change in the order of 100 ppm per 50,000 years. Anyone talking about "saving the planet" for the next generation or anything even remotely close needs to explain how we are going to accelerate this rate of change a thousand-fold without killing everyone in the process and using-up more energy than this planet can produce.
Basic scientific principle: You don't get something for nothing. If you are going to produce a planetary-scale change at 1000x the natural rate the side effects could be worse than the problem.
As I said before multiple times, the natural rate of change is what happened when humanity basically wasn't here --certainly our cities, power plants, planes, etc. were not here. Simple conclusion: If we destroy and eliminate ALL of humanity and all things we built it would take about 50,000 years to reduce atmospheric CO2 by 100 ppm. Anyone claiming to make a 1000x improvement to this rate of change while we are all still here (and our toys) has a supernatural problem to answer for.
Yes, sure, let's stop polluting unnecessarily. Swapping lawns and mowers for trees seems like a win-win at many levels. You stop producing pointless pollution, reduce water waste and convert carbon into trees. After that we need to look at reforestation at a massive scale.
I guess my point is that trees is the only "technology" we know we can deploy at scale without killing everyone on this planet in the process and using-up so much energy and resources that we'll create a larger problem.