[ubuwaits]

Bill Gates wrote about the impact of planting trees recently:

> It sounds like a simple fix and it has obvious appeal for all of us who love trees, but its impact on climate change is overblown. Although trees absorb some carbon, they can never take in enough to offset the damage from our modern lifestyle. To absorb the lifetime emissions that will be produced by every American alive today — just 4 per cent of the global population — you’d need to plant and permanently maintain trees on more than 16bn acres, roughly half the landmass of the world.

From: https://www.ft.com/content/c11bb885-1274-4677-ba05-fcbac67dc...

[adflux]

A very misleading calculation.

You don't need to absorb ALL co2 currently being output by Americans. A large percentage of that is already being converted/stored by algae / trees

So the baseline isn't "we need to store all CO2". The baseline is, we need to convert the part that is currently "overcapacity" for our environment. And for that, planting trees IS a good solution. But don't take my word (or Bills) for it.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6448/76

... Ecosystems could support an additional 0.9 billion hectares of continuous forest. This would represent a greater than 25% increase in forested area, including more than 200 gigatonnes of additional carbon at maturity.Such a change has the potential to store an equivalent of 25% of the current atmospheric carbon pool.

[dheera]

s/Americans/world/, and also

- Trees are being cut down at record rate for meat production. Meat production is one of the bigger culprits in deforestation (and particularly of the Amazon and other tropical rainforests). If the world were willing to eat less meat (we don't have to be all-out vegan, we just need to eat much less of it) we'd be a lot better off in terms of how much arable land we need to feed everyone instead of feeding a bunch of cows and then feeding everyone

- The world population is much bigger now. All environmental problems are essentially only an issue because we have too many people in the world right now. If we had the population of the 1800's, none of our modern lifestyle habits would be a serious problem.

[mumblemumble]

For the sake of bringing it into more immediate (for this context) perspective, I'm curious if anyone is able to do the analysis on ecological impact from technology decisions?

For example, choosing fancier, JavaScript-heavy ways of building webpages probably results in clients consuming extra electricity. One could hypothetically estimate the impact, and then come up with an analysis to the effect of, "For a site generating X amount of traffic, you'd need to plant Y trees to offset the decision to use Google Tag Manager."

[frongpik]

Ads, basically. But I doubt web makes any impact here. Let's say every web user spends 2 hours every day waiting for ads to finish loading. 2 hr x 100 watt x 360 days x 5 billion users = 1 TWh. The US alone produces 4000 TWh per year.

[htnsao]

Gates is supporting many good solutions but this quote about trees is false. As outlined in the book The Treesolution, it's just "2 billion hectares of trees to disconnect all present and past CO2 what is produced through fossil fuels." [1]

and furthermore

"Pieter Hoff says that we can replant a hectare for approximately 2,500 USD. We need 2 billion hectares of trees to disconnect all present and past CO2 what is produced through fossil fuels. The total investment to clean the air from the CO2 pollution is therefore 5 trillion USD. This investment is smaller than the costs of saving the bank system since 2008. Both USA and Europe spent over 6 trillion USD to save their banks."

Note: it's an investment, not an expense. ie profitable.

[1] https://www.groasis.com/en/downloads/download-the-treesoluti...

[IgorPartola]

Well fuck. Anyone know of a lobby as a service project?

[therealdrag0]

The Coalition for Rainforest Nations might be good. This is recommended by this report: https://founderspledge.com/research/fp-climate-change

[sterlind]

Any APIs hosted by major cloud providers are LaaS, if you think about it.

[darkerside]

Thought about it, still not getting it. I like the idea.

[atleta]

Sounds logical. We're burning fossils of past creatures that have lived over a period of hundreds of millions of years on the surface of the Earth.

[developer92]

yes but this is the guy who didn't think he needs to give up his private jet, so although I'm sure he's will intentioned I'll not accept his pronouncements about the environment at face value, I'll check elsewhere first.