Stop Planting Trees, Says Guy Who Inspired World to Plant a Trillion TreesComments
oolong OP wrote
"Crowther, who says his message was misinterpreted, put out a more nuanced paper last month, which shows that preserving existing forests can have a greater climate impact than planting trees."
i think it was an easy buy-in for big corps
devtesla wrote
something that's real and something corporations will take as fact are often completely unrelated
oolong OP wrote
that uae minister on the same side as corporations
Moonside wrote (edited )
I think that's reductive. NGOs, states and basic normies were all pretty into afforestration as a strategy, when we degrowth permie environmentalists were already into simply cutting down fewer forests and lengthening the cutting cycle; agroforestry, coppicing and pollarding; wetland and grassland restoration; and beaver ponds and other water cycle restoration; biocarbon as soil amendment. Like beaver ponds soak up 2-3 times as much carbon per area as a boreal forest does, but they do a lot more besides.
It's a complicated set of interests even on the site of capitalists, imho. Extractive industries especially in forestry and mining and landowners in general on the one hand and other capitalists probably don't exactly have the same interests on this topic.
oolong OP wrote
i don't disagree! i read the 'wood as not sustainable building material' article posted here only recently and there are more factors at play than i previously thought
Moonside wrote
Yeah. I feel that plenty of progressives neglect the role of the state and international institutions that aren't multinational corporations in environmental predicament. In a sense this is a conservative reform, but merely stopping subsidies (except those funding restoration work) for forestry would be a clear improvement since it would remove marginal forestland from production, that is, no-one will bother maintaining roads for logging access. It would also decrease clear cutting since a lot of the labor tasks only useful for clear cutting are presently subsidized by governments. Now a near total ban on clear cutting would be pretty awesome, all things considered, but a lot of trouble has to do with what public sector enthusiastically encourages rather than merely fails to curtail in the private sector. This doubly so when public bodies own natural resources, like oil and forests.
oolong OP wrote
i don't remember if this article was posted here but i feel like it intersects well on how the public sector subsidises energy projects without further thought into impact
Moonside wrote
I'm gonna read this article fully later but I thought that this was common knowledge among environmentalists and permies (I hangout with them a bunch) in 2019! Carbon offsets seemed like an obvious scam back in 2010.