China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/china-new-forest-report

by Brajeshwar • 9 months ago

674 619 9 months ago

e360.yale.edu

yesbut• 9 months ago

finally some good news.

maerF0x0• 9 months ago

My immediate thought, yeah isnt that because they don't really naturally have the kinds of softwoods forests good for making boards and paper? And until more recently they were taking recycled paper/fiber from america in empty shipping containers returning.

The real news is that it's also slightly happening in other developed countries too, another rhetoric point towards Steven Pinker's concept that as nations get richer they become more environmentally conscious, cause they can afford to care about it.

smallnix• 9 months ago

At least some projects run longer I understand: > Last year China completed a project, begun in 1978, to plant a 2,000-mile-long belt of trees

xhkkffbf• 9 months ago

I've seen some neat videos on YouTube that sound impressive. Are they impressive in real life? Anyone have any personal experience?

vondur• 9 months ago

I’d heard that project wasn’t going so well. The trees weren’t really suited to the areas where they were planted, and many died off. I suppose even if only a small percentage survive, it’s still better than desert.

IncreasePosts• 9 months ago

China is very large, has 90% of the population living on 40% of the land in the southern and eastern portion of the country, and some massive deserts that they don't want to expand. This leaves a lot of room for tree planting programs.

dj_gitmo• 9 months ago

The real news is that it's also slightly happening in other developed countries too, another rhetoric point towards Steven Pinker's concept that as nations get richer they become more environmentally conscious, cause they can afford to care about it.

I'm not sure it's environmentalism. It's efficiency. From the article.

In richer countries, where farming has become more efficient, deforestation has slowed or even reversed

You simply don't need as many people living in villages, farming marginal land. New England re-forested because the land was never that good for farming, and it made a lot more sense to work in factories.

legitster2• 9 months ago

Steven Pinker's concept that as nations get richer they become more environmentally conscious, cause they can afford to care about it.

I think in this case it's more of a correlating factor. The countries struggling with deforestation have very little state capacity to enforce property rights or any sort of environmental regulations. Whereas in the developed world it's much easier to stop illegal logging or homesteading.

munk-a5• 9 months ago

I agree and would also add that food security is also a massive factor. With a high food insecurity clamping down on illegal expansion of farmland is politically toxic - but as land use efficiency rises and cities grow conservationalism becomes a much more important agenda to back.

People like nature - all things held equal we want to live in a beautiful natural world... but if that world comes at the cost of having food on the table. Whether that inefficiency is technologically, environmentally (e.g. New England's poor soil) or conflict driven doesn't significantly change public opinion.

conductr• 9 months ago

as nations get richer they become more environmentally conscious, cause they can afford to care about it.

Thus far, getting rich has been dirty business. This is what leads people to care more so than them being able to afford to care. Their richness is a side effect of their pollution, thus, caring is a side effect of richness but that's not the root cause. Pollution -> Money -> Caring. If you removed the money, people still care they just can't afford to do anything about it.

I'm not familiar with Pinker or this theory, just poking at it :)

renewiltord2• 9 months ago

Much of Europe used to be forest. It just all got whacked in the few centuries prior to today. So you have Europeans making tiny recoveries to their rampant destruction of their environment celebrating that fact while preventing others from doing what they did. There is one path to this: first clear cut your forests so you can build your industry; then build your industry so you can be prosperous; then rebuild your forests. If you had 100 acres of forest, and cut it down to 1 acre, then you can build 1 acre at the end and claim a 100% improvement. The next year another acre still is 50% improvement. Can any who have retained their forest boast such improvement?

China is following this path and we will celebrate it. As always, do not do what the developed nations say you should. Instead do what they did. After all, Norway did not become prosperous by keeping their oil in the ground.

sarchertech• 9 months ago

There is one path to this: first clear cut your forests so you can build your industry; then build your industry so you can be prosperous; then rebuild your forests.

Sure if you need to bootstrap to the 18th century. It’s much faster and cheaper to skip a few hundred years ahead by importing equipment.

ahmeneeroe-v2• 9 months ago

Checking in on the relative wealth of the countries who are only just now developing

evoseven• 9 months ago

You are wrong. In Gaule, most of the country was farmland. Wood consumption was huge.

nitwit0053• 9 months ago

Much of Europe used to be forest. It just all got whacked in the few centuries prior to today.

The deforestation goes back much further than that. Europe experienced significant deforestation in the middle ages. It was a major issue for many countries long before industrialism.

renewiltord2• 9 months ago

Yes, all that's happened is that we declared that morality started on Apr 22 2016. Slash and burn, cut and grow. Three hundred years from now, when the result is massive prosperity we can pontificate to whomever is cutting trees then.

oreally• 9 months ago

Have an upvote. Site has too much FUD brigading for any positives on non-western aligned countries.

aiauthoritydev3• 9 months ago

India too has been adding more green cover than ever. Higher CO2 in atmosphere leads to faster growth of forests. But more important factor is urbanization for India. As people move to cities the need to cut down trees goes down.

navigate83102• 9 months ago

Doesn't that put pressure on the cities itself especially the peripheral counties to pave way for housing and concrete roads?

roncesvalles• 9 months ago

Cities tend to expand up. Almost all buildings in Mumbai that are under 5 stories are targeted for "redevelopment" i.e. a developer buying it out and building something taller in its place.

devnullbrain• 9 months ago

Yes, and it's a good thing.

Either way, you need to fit the needs of the same number of people. If they're in a dense city near everything they need, they use less space.

Policies to limit urban sprawl just an expensive way to create more sprawl elsewhere - and roads to it.

torginus• 9 months ago

One nice thing about these developing countries is due to the power infrastructure tends to be not very good - which prompts people to take things into their hands and install solar, not to save the planet but to stave off brownouts, and be able to run the AC around the clock to stave off the heat.

For residential, solar + batteries straight up beats legacy infra on cost, and with the upcoming cheap sodium batteries, things are only going to get better.

jkestner• 9 months ago

Like how mobile payments took off in Africa early because they weren't held back by existing infrastructure.

profsummergig3• 9 months ago

India doesn't do it in an organized way though.

You'll read about some 70 year old woman/man in an obscure village who's reforested thousands of acres on their own, or resuscitated a lake (e.g. the lake guy in Bengaluru).

But there's little effort to harness their knowledge in a systematic way, add knowledge from others into the knowledge bank, do peer review, and then systematically dispense the knowledge in the form of a kit to environmentalists and bureaucrats across the country. China did this, and that's why they're so successful.

PeaceTed4• 9 months ago

Yeah another example of the saying "India is a disappointment to both optimists and pessimists".

xandrius• 9 months ago

Do you personally know that or just from feelings?

Because I know of several organisations doing this and are organising projects state-wide (they focused in Bihar and surroundings).

aiauthoritydev3• 9 months ago

Do not get influenced by the English media that loves the stories of anecdotal heroes. On one hand nothing in India is done in an organized way. But the forestation and wildlife management is done relatively better than other things.

Environmentalists and bureaucrats are epitome of evil in India. Where I lived in India, the forest officials themselves hunted the wild game and gifted it to environmentalists and vice versa. Need exotic meat to eat ? The forest officer or the local wildlife activist is the guy who can make it happen. Want to eat Olive Ridley Turtle eggs ? The officer incharge of their conservation can sell it to you.

India's forests, rivers, beaches have been inhabited by their native people for thousands of years. Over years they did figure out what works and what does not. For example ban on fishing during breeding season was a traditional system. Not hunting in "God's forest" was essentially a wildlife preserve. Religion, way of life and sustainability was part of the society in an organic way. Need to build a checkdam seasonally ? we had a local process for that. The dam was built on new moon day of X month and taken down with the first rain etc.

I am not romantacizing the poor people's life in India. Their systems had problems. Unscrupulous people took advantage of religious beliefs, some systems were based on exploitation etc. etc. But with growth in population and urbanization required a seamless transition of these traditional systems into governance structures of local bodies.

That did not happen because of Indian Government. They adopted the British I*S system and airdropped young and corrupt idiots as the overlords of the areas. Activists who wrote papers in "peer reviewed" journals then wrote reports on how these babus gotta civilize the villagers and put in new system in place.

Once you ban hunting entirely, the hunters go back to their life and poachers take over. Hunters understand concept of wild life preserves. Poachers don't. Hunters now out of business don't have incentive to stop poaching. Before you know it the poachers and babus have formed a nexus to sell game meat.

Same goes for trees. Government banks cutting down trees entirely as if it is murder. Entire wood logging industry is killed off under the sheer weight of red tape. Since I come from wood logging family, the red tape meant we could not sell our trees profitably anymore. I had to look for altnerative occupation for myself and sell the land to wood mafia who now use the land for a "pretend forest" while they actually steal wood from national parks and public lands.

HexPhantom5• 9 months ago

While the trend looks positive on paper, it's worth digging into the quality and type of vegetation being added

Freedom22• 9 months ago

Does this mean that you can drive in the forest for an entire day and still be in the forest?

iagooar2• 9 months ago

Probably, yes. This is possible in Sweden, if you go from South to North, you can travel for multiple days by car and if you avoid highways, you will not leave the forest at all.

Freedom22• 9 months ago

The joke I'm making is that many Texans like to make that statement about Texas (with regards to size and driving) and claim it's unique to that state and to the US without realizing that it's common for many other parts in the world as well.

coliveira2• 9 months ago

This is common in Brazil.

supportengineer• 9 months ago

You can do that in Virginia if you drive slowly enough, stay off the Interstate.

For example if you go from Cumberland Gap to Virginia Beach, a distance of 499 miles, it will take you 10 hours and 25 minutes.

palata• 9 months ago

Well if you drive slowly enough, you can do that in my backyard :D

trhway9• 9 months ago

While Russia cuts more and more timber for export to China. In return for the support in the war (drone components, etc) China asks for even more and more timber and fresh water from Baikal.

coliveira2• 9 months ago

I don't think they're giving away the timber. It is a commercial exchange like any other.

trhway9• 9 months ago

Yes, it is a massive sale of natural resources with huge discounts in exchange for the war support.

cpursley5• 9 months ago

This would happen war or not. Btw, they sell the same off-the-shelf drone components to Ukraine and anyone else willing to pay for them.

ivan_gammel5• 9 months ago

The same article says Russia is on 2nd place in reforestation. They do export timber and can export more, while increasing the share of sustainably managed forests. But export of Baikal fresh water? That’s fake news. Didn’t happen and won’t happen, unless you mean just some bottled water.

trhway9• 9 months ago

The same article says Russia is on 2nd place in reforestation.

Reforestation alone doesn't matter. What matters is total result of deforestation and reforestation. Russia reforests only about 1Mha/year :

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1059300/russia-reforeste...

while the total resulting loss is

https://www.globalforestwatch.org/dashboards/country/RUS/?ca...

"In 2020, Russia had 748 Mha of natural forest, extending over 44% of its land area. In 2024, it lost 5.59 Mha of natural forest, equivalent to 816 Mt of CO₂ emissions."

But export of Baikal fresh water? That’s fake news. Didn’t happen and won’t happen

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/07/parched-chines...

in Russian, that another waterpipeline - from river Ob' was approved at some Russian Parliament "roundtable on strategic projects with China and Kazakhstan".

https://topwar.ru/159671-bajkal-xxi-veka-druzhba-druzhboj-a-...

and there were strong leaks, not officially dispelled, that Baikal water was raised during the most recent Putin/Xi meeting.

legitster2• 9 months ago

It's really hard to understate how deforestation ravaged China - their forestry cover declined by almost half during The Great Leap Forward as the CCCP at the time pushed hard to exploit the land. As a result, there were severe and noticeable problems with flooding and desertification. So starting in the 70s they invested heavily in the "Three-North Shelter Forest Program" (aka the Great Green Wall). Although, probably more importantly, economic liberalization meant farming became more efficient and people could move towards cities and free up the land again.

I think more fascinating has been Russia's surge in forestry growth, also very notable in the report. Unlike China their forests have expanded almost completely accidentally. Communist-era collective farmlands have slowly been getting abandoned. Their frontier has been shrinking and the forests have crept in, tree growth being aided by longer growing period and thawing permafrost.

mistrial9• 9 months ago

as an American that was my understanding also.. small nit (understate deforestation) -> (overstate deforestation).. the phrase means "even if I talked for ten minutes with all the emphasis I can find, it would not be enough to show it.. you cannot OVERstate how serious the impact was..

ivan_gammel5• 9 months ago

According to WWF, there was some targeted effort on reforestation and sustainable forest management in Russia, which they claim to have assisted.

RobotToaster• 9 months ago

China was already extensively deforested in the Ming and Qing dynasties.

holoduke• 9 months ago

And Europe in the golden era. A squirrel could jump tree to tree from north Scotland al the way to the south. Timber, grazing, charcoal are the prime reasons why everything is gone

jillesvangurp4• 9 months ago

I've been binging a lot of videos on things like rewilding and other approaches that can be used to restore landscapes. The Chinese have successfully executed a number of large scale projects over the decades. They started this early. Where other countries talked about doing things, the Chinese went ahead and did those things.

One of their projects is allowing them to undertake infrastructure projects in the desert. They simply stick bales of straw into ditches to stop soil being blown away by wind. The straw traps soil, water, and breaks down over a few years allowing plants to take hold. It's a simple approach that works. Very pramatic, dig a ditch, stick in some straw. Done. Repeat.

Outside of China, the green wall in Africa is a very pragmatic approach that involves digging a lot of half moon shaped ditches to trap rain water. Simple and effective.

Other approaches involve using fences to stop sheep and other grazers from preventing anything vaguely green tinted shoots from being eaten and giving them a chance to actually turn into trees.

What I like about these approaches is that some relatively simple measures can have big effects. People spend a lot of time hand wringing over seemingly insurmountable problems. The Chinese are showing that in addition to the power to destroy landscapes, we also have the power to remake them. It works. They aren't tree huggers. Better landscapes also mean local economies benefit. Deserts don't feed people. Water retention means agriculture gets a second chance.

What I admire in the Chinese is the pragmatic can do attitude. Their motivations are of course self serving. They value having clean air in their cities, clean drinking water, and a landscape that can support agriculture and infrastructure. And in the end that's the best kind of motivation you can get. It's something worth copying. Whenever economy, science, and environment align, everybody wins.

A lot of areas in the rest of the world that are subject to desertification, pollution, etc. are fixable. And there's value in fixing them that needs more attention. I don't see this as a green/left topic. If you exist on this planet, why wouldn't you want something to be done to clean up the mess we've all created in the last centuries? Breaking out this topic from the usual left/right day to day politics is key. The rest is just work. The Chinese put the rest of us to shame with hard work.

seb1204• 9 months ago

Any YouTube playlist that you can share?

jillesvangurp4• 9 months ago

Just search for things like "green wall", "china straw landscape", etc.

A few good ones that I watched:

- Inside Africa's Food Forest Mega-Project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbBdIG--b58

- China Buried Tons of Dead Plants Under the Desert Sand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev8DsPH_82Y

- Green Gold: Regreening the Desert | John D. Liu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3nR3G9jboc

There are way more. One channel that I might call https://www.youtube.com/@MossyEarth. They basically use donations to take on projects to do smalls scale nature restoration. I am actually considering making a donation to them because I like what they do. There are more examples of such channels.

Not everything on this front is without controversy of course and I'm not blind to that. But I like the positive, constructive nature of these approaches. Just the simple notion that it's fixable with a bit of cleverness and lots of hard work. China is of course an autocracy that you can criticize for a lot of things. But they are doing a few things right as well. And it's worth calling that out and learning from them.

profsummergig3• 9 months ago

Do you know why the mounds with half-moon shapes? Why is it more effective than simply digging a circular hole in the ground?

nkmnz• 9 months ago

Same effect for half the work. Look up the videos on youtube, it's manual labor on very hard ground.

jillesvangurp4• 9 months ago

The idea is that rain flows downhill, you dig the half moon shape to capture the water on the end without a ditch and then it sinks into the ditch instead of flowing unobstructed to the river and taking all soil with it.

It's an ancient practice that was forgotten and rediscovered. The beauty of this approach is that it shows results within a few short years. Basically in Africa if there's water, nature shows up and consumes it. So you get lush growth and rapid soil restoration. Trees, vegetables, etc. on what was a heavily eroded flood plain before.

It's easy to explain, the locals get why it works. And they get a very fast response from nature and all the produce and riches that come with that. And all they need is shovels and some elbow grease.

aarondf• 9 months ago

This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qwshdtijFY and his whole channel are a great binge for this topic.

No nonsense, an actual practitioner, and not very "YouTubey"

pksebben• 9 months ago

This seems like gross, and I wonder what the net is. It seems impossible that there's no deforestation in the places mentioned int the article, and unlikely that the net is positive.

AuthAuth5• 9 months ago

This sounds big but its less than the bare minimum required. Their coal emissions are insane. In my opinion its all anyone should be talking about when it comes to climate change.

Mistletoe2• 9 months ago

Aren’t they bringing on incredible amounts of solar we could only dream about?

Edit: for the downvoters

https://gemini.google.com/app/6da2be1502b764f1

kulahan4• 9 months ago

They're building an insane amount of nuclear. It's the only thing with a hope in a country where a "small" city has like 6 million people.

munk-a5• 9 months ago

And nuclear power - they have a large carbon deficit to make up so you shouldn't think of them as a green economy by any measure but... I think their strongest advantage is that there is a strong environmental pressure within the country and (while industrialists will be industrialists) there is no faction or movement within China that is dedicated to an anti-environmental agenda.

There's a lot of work to be done and there's a lot of friction, corruption and economic pressures constraining that work but there seems to be a genuine desire to do that work.

mliker• 9 months ago

would you prefer zero trees being added?

munk-a5• 9 months ago

Of course not - but it is quite fair to examine articles like this with a critical eye given all the greenwashing that takes place.

moron4hire• 9 months ago

Liking waffles!= Hating pancakes.

dumbledoren• 9 months ago

Their emissions are the emissions of Western companies for whom they are doing manufacturing.

kwanbix2• 9 months ago

AS if they don't consume the products themselves with their 1.2 billion people?

My home country we are only 40 million. I am sure they consume much more than us.

quacked• 9 months ago

The global economy is so China-dependent it doesn't even make sense to talk about an individual country's emissions profile unless we look at their imports.

throwawaymaths5• 9 months ago

You should check the stats on that, it is not the case.

benjiro• 9 months ago

Their emissions are the emissions of Western companies for whom they are doing manufacturing.

Spoken like somebody that never stept a foot in China.

Sure, manufacturing for the West is part of it, but up to a few years ago, entering Beijing alone resulted in your naval cavities burning, the moment the airplane door opened.

Because of the usage from coal in households. It was only until a few years ago, that they banned the usage of wood/coal around the city. Outside the city, its coal everywhere for the normal class people who own their (country)house. Near other large cities its still very coal centric in the winter.

And the heating (communal for apartments) is mostly coal and while the coal may burn a bit more clean, and there is some filtration going on, its not a ton. So while open coal burning was reduced directly in the cities like Beijing, they simply moved a lot of it outside the 6th ring.

All those EV's ... great, no more gasoline/oil usage but ... wait, where does a lot of the electricity come from? Oeps...

But wait, all that crypto mining, where do you think that electricity comes from?

And now AI...

And the consumer goods.

Your statement ignore a large part of the coal consumption in the country.

lbrito2• 9 months ago

Can you tell everyone what their per capita emission is? While you're at it, compare that with the US per capita emissions. Also let us know the accumulated emissions for China and US in the last 50 years.

Thanks.

mulmen7• 9 months ago

Per capita emissions aren’t relevant to climate impact. Neither are relative emissions between countries. This is a global issue.

kvirani• 9 months ago

Great question. Let's indeed make it a point of discussion then. I'd like to know too.

jacobolus4• 9 months ago

Chinese CO₂ emissions per capita are only about 60% as much as the USA, but in the past 25 years US per capita emissions have dropped by about a third and Chinese emissions per capita have almost tripled and are still rising rapidly. Considering that China is about 4 times as populous as the US, this is a huge problem for the world. (US emissions are also a huge problem; we all need for them to decrease very quickly.)

throwawaymaths5• 9 months ago

The earth doesn't give a shit about per capita, and us and eu are net reducing CO2 emissions since 2014 (even during trump I)

whoevercares2• 9 months ago

It is 8.89 China vs 14 according to https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...

AuthAuth5• 9 months ago

I couldnt care less what their per captia emissions are they have 1.5b people. Accumulated is about the same as the EU and will very soon overtake the US.

voxelghost2• 9 months ago

Well they're releasing 9.2ton CO2 per Capita, the US is releasing 13.5ton CO2 per Capita. And this while the US and the rest of the world is doing all of their manufacturing in China.

GenerocUsername2• 9 months ago

Maybe the rest of the world should stop doing their manufacturing in china.

geysersam3• 9 months ago

This is propaganda. It's impossible to take this comment in good faith

AuthAuth5• 9 months ago

This article is propaganda. Its part of a green washing campaign China started a few years ago to offset their reputation of being a dirty country powered by coal. Think about how often you hear about China's solar despite it being a tiny part of their energy grid.

nitwit0053• 9 months ago

The project wasn't started as a global warming fix. As the article notes, it was about preventing desertification:

Over the last three and a half decades China has planted roughly 120 million acres of forest, according to U.N. figures, much of it added to contain the spread of deserts. Last year China completed a project, begun in 1978, to plant a 2,000-mile-long belt of trees around the Taklamakan Desert in the west. Work continues on a belt of trees around the massive Gobi Desert in the north.

hammock• 9 months ago

Not counting the gobi desert , China is only 5x the size of Texas so it’s nothing to sneeze at

erikpukinskis• 9 months ago

“Their” coal emissions

gnarlouse2• 9 months ago

I'm starting to think that we're the baddies.

kulahan4• 9 months ago

Ecologically speaking, the US is an absolute monster of a nightmare. The American carbon footprint is incredible.

munk-a5• 9 months ago

The US was positioned to leverage technological and economic advantages to embrace and profit massively off of next gen energy infrastructure. It is a tragedy of our era that anti-conservationalism was able to gain such a strong foothold in the body politic.

porknaut2• 9 months ago

It doesn't even come close to China. So if we're a nightmarish monster, I would hate to think what that makes China.

jaza• 9 months ago

I would have thought that, in saying "we", OP was referring to all of humanity, rather than just the US and/or the Western world.

ebbi• 9 months ago

Not intending to make this political, but it's a relevant point to consider: we should also take into account the carbon footprint of all the bombs that were dropped by America and its proxies into the equation as well.

The environmental impact from these would be immense, I'd imagine.

gorwell2• 9 months ago

For context, here are the top 10 biggest footprints

1. China 26.16%

2 United States 11.53%

3. India 7.69%

4. Russia 3.75%

5. Brazil 3.16%

6. Indonesia 3.15%

7. Japan 2.15%

8. Iran 2.06%

9. Saudi Arabia 1.60%

10. Canada 1.54%

The top 10 countries account for about ~60% of global CO₂ emissions.

refurb6• 9 months ago

You can’t look at carbon footprint in isolation. All carbon is a result of the production of something, often production which improves the state of human suffering.

What is more important is efficiency.

Otherwise the logical argument is “the US should have remained poor with more human suffering because our carbon footprint would be smaller”

That’s an insane statement

jandrewrogers• 9 months ago

How do you figure? Carbon footprint only matters per unit of output.

Americans produce 2-2.5x more output per ton of carbon emitted than the average country. And this despite the fact that the US is (1) the second largest manufacturer in the world, (2) one of the largest agricultural producers in the world, and (3) the largest oil producer in the world.

The US has a surprisingly low per capita carbon footprint given its vast per capita carbon-intensive production.

Waterluvian• 9 months ago

It’s becoming very hard to see China as the adversary and not the U.S. There isn’t even a pretend moral high ground anymore.

porknaut2• 9 months ago

What does your comment have to do with ecology? Just because China plants trees (news flash, so does the US) doesn't erase the fact they are far and away the biggest emitter of carbon emissions and have high levels of pollution.

Glad they are trying to do good things though.

thegreatpeter• 9 months ago

Texas has the most wind farms & largest solar arrays in all of the US

mrits• 9 months ago

I could see how you would come to that conclusion if your knowledge of China started 5 minutes ago

refurb6• 9 months ago

There is the whole totalitarian human rights thing, so if you overlook that small, insignificant issue, then yeah, China is doing great!

mc322• 9 months ago

During the same period the US also added 18MM acres and so has Canada, but additionally Russia, India and Europe have also net added forest… so the “baddies” are still Brazil, Indonesia and the democratic Republic of the Congo.

adrianmonk• 9 months ago

Who is "we"?

gnarlouse2• 9 months ago

The US. Admittedly, it’s a kneejerk reaction.

switchbak3• 9 months ago

Ahem: "China consumes over half of the world’s coal and contributes more than 20% of global CO2 emissions from coal combustion."

But trees are nice.

Source: https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.918

lvturner• 9 months ago

Your point reads strangely, it's almost like saying "Why even bother when CO2 emissions are so high" - surely ANYTHING that they are doing to turn that around should be celebrated and encouraged rather than saying "Yeah but..." - Rome wasn't built in a day and all.

ehsankia• 9 months ago

is that per Capita? Also, At least they are going in the right direction with most metrics (switching to electric, installing renewable, planting trees, etc), whereas the US (under Trump) is hellbent on getting rid of renewables, focusing on coal/fossil fuel, slowing down electric cars, destroying national parks, etc.

seanmcdirmid6• 9 months ago

Are you trying to say something like perfect is the enemy of good?

thesmtsolver2• 9 months ago

Great quality comment.

We shouldn't consider the fact China did much more deforestation to start with and even after all this reforestation China has lesser forest area than the US despite being larger in size:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_forest_ar...

https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54719577

The US claims: "China is the world's largest consumer of illegal timber products." And, according to studies, that is true.
The Environmental Investigation Agency says: "The immense scale of China's sourcing [of wood] from high-risk regions [of the world] means that a significant proportion of its timber and wood product imports were illegally harvested." And research by Global Witness last year said there were "worrying" levels of illegality in countries from which China sources more than 80% of its timber.

z24• 9 months ago

Just as with CO2, a better comparison would look at per-capita figures and the destinations of consumption--for instance paper and furniture for export.

It may also take into account the viable land area, lest we also want to condemn Australia for having so much less forest area despite being similar in size to the US.

deadfoxygrandpa2• 9 months ago

well, china also has gigantic northern and western regions that cannot be forested. the us doesn't have an equivalent of the tibetan plateau or the gobi desert

reissbaker• 9 months ago

Based on forest cover? The US has nearly 50% more forest cover than China, and has been steadily growing it since the 90s as well.

raincole2• 9 months ago

Who the hell are 'we'? The US? The western countries?

By the "forest baddies index", South America is the baddies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_by_continent#/me...

k4rli• 9 months ago

100% true. The US defaultism "we" is a cherry on top.

marricks2• 9 months ago

This and Bill Gates saying...

“the doomsday outlook [on climate change] is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.”

I guess it's cool there's something to be hopeful about, westerner's just seemed excited to make money off of melting ice in Greenland.

9dev• 9 months ago

Bill Gates is fundamentally anthrophilic, so his concern is above all human suffering. I think that’s a valid viewpoint, but also shortsighted; keeping this planet habitable will require tough decisions and sacrifices, and should stay the utmost priority, out of sheer necessity.

telchior• 9 months ago

The population as a whole has a rapidly dwindling appetite for tech billionaires trying to impose "tough decisions and sacrifices" on everyone else, so Bill's probably in the right lane. He has already been the target of a vast array of conspiracy theories.

hooverd• 9 months ago

ah, the classic "you are a sacrifice I'm willing to make"

conception• 9 months ago

Anthropophilic perhaps…

dustractor• 9 months ago

Meanwhile we're speedrunning DustBowl 2.0 just in time for its 100th anniversary.

chemotaxis• 9 months ago

How so? US forest cover bottomed out in the 1920s or 1930 and has been going up since. If anything, in the West, the forests aren't logged enough, which increases wildfire risk.

China isn't following a particularly unique path, they just did a speedrun of economic development - they had nearly everyone living in extreme poverty in the 1980s. Before long, they'll be looking for cheap markets to outsource manufacturing and extractive industries to... which is why they're lending money to forgotten African nations. Keeping Russia an international pariah and making them economically dependent on China is probably up their alley too.

fwip2• 9 months ago

I think it's due to topsoil depletion, which is only partly affected by local forests. Trees reduce wind speed which helps reduce erosion from wind, but much of our topsoil is lost due to our agriculture practices.

lovegrenoble• 9 months ago

Canada has added 20 million acres,

India 22 million acres,

Russia 52 million acres - an area about the size of Kansas.

softwaredoug• 9 months ago

The US reforested significantly in the twentieth century as well, which helped keep some of the US cooler than it should have been relative to the climate change norm.

https://news.agu.org/press-release/a-century-of-reforestatio...

teleforce• 9 months ago

Thanks for the info.

Honest questions how much forest the US and UK added since they are probably the loudest in the issue of deforestration?

TiredOfLife3• 9 months ago

[flagged]

tomhow3• 9 months ago

Please avoid generic tangents and flamebait on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

867-5309• 9 months ago

Texas is ~172 million acres

hereme8882• 9 months ago

Wise to use forests to contain deserts. Problem is that China still plays a big role in importing deforestation-linked commodities and fund overseas projects that exacerbate global loses. There are low tree survival rates and falsified coverage, like the Three-North Shelterbelt program which is plagued by inefficiencies over its 40 years of operation.

It's also hard to balance afforestation without causing scarcity of water and displacement of native forest habitats. For example, instances where shrubs are misclassified as forests inflate the report figures. China seems to be the global leader in biodiversity loss, with about 80% of its coral reefs and 73% of its mangroves gone since 1950. Everyone knows their abusive fishing practices, and the millions of tons of plastic pollution into the ocean every year.

So, keep up the good environmental efforts, China, and hope you do even better.

gchamonlive2• 9 months ago

Honest question, aren't coral reefs also very sensitive to climate change? How much of that loss is because of regional activities and how much is due to global environmental changes?

margalabargala4• 9 months ago

Considering that China is responsible for ~25% of cumulative CO2 emissions to date, there's not much difference between the regional and global inputs.

andai• 9 months ago

So, something has been bugging me. Coral is one of the oldest animals.

They've been around for over half a billion years.

They survived the Great Dying, which killed 80-95% of marine species.

And now the ocean gets 0.9 C warmer and it's game over for coral?

wraptile• 9 months ago

Regional activties is a huge factor, much bigger than global imo.

For example, South China Sea coastlines from Vietnam and China side are basically completely dead. There zero ocean environmental awareness in both countries and it's all about just devouring all ocean creatures with no self awareness.

This is especially apparent if you take a look at the other side of the same sea. Philipines coasts are absolutely beautiful, full of life (well as much as you can get these days). Huge conservation efforts and really strong indigenous culture that respects the ocean made much more difference than global warming ever could.

Completely different views from two vastly different regional activities.

seanmcdirmid6• 9 months ago

It’s hard to reason about where China is today with forestation. Obviously their efforts from 20 years ago didn’t do much good, probably due to corruption and mismanagement. Today they seem to have solved so issues, is it could really be working. The primary resource they need to manage is water, and any effort that requires too much water (especially water diverted from local farmers) isn’t sustainable.

HexPhantom5• 9 months ago

It's a bit of an environmental paradox: ambitious at home, extractive abroad

fransje26• 9 months ago

It's also hard to balance afforestation without causing scarcity of water

Is that not a bit of a non-sequitur though?

From the reforestation reports I've read, bringing back trees was also coupled with bringing back springs, water and rain to the local environment.

Do you mean that it can cause water scarcity in the original planting and nursing stages before the biotope becomes self-sustaining?

hereme8882• 9 months ago

Is that not a bit of a non-sequitur though?

Yes, I thought about that when I wrote it. I was trying to bring validity to their efforts, without fully dismissing the issues.

lovelearning• 9 months ago

Drawing on national reports prepared for FAO, ...
Since 2005, the FRA has relied on data provided by a network of officially nominated national correspondents...

My understanding is that these reports are heavily based on data reported by respective governments. I think "officially nominated national correspondents" means bureaucrats of different governments.

But the governments of Russia, India, China are all known to lie. A lot. About a lot of things. I would know.

My default stance is to be skeptical of such claims based on national reports. Independent verification using satellite imagery seems like a better approach.

abhaynayar• 9 months ago

How many football fields is that though?

zahlman3• 9 months ago

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i2d=true&i=Divide%5Barea+...

About 130 million.

Bud• 9 months ago

It should be noted that massive tree-planting efforts do not magically create "forest". They create tree plantations. Forest is a complex ecosystem that takes some time.

zahlman3• 9 months ago

Since 1990 ... surpassed by China, which managed to add a staggering 173 million acres....
Over the last three and a half decades China has planted roughly 120 million acres of forest

Where did the rest come from?

paulcole2• 9 months ago

When a mommy tree and a daddy tree love each other very much…

zahlman3• 9 months ago

I would have expected that to cause infill rather than spreading.

yanhangyhy32• 9 months ago

I don’t know how it is in other countries, but nearly thirty years ago when I was in elementary school, a Chinese propaganda slogan stuck with me: “If you want to get rich, build roads first; have fewer children, plant more trees.” Every part of that slogan has been put into action, continuously, for decades. Although low birth rates have now become a problem, back then it seemed like a solution.

Xi Jinping may be a rather dull person, but his most famous saying is “Lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets.” As for building roads — the Belt and Road Initiative speaks for itself. We’ve built bridges in Croatia, in Bangladesh, in Mozambique, and roads and railways all over the world. That slogan is probably engraved in every Chinese person’s memory.

uvaursi2• 9 months ago

My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I ride a Mercedes, my son rides a Land Rover, and my grandson is going to ride a Land Rover…but my great-grandson is going to have to learn Mandarin.

yanhangyhy32• 9 months ago

LOL. Probably no longer needed. China currently has no real solution for the low birth rate. I guess they are 99% relying on industrial robots and household robots(in the future).So China will desperately invest in the robotics sector. (The recently released 15th Five-Year Plan likely includes this). By then, language likely won’t be an issue—AI can replace everything.

andrewflnr7• 9 months ago

I would really respect the hell out of the nation of China if it wasn't for the authoritarianism and imperialism.

onethought3• 9 months ago

Imperialism? Expand.

jama2113• 9 months ago

And oppression of Tibet and the Uyghur people and other human rights violations…

kaptainscarlet• 9 months ago

As long as the cat catches the mice... :-)

scoopertrooper2• 9 months ago

They go hand in hand. The authoritarianism of China allows it to undertake generational projects of immense scale with mass popular support through propaganda.

It works well when the government is pursuing welfare maximising initiatives, but limits self-correction when the government goes off track.

A small example of it going wrong, was when Mao convinced peasants to exterminate Sparrows and other ‘pests’ only to severely disrupt the ecosystem and cause a famine.

FpUser• 9 months ago

"if it wasn't for the authoritarianism and imperialism"

Oops, my hypocrisy meter just broke.

LAC-Tech• 9 months ago

Really? I always thought people made a massive deal about an incredibly poor country that become... middle income, and seems to be stuck there.

I'm glad they don't have self-induced famines anymore I guess, but it's not exactly japan in the 80s.

vishnugupta• 9 months ago

I’m really curious to better understand what aspects of China’s government would hurt your day to day life.

From what I read online the people there are free to rant and get things fixed. Their local government representative is held accountable if the people in his/her province are unhappy. Not too different from a typical democratic setup I guess? But this could be off because I don’t know anyone personally there.

marricks2• 9 months ago

I don't think any super power looks fantastic, and we definitely should not idolize China.

But also, we should let that be an excuse for western powers. We have corporations forcing most of the decisions in our country for extremely short term gains.

In the US we have... decrypt public transit, horrible healthcare, halting progress on renewable energies, we're probably going to make less than our parents while billionaires make more.

Like it sucks, and if anyone tells you well at least you don't live in China you should roll your eyes, why does where we live have to suck. Oh, and we even have awful imperialism too.

jmyeet• 9 months ago

Have you not been paying attention to what's going on this country?

We're building concentration camps. We have the Gestapo rounding up brown people. We have people being deported to supermax prisons in countries they have no connection to for protesting America's material support for genocide on college campuses. We have a media that is increasingly owned by lackeys of this administration (just look into CBS and Bari Weis as the latest example). Every aspect of our government is for sale from pardons to merger approvals and ending SEC investigations. There is functionally no law and order where we may start simply ignoring inconvenient parts of the Constitution like the 22nd Amendment. We have the military in our streets to incite violence. We have the Navy blowing up random small boats off Venezuela, arguably to incite a hot war with Venezuela. We have people who are rapidly unable to afford a place to live, food or both (and that's a bout to get a whole lot worse when SNAP gets suspended in November as the administration refuses to use the $6 billion set aside to fund it). We have a Speaker who won't swear in a duly elected House representative because she'll be the 218th vote on a discharge petition that will force a vote on release of the Epstein files, which the president will be forced to veto and he doesn't want to be put in that position.

I think about all these things when people bring up so-called "authoritanism" in China. Do you not see how dire the situation is not only in the US but basically all of the developed world? France, Germany and the UK are poised to have actual Nazis win their next elections due to these economic crises that governments absolutely refuse to address.

And imperialism? What imperialism? Pretty much every conflict on Earth currently can be traced back to the US, either because a US ally is a proxy doing war crimes or simply because the US turns a blind eye because one or both sides are buying US arms to commit those same war crimes.

Just this month the Nobel committee handed the Peace Prize to an opposition leader in Venezuela who has promised to make Venezuela more Israel-friendly and to privatize all the resource extraction to Western companies. "Peace".

We are in 1930s Germany. Worrying about China seems crazy to me.

somenameforme7• 9 months ago

Not to be coy, but what do you mean by that? The reason I ask is because I think many of us use these terms, but without ever thinking about exactly which behaviors we're critiquing, or how they relate to what we truly value. For instance both the Roman and Greek Empires deserve immense respect, yet they were both often imperial empires ruled by dictators. The same is no less true of many societies that played key roles during The Renaissance, and patrons of the talents of the era.

I hold immense respect for China, because I think they're achieving great things. I also think there is a high probability that they will be the first society to start creating permanent off-planet colonizations, which is what will probably signal the birth of the next era of humanity, so that in the future a name like Wang Yie might lie right alongside Neil Armstrong.

On the other hand I certainly don't think the US should emulate them. It's important for the world to be multipolar, not only in alliances, but also in ideology, perspective, and behavior. What will happen to China once they inevitably find themselves with a leader who is not socially motivated, or who is incompetent? In such a centralized system outright collapse is not out of the question. Or perhaps they'll be just fine? Who knows? By maintaining a wide diversity of systems across the world, I think we maximize our chances of collective success and minimize our chances of collective failure.

ImHereToVote• 9 months ago

China isn't imperialist.

carabiner2• 9 months ago

How much is "freedom" worth to you? Do you think your average homeless person in San Francisco would be worse off with free healthcare, housing, and no right to vote?

csomar• 9 months ago

We can argue and discuss the authoritarianism of China (and state control). But imperialism? Really?

blitzar3• 9 months ago

I would really respect the hell out of the nation of America if it wasn't for the authoritarianism and imperialism.

Jackpillar2• 9 months ago

Imperialism? Please do divulge

devsda2• 9 months ago

a Chinese propaganda slogan stuck with me: “If you want to get rich, build roads first; have fewer children, plant more trees.”

Why call it propaganda though ? That doesn't sound like a biased, deceptive or misleading policy.

It hasn't been thought through much which is universally common for some govt policies everywhere, but it results have been positive for the most part ?

MangoToupe• 9 months ago

That doesn't sound like a biased, deceptive or misleading policy.

Propaganda doesn't imply any of these things; it just implies a polemic.

londons_explore• 9 months ago

Not all propaganda is deceptive.

The best propaganda is 100% true and still achieves it's goal.

yanhangyhy32• 9 months ago

I probably often use that term in a neutral sense.

hunglee22• 9 months ago

propaganda is not necessarily a lie, it's more a call to action (which can sometimes be a lie)

FooBarWidget5• 9 months ago

Not all cultures/countries/languages have a negative connotation of the word "propaganda". In Chinese, in most contexts, the word is usually much more neutral, closer to "publicity".

BurningFrog2• 9 months ago

"Have fewer children" implies that people are a burden, which can be true in a dysfunctional society, like perhaps China under Mao.

But in a well functioning system, more people get more things done and make society wealthier.

The old idea was that the planet can only produce enough food for a certain number of people. But it turned out that people produce the food, not the planet!

yanhangyhy32• 9 months ago

So most people believe it was a mistake. We were misled by some so-called experts at the time. Conspiracy theorists claim that many of those experts weren’t Han Chinese, since the one-child policy only applied to the Han population.

goatlover• 9 months ago

There's only so much food people can grow on planet Earth, so it remains true, even if the number varies depending on the means available for producing that food. So yeah we can grow more food than people thought decades ago, but the Earth and the energy available to it, along with arable land are still finite.

mitthrowaway2• 9 months ago

Probably neither "larger n is always better, for any value of n" nor "smaller n is always better, for any value of n" adequately captures the nuance involved in assessing whether having more or fewer children will increase wealth.

It also turns out that producing food requires some amount of both planet and people.

Unearned51613• 9 months ago

Haha, what a delightfully backwards way to look at things. This ranks closely with “humans are not part of the ecosystem”.

You should look into what carrying capacity means, and in particular how our access to abundant cheap oil enabled us to overclock our chip in a manner of speaking.

yndoendo• 9 months ago

Are low birth rates a problem? The job market keeps being published about lack of employment. Recent was this UK having a 1,200,000 plus college graduates and less than 100,000 job placements. The USA market is also bad with very limited economic mobility based on years past.

Is the job market too restrictive with maximize profit over maximum knowledge transfer and upkeep? Not properly balancing older and newer labor. That is the reason for "low birth rate problem"?

ML is being pushed to condense the labor market even more. Along with growth of larger and more powerful businesses. Number of businesses are pushing to be an oligopoly and more to a duopoly or monopoly.

The current and future labor market with modern business ideology does not seem to match the statement _low birth rate problem_. The problem seems to be elsewhere.

seizethecheese• 9 months ago

The relationship between the job market and employment is not so straightforward as you presume. After all, fewer people means less demand for labor as much as it means more supply. In general a falling population is considered an economic risk.

yanhangyhy32• 9 months ago

Based on my understanding, that’s still the case. I think the problems you mentioned are currently beyond what any government can handle, even one with extremely strong control like China. China is now facing both rising unemployment and a low birth rate. In the past, when China’s birth rate was higher, unemployment was not this high. The fundamental problem is not that there are too many people, but that the economy lacks vitality. Moreover, a declining birth rate will cause systems like pensions and healthcare—which rely on the next generation to support the previous one—to collapse.

hollerith5• 9 months ago

Is the job market too restrictive with maximize profit over maximum knowledge transfer and upkeep?

Victor Shih (China scholar) says that employers in China mostly don't care about profit margins nor do the banks that lend to them.

graemep3• 9 months ago

Recent was this UK having a 1,200,000 plus college graduates and less than 100,000 job placements

The UK is producing too many graduates, often doing low quality courses at low quality universities, who then cannot get the graduate level jobs they aspire to.

The UK does not have enough people to work in many other areas - tradespeople, care workers, doctors and nurses, archeologists, chefs....

shubhamjain2• 9 months ago

Although low birth rates have now become a problem, back then it seemed like a solution.

They haven't, imo. I am from India, and I have been hearing for the last two decades how we have avoided same mistakes as China and the latter is headed for a demographic collapse. China is only marching forward, and focusing more on automation to hedge its bets. While overpopulation in India has choked almost every city in India. I honestly don't know what will happen as more people migrate from rural to urban areas.

India's population will peak in 2065, while China's already has. It's depressing to imagine that 250-300M more people are left to be added before we finally see a decline.

Just like 1970s claim "overpopulation will destroy the planet" turned out to be exaggerated, the modern idea that “a large population is a blessing” feels equally misguided.

GolfPopper2• 9 months ago

Just like 1970s claim "overpopulation will destroy the planet" turned out to be exaggerated

Seems to me like that prediction is pretty on track.

unglaublich• 9 months ago

The nice thing about being a growing, underpopulated country, is that you're very attractive to immigrants. China can just fill the demographic gap with migration policies.

sometimes_all2• 9 months ago

In my opinion, we might have avoided some of the mistakes, but that is still costing us.

The best usually leave the country after getting the prime education India can provide, and support the retirement plans of other countries' aging populations more than their own - the Indian government actively seems to encourage this, looking at how our PM tries to negotiate for more visas during every first-world trip. Even with the demographic dividend, we do not have enough jobs, so the elderly are not supported neither fiscally, nor infrastructure-wise, since old people cannot walk on bad roads or take advantage of non-existent programs anyway. For the younger people, the insane competition makes both work and personal life hell.

Whenever I see videos of China and their cities, and then look out of my window, it makes me both depressed and angry. I still don't understand how India can even be compared to China any more.

yanhangyhy32• 9 months ago

I believe automation can solve this problem. Perhaps the government believes it too. But there are still many people who don’t believe it. I sincerely hope automation can solve this problem.

tossandthrow5• 9 months ago

The main issue with a demographic decline is that fewer people can live of their wealth.

This is in particular a problem for the older generation.

But if you are not a big believer in retirement, then there are no issues with demographic shifts.

coldtea7• 9 months ago

Overpopulation is not the problem of India. Mindset towards public areas and public behavior is - and the very much active in practice caste system, still excluding millions from full participation in all of society.

And inversely, demographic collapse if fertility falls will be a problem, just because it will hit after 2065 doesn't mean it's something to ignore.

simsla2• 9 months ago

European here.

One of the problems is that many of our society's systems are predicated on a growing population. Social security and pensions, for example, are structured not unlike a pyramid scheme: for every old person we should have more than one working young person. People take more than they give. Fixing that will be painful, but possible.

More worrying is how many countries' birth rates have fallen below the replacement rate. Some SE Asian countries are interesting case studies here (Japan, S Korea), but it's not looking good, and much of western Europe is heading in the same direction. Maybe the worry is overblown and populations will eventually stabilize at a lower point, but currently it seems like a declining population will just add to the stressors that are putting people off from having children, so it could just as well keep snowballing.

All that's to say, I don't worry too much about over/underpopulation, but I do worry about a shrinking population.

Dumblydorr• 9 months ago

An inverted population pyramid is a huge problem. What does China do when it has far too few workers and far too many elderly? This is coming for them in the next few decades, a slow moving crisis in demographics.

mensetmanusman2• 9 months ago

China’s economy is transitioning to one of taking care of the elderly.

With a shrinking workforce and more robots, maybe that productivity gain is good enough to stall the inevitable.

Their crazy bad policy decisions resulting in 20% youth unemployment is a risk.

alex_smart• 9 months ago

India’s problems have nothing to do with population and everything to do with complete collapse of all government institutions.

6510• 9 months ago

My thought was that we should develop a good DSL to design pensions. You obviously cant have a formula with more money coming out than going in. Pensions can gradually scale up and down depending on all factors.

It isn't even hard to create. Things currently work like that children's game where each participant has to write the next word in the sentence. No amount of effort or coordination will produce a good novel.

selfmodruntime• 9 months ago

Not to glaze unelected uniparty governments, but this is what you can actually achieve if you don't have to focus on your new election the moment you enter office.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 9 months ago

This.

Also, China has always taken the long view, and has, historically, leveraged experience.

I’m no expert in their culture, and am rather worried about their influence, but I can’t but admire their incredible strategic vision.

Also, as a retiree, I’m rather saddened by some of the discussions, here.

pjc502• 9 months ago

You can achieve a lot of bad things that way too, with nobody to stop you. It's the promise of every totalitarian: free you from all the messiness of having to deal with conflicting opinions.

It is remarkable how well the tradeoff of "you don't need political freedom if the economic growth rate is high enough" works for China, and also previously Korea and Singapore. Even, to a certain extent, Japan - fairly high levels of political freedom, but somehow it's still a one-and-a-half-party state.

Phelinofist2• 9 months ago

I know it sounds insane but I wish Germany had such a stable government that actually DOES something. For as long as I can remember German govs have been absolute dogshit. Not to say the CN gov hasn't done no wrong. But they are moving with incredible speed in the right direction.

HexPhantom5• 9 months ago

Wild how slogans from school can stick with us for life

matheusmoreira2• 9 months ago

I'm envious of China's ability to define long term goals and execute them somewhat competently... In democracies politicians only care about reelection, and most people's voting patterns do not take long term strategy into account. Quite the opposite: short term profits and benefits are favored above all else.

vbezhenar• 9 months ago

That's why democracy is wrong path. Crowd is stupid and easy to manipulate.

There should be hierarchy. 100 men should vote for one who will rule over them. 100 level one rulers should vote for one who will rule over 10 000 men. And so on.

Imagine all Amazon workers to vote for Amazon CEO. It does not happen.

yanhangyhy32• 9 months ago

China’s rare earth strategy was formulated roughly 40 years ago — this in itself is an advantage of a one-party system. Almost all nations that experienced rapid economic takeoff were built on one-party rule, strongman leadership, or authoritarian governance — such as South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and Singapore... Taiwan had Chiang Ching-kuo, South Korea had Park Chung-hee, and Singapore had Lee Kuan Yew. At least in Asia, this pattern seems to hold true.

dzonga• 9 months ago

why would you say xi jinping is dull ? I thought his works on xi jinping thought are enlightened, someone who is pragmatic. btw i'm not chinese so I read these things in english.

yanhangyhy32• 9 months ago

Compare to jiang. jiang is more open and funny. We like to make fun of him before.

wslh• 9 months ago

In Midas World, The Servant of the People, by Frederik Pohl [1] robots gain voting rights and outnumber humans in elections.

Also, in the context of this thread there is a famous quote by Pohl: "Nothing is so good that somebody, somewhere, will not hate it" [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas_World

[2] https://pit.begghilos2.net/Sayings/Laws-Other.html

throw0101c5• 9 months ago

“If you want to get rich, build roads first; have fewer children, plant more trees.”

Having fewer children followed "naturally" as child mortality dropped and women's education and workforce participation rose. You can quite clearly see China's birth rate dropping before the one-child policy was enacted:

* https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/11/20/will-the-...

* https://populationmatters.org/news/2021/06/chinas-changing-c...

Even India, which has also been growing in prosperity, has seen a declining fertility rate without a heavy handed government policy:

* https://archive.is/https://www.economist.com/china/2015/07/1...

Fade_Dance• 9 months ago

If you want to get rich, build roads first; have fewer children, plant more trees

That's funny, because the supposedly widely repeated quote that I heard in the past that stuck with me is the exact opposite message on demographics:

"We have a saying in China to describe this situation –“Wei Fu Xian Lao” that we will get old before we get rich."

Myrmornis• 9 months ago

A very worrying number of people nowadays seem to think that forests are a thing to counter climate change. What is the species composition being planted? Is it appropriate to the location? Reforestation must be about recreating _forest ecosystems_, not about creating the photosynthetic counterpart of a vast fucking solar farm.

AoifeMurphy• 9 months ago

Of course, planting is one thing, maintaining is another. Many areas turn green for a few years and then fade back to desert. The real challenge is building an ecological culture, not just a green map.

jo32• 9 months ago

One more interesting thing: https://english.news.cn/20251022/ab149540692140f3836a60e22dd...

dukeofdoom• 9 months ago

I always wondered why Western democracies want carbon taxes, when just reverting more land back to managed forests, seems like a much more reasoned solution. It would trap carbon, help wild life, and provide fresh air, and jobs in forestry, and renewable resources like wood. Seems to me Carbon Taxes primarily benefit the banks, and grow bureaucracy.

beloch• 9 months ago

How much of this is the result of reversing the deforestation caused by the Great Leap Forward and other anti-nature policies of the mid twentieth century?

It's not a bad thing if this is mostly just restoring forests ravaged by bad policy, but it's a bit odd to compare this reforestation, quantitatively, to what's going on in countries that didn't have a "war against nature".

feverzsj• 9 months ago

They've been doing deforestation for thousands years. The "Yellow" River is one of the results.

swagasaurus-rex• 9 months ago

I think they’re doing a great thing.

My area has seen some wildfire smoke season near the end of summer. It never happened when I was a kid. Now every summer there’s wildfire smoke for several days or several weeks.

The climate appears to be changing and heavily forested areas of midwest US and canada are on fire every summer.

Planting trees could be great for the environment, but without the moisture it could become a tinderbox for wildfires.

blitzar3• 9 months ago

Wildfires are only a problem for the matchboxes filled with trinkets we build adjacent to the pretty trees and live in - the forest likes the cleansing.

graemep3• 9 months ago

How do you know whether that is caused by climate change or worse management of forests.

I suspect many governments are spending less on prevention because they can blame the consequences on climate change - whereas if climate change is increasing the risk they should be spending more on reducing it.

Planting trees could be great for the environment, but without the moisture it could become a tinderbox for wildfires.

Trees also change the climate locally so might be part of the solution for that too.

Stevvo2• 9 months ago

I'm curious how much of it is fake; at-least some of it is. To get financial incentives from the central government, local governments have pained rocks green and planted plastic trees to make it look like they planted trees in satellite photos.

Liftyee2• 9 months ago

Interesting... where can I read more about this?

Stevvo2• 9 months ago

https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1159907.shtml

Trees pop up on Chinese social media all the time, the rocks were a particularly egregious case.

HexPhantom5• 9 months ago

I do wonder about the quality of those forests. Monoculture plantations aren't the same as biodiverse ecosystems. Still, if the goal is to stabilize soil, reduce dust storms, and push back deserts, it's a step in the right direction

ksynwa• 9 months ago

Wondering if I should also pitch in a backhanded compliment for doing something good or if we already have enough of those in this thread.

carabiner2• 9 months ago

NYTimes in 4 days: "Analysts mention that the radical forestry has military applications for Chinese forces training for a potential Western European conflict."

casey2• 9 months ago

It's all desert forests though.

shadyKeystrokes• 9 months ago

Give me less articles more GPS coordinates. I distrust the digital tree pulp and want to see the original tree pulp.

China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990

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