

Almost 1 billion trees planted, in a single day - vijayr
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8257563.stm

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Syama
To put this in perspective, the daily wage for planting and protecting these
trees, 100 rupees, can buy a weeks worth of vegetables. If they offered a
similar plan in the US i would want to participate :)

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skolor
To put that in perspective: The daily wage for planting trees is roughly $2
US. Or that vegetables are ~$0.70 per day.

It slightly unfortunate, but I doubt it could scale to work in the US. That
would come out to paying each individual ~ $30 per day (guessing that an
equivelant amount of vegetables would be roughly $5 per day, not based on any
hard numbers), so this project would cost some place in the range of $1
million per day, before any kind of overhead, just for paying all of the
people.

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bkovitz
Also, in the U.S., the poor wouldn't buy vegetables, they'd buy fast food.

Maybe there's a "do-gooder" entrepreneurial opportunity: show poor people how
much fun vegetables can be.

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araneae
Sadly, planting trees does little to help with the global warming problem.
Flora are only temporary sinks for carbon; as soon as the tree dies it will go
back up into the atmosphere. Since we're releasing carbon from fossils, what
we really need to do to restore the carbon cycle is put the carbon back into
fossils. Sadly, this takes a really long time.

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kierank
_as soon as the tree dies it will go back up into the atmosphere_

That implies combustion which doesn't occur.

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radu_floricica
Plus a lot of a tree's mass is in the roots. Wouldn't be surprised if it would
be over 50%.

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radu_floricica
I wonder over say 10 years how profitable this is. Fruit bearing trees can't
really be a bad bet, and considering how low the pay is... In a few years the
income from this might completely finance it - which is probably what they
should aim for from the beginning. Over all, a very nice scheme.

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d_c
I hope this spurs some entrepreneurial growth in the affected areas, such as
gardening services.

