I planted some thousands of trees in Iceland in the noughties. I believe the program was funded by Alcoa to offset the carbon produced by an aluminum plant they were building on the island. They paid farmers to plant trees on unused land, and the farmers hired and hosted us to do the work. It was an amazing way to see the country. We mostly planted larch, birch and alder from what I remember. It is a very beautiful country, like an arctic Hawaii.
Are those trees native to Iceland? I would hope that they aren't just trying to increase forest cover using species that have the potential to be invasive.
I think by "birch" they mean the Icelandic birch[1], which is the only tree that's actually native to Iceland. The others (Siberian larch, Alder variants) were probably previously endemic, even if they aren't "truly" native.
Yes that's correct re the Birch. I believe the alder was what we call Slide Alder, which is useful for holding down the soil and preventing erosion on steeper areas. Not sure which Larch it was.
the science shows dramatic changes in temperatures and rainfall in the far North. Planting new tree stands certainly ought not be bound by a "pure native" perspective, in these times. While you and I split hairs, not a small amount of money is being invested in genetically engineered flora of all kinds, boasting that it is "climate change ready." A much bigger problem than "pure native" to my way of thinking.
People get all twisted up over the idea of genetically engineered plants breaking out into the wild though. But, once we're staring down the barrel of the climate apocalypse it'd be cool to go nuts with genetically engineered plants like: Here's a giant redwood that grows 10x faster, filters particulates out of the air with its needles and is designed to extract carbon from the air as fast as possible.
Might need both. Also lots of insect-based nutrient paste, made with your daily water ration (helps mask the unpleasant mineral and chlorine taste of the water so you don't dehydrate in the 40 C heat).
designer grass in different colors; fish genes in oranges; new mammals as pets designed to sell.. people know very well that is what is going on.. pure BS to make a buck, like "fast growing things that live 600 years" .. like fake medicine, but worse because it breeds. zero confidence in MBAs and shysters making this a GMO business to "save the planet"
ok - better, plants whose seeds die instead of refreshing; plants that are allegedly immune to only MY brand of poison and won't hurt anything; trees with patents.
The fact that bugs me is that artificial selection is “fine”. If randomness produces a mutation, that’s kosher, but if man makes the change, that’s Dangerous.
If man was making said changes at the rate random useful mutations tend to occur in nature I don't think anyone would be concerned. And we typically do more than just tweak a genetic component in a single individual and see how it fares against existing populations - if the change suits our short term goals, we'll do everything we can to ensure that becomes the dominant variant, often destroying the genetic diversity that provides long term durability in the process.
Any mutation could be "dangerous." We're just used to a system that produces mutations randomly so we estimate the danger to be in the background. Targeted changes also can produce unknown side effects, which to my understand are what non-GMO folks fear. Toxicity, missing nutrients, etc. could certainly be issues with adjustments, but I don't think the right approach is to fear so much as to attack things two fold: test the biological systems outputs, and learn the biological systems outputs sufficiently to simulate impacts.
Absolutely, because the trees non-ecologists pick for rapid reforestation happen to grow aggressively and they tend to out compete the local species. They tend to pick either rapidly growing species, or particularly hardy ones. Both characteristics make removing them after introduction difficult.
Hawaii has a huge problem with this, but also California. The eucalyptus trees they imported from Australia have had the terrible affect of making wildfires in California even worse. There's also a horrible negative feedback loop because the Eucalyptus is adapted to recover quickly from such fires.
"It has been estimated that 70% of the energy released through the combustion of vegetation in the Oakland fire was due to eucalyptus.[41] In a National Park Service study, it was found that the fuel load (in tons per acre) of non-native eucalyptus woods is almost three times as great as native oak woodland."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus#Adaptation_to_fire
Note that reforestation up here is a different game than in places like California (read: "warmer locations more amicable to life"). Species that survive here mostly already existed and trees grow very, very slowly. For the most part, we'll welcome anything that will survive, and turns out (big surprise) that our existing species are the best at surviving here. An exception (as in, a newly introduced potentially invasive species) is the Californian Poplar, which was imported in the 40s, but that isn't really used much for reforestation anymore.
There are notable examples of invasive species in the non-tree category though, the Lupine probably being the most controversial. It's been used to reclaim and create soil in sandy areas and in only a few decades since being imported, the blue of the flowering lupine absolutely dominates some areas. I think it's pretty, but it's aggressive as all hell.
> The eucalyptus trees they imported from Australia have had the terrible affect of making wildfires in California even worse.
I watched the eucalyptus stands burning in the Oakland Hills fire. They go up like torches. I've never understood the rationale for keeping them. Owls really like them though.
It does say in the article that 20% nest in the pine and 16% in cypress trees.
> His theory is that the agricultural practices of early settlers, which cleared trees, created a population explosion of the milkweed that is the host plant of monarchs. More milkweeds resulted in more monarchs and monarchs began to migrate in response to population pressure, he believes.
So it sounds like it was all pine in that area, deforestation created an environment for monarchs, and they moved in. Monarchs are not native to the area, so I'm not sure that they can be used as a defence to keep all the eucalyptus.
I don't think there's much of a rationale; nobody I knew in CA liked eucalyptus trees, they just are everywhere. I had heard they wanted to make railroad ties from them.
I really, I mean really, really like the slender ones with the almost white bark, and the limbs that branch off with the skin-like wrinkles on their undersides. The trunks and lower limbs remind me of the human form. And I like the broccoli-like crests of leaves, that while poor at providing shade, are just so doggone stylish.
There are other Eucalyptus trees that are massive and perhaps less attractive, that I still find awe inspiring because of their massive size.
I did not know that they were such a problem in wildfires, despite being born in and living nearly the whole of my life in Southern California. You learn something every day.
The North American Black Locust tree, a continental native tree, of the legume family, is considered invasive within North America, in New York and Connecticut and Massachusetts and the rest of New England, mid-west prairie areas, and the west of the continent.
Its original range, before European arrival, is believed to be in Appalachian Mountains, Pennsylvania to Georgia, and the Ozarks.
It has been used as a pioneer species to restore treeless land in other continents, including Europe, Asia and Africa and Australia. Spain has used them to restart forest in desertified areas, for example.
Buckthorn in the US is very resilient, crowds out other species of both undergrowth and trees, and is a host to a number of pests such as aphids and fungi which will then attack crops and native species.
You can't simply cut it down, it requires a nasty chemical applied to the stump, or to be completely pulled out by the roots. They grow tightly packed together, so clearing out even a small area is best done with a team of people.
It also can absolutely grow to tree size, and I’ve found areas with a lot of buckthorn have significantly more mosquitoes. Presumably they have more cover so aren’t as likely to be eaten.
If I were a billionaire I’d fund a secret program to create a disease to wipe out buckthorn. I hate what it’s done to Minnesota’s forests.
it’s not a tree but kudzu is a pretty famous example. it was imported from japan (i believe —may be mistaken on that point) into the American Deep South for erosion control, it quickly grew in the warm, wet environs and now literally smothers nearly all native vegetation. Its incredibly invasive and difficult to eradicate.
Yes, why wouldn't it be? Any non native species can disrupt an ecosystem in any number of ways. For trees for example, they can shade or crowd out native species.
Because trees tend to grow very slowly, which should mean they should be fairly easy to control. Not to mention the useful wood if any population culling needs to occur.
Many trees grow as fast as weeds in the first few years of their life. A single tree can output thousands to millions of seeds in a year. Something can be easy to control when there's 10 of them and impossible when there's a billion of them.
Add to that some tree species can be nearly impossible to kill. Cutting them off at the ground does not work, the roots must also be dug up. Any green braches left on the ground can take root and form a new tree.
Typically the Japanese knotweed is considered as highly invasive and a pest in Europe. Almost impossible to get rid off due to its fast growth and deep root system.
It grows quickly. I’ve never heard of its wood having any use. While you’re cutting it down, vibration causes its seeds to fall and they sprout later. And you have to burn/poison the stump or else that regrows too.
Honestly trying to clarify... Are you aware that altering existing, stable ecosystems has potentially massive, unpredictable, long-term costs that other humans will have to pay, potentially far outweighing any of the economic benefits of the original human interference?
This is pretty basic history, with endless examples of human societies that took short-term gains by screwing with ecosystems for more complex than they could understand... Only to leave behind horrific costs for their descendants and neighbors? And that some of those costs proved so high that they wiped out the societies that came up short, when the bill came due?
Are you aware of the countless famines, wars, wildfires, floods, and other disasters that happened as a result? Do you know the body counts of these choices?
If you're honestly just ignorant of all this history, I'm gonna suggest that you start by reading Mark Reisner's masterwork:
If you can at least digest those, whether you agree or disagree with their theses--then I think we'll be ready to have a useful discussion about the wisdom of human interference in existing stable ecosystems.
Lay off skittyboo; doesn't seem like you are "honestly" trying to clarify anything.
Have you considered that you might be making a wildly inaccurate assumption that island ecology tends toward homeostasis? Does it bother you so much that someone might believe that disruption and wild fluctuation might be much more typical of ecosystems, even without the intervention of Homo sapiens sapiens?
Your question has an obvious, widely accepted answer... Whether that answer is right or wrong, your failure to reference it comes off as deliberately provocative.
And by your response, it seema pretty obvious: Yes, you knew full well the answer before you sarcastically asked your orignal question.
If you ask questions in bad faith, using an argumentative tone--then why are you surprised when I respond to you in the same fashion?
If you want better replies, you should try writing a better post, in the first place.
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...
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...
> Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
Oh my god yes. I'm battling (and probably losing the fight) the dreaded Box Elder Maple. The thing grows like a weed and if you cut it down, it just grows back even larger. You either need to cut it down to a stump (and likely grind the stump to nothing), or cut it and poison what's left so it dies for good.
In the mountain west, the Chinese Elm has exploded. In my neighborhood, 95% of the trees that grew naturally (i.e. they are established, and a human didn't plant them), are Chinese Elm. If it weren't for homeowners planting alternates, I suspect it would be Cottonwood's along the canals, and Chinese Elms everywhere else. Those things spring up everywhere, even cracks of sidewalk where there's no dirt! And their roots go aggressive and deep, and are very hard to get rid of once established.
There are no trees on the island at all, barely an ecosystem, they clear cut the island about 500 years ago and nothing has been able to reestablish in the harsh conditions. Most of the island is rock, some of it covered in lichen, some covered in a very hardy moss. It's important to be respectful of the ecosystem, but also, iceland is a barren rocky island and you need some sort of flora to bootstrap a productive ecosystem. The tree planting efforts have been necessary.
Iceland's tourism marketing department is super impressive; I see a barren rocky hellscape (I've been there twice, both times as emergency layovers due to XYZ airline problems) but people who buy into the ads consider it "beautiful and otherworldly", I think, because there are no trees there besides the ones planted in the cities. The bus trip from the new airport to the capital is about 30 minutes, other than Craters of the Moon national park in idaho I don't think i've seen a more barren stretch of land, especially so close to a major population center.
I've seen the entire portion of the island visible from the ring road. It is absolutely beautiful and otherworldly... if you count the spectacular waterfalls and fjordlands as "beautiful" and the barren wastes of Mars and Venus as "otherworldly." If you're particularly inebriated you might see miles and miles of sheep, with no humans in sight, as "alien." If you're from New Zealand this might not be novel, but I'm not.
There's nothing quite like hiking for miles before looking down and realizing that you've been walking on a dense two-dimensional mat of berry bushes and spiral-shaped alder trees. It's quite possible that you saw trees but did not recognize them as such -- from a distance, this "flat forest" looks a lot like moss. Not much can survive annual meters-deep snows, which is one of the reasons I'm uncharacteristically flippant about invasive species (the other reason being the sheep population).
"nothing has been able to reestablish in the harsh conditions"
AFAIK the main factor in those "harsh conditions" is sheep farming. Sheep on Iceland are kept pretty much without any fences. They will eat saplings and small tees. There is an amazing photo somewhere of a little island in a river that's in essence covered in forest. Everything around it is mostly moss as you call out.
Another factor, especially on the Rejkyanes peninsula towards the airport is that this is also a very young part of the island. It's mostly still lava rock. This isn't representative of other parts of Iceland.
Source: visited 5 times and travelled the island extensively.=
It is slightly unfair to say there's barely an ecosystem. If all you've seen is Reykjanes between Keflavík and Reykjavík then sure it might look like a bleak, moss covered, rocky desert. But the thing is that different regions can vary quite drastically in their level of vegetation. You might have farmland on one side of a mountain but on the other side a vast sandy desert.
But, to be fair, if your measure of a fertile landscape is a forest then those are relatively few and far between. Personally I tend to feel a bit claustrophobic when there are trees boxing me in on all sides and I can't see the mountains. :)
It sounds like you have never actually visited Iceland as a tourist or resident intentionally. It’s a beautiful place, perhaps not best judged on emergency layovers.
Planting forests increases the overall amount of carbon stored in biomass, but the forestry program is also designed to harvest trees for use as fuel or building material (from the main article linked in the post):
> "In the meantime, Iceland’s forests have begun to produce wood for a small timber market. Forests planted between 1950-1970 are now supplying around 5,000 square metres of wood per year: miniscule compared to industries abroad, but a start. The Icelandic birch, Siberian larch, Sitka spruce, lodgepole pine and balsam poplar are producing quality wood of equal or superior quality to that which Iceland imports from abroad. Yet an overwhelming 80% of the trees felled are burned as fuel in silicon smelting."
Iceland has a silicon production industry, which relies on geothermal electricity interestingly enough. The wood is included to grab the oxygen from silicon dioxide to produce elemental silicon metal (being emitted as carbon dioxide). Overall, if they could eliminate the coal from the mix, this would be a carbon-neutral fossil-fuel free silicon production system:
> "Silicon metal is extracted from quartzite, aided by the addition of wood chip and coal, in electric arc furnaces at temperatures of around 2,000 degrees Celsius. The new plant obtains its key raw material quartzite primarily from PCC’s own quarry in Zagórze, Poland. However, the related logistical costs are more than outweighed by the advantages of electricity procurement. And the dust emissions generated during silicon metal production are almost completely removed from the ambient air by high-performance filter systems installed in the PCC plant. Taken as a whole, therefore, the production process offers exceptional sustainability credentials."
I have been donating some money every month to an Icelandic tree planting project to offset my carbon emissions after reading an article on HN about how the Vikings cut all trees of the island. I find the numbers fascinating :
> Forests and bushes now cover over 2% of Iceland, Vísir reports. That number may not seem like much, but since 1990, the surface area covered by forest or shrubs in Iceland has increased more than six times over – from 7,000 hectares to 45,000. In 20 years, the number is expected to be 2.6%.
And from another article :
> The Forest Service intends to deliver six million plants this year, says Þröstur, which is equivalent to pre-crash levels of production. “It was around five million last year, and four million the year before that. This is a rapid increase. Then we need seven to eight million next year, which we may not manage, and ten to twelve in 2025.”
Frankly I find both of these really hard to wrap my head around. Not like football fields or olympic swimming pools are better, but the country of Finland being ¾ covered gives me a much better sense of scale than x million hectolometers.
Probably that only works for people that are from nearby Finland and/or into geography, though. For huge scales like these, I'm thinking degrees might theoretically be a better unit, since it's easier to visualize a fraction of the globe (presuming people know there's 360 degrees around the globe) than picturing hundreds of thousands of some other unit.
If the goal is to sequester as much CO2 as possible, it's much better to support tropical rainforest than planting trees near the arctic circle. The Coalition of Rainforest Nations is consistently cited as one of the most impactful NGO's in terms of carbon saved.
I'm all for planting more Icelandic trees, but I don't think you're getting as much bang for your buck as you could.
There are 8 billion people on the planet. “Hey, everyone stop what you’re doing, let’s all do this” is quite ineffective. We don’t need to stop planting trees in Iceland in order to save the rain forests.
While I appreciate the irony of this comment, you actually have a point. I would love the ability to personally sponsor the energy transition. Privately subsidized renewable energy projects could be a game changer. Anybody here done much research into this?
Again, I think planting Icelandic trees is awesome! Just since OP specifically mentioned "offset my carbon emissions" I thought I'd shill one of my favorite ways of doing that :)
My ancestors on my “civilised” country uprooted an tore down all the trees and forests, most of the countryside is farmland. And now that we have destroyed our forests we go “no no, preserve the rainforests”… so we can keep planting wheat?
I wonder if there's a charity that will pay for / subsidize heat pumps in Europe this winter. The war in Ukraine is an actual existential crisis for many countries over there, and ending gas imports is the easiest way for them to defend against future Russian invasion.
I'd expect the politicians to be launching a WWII-style industrial mobilization to ramp up heat pump installations. Even if they can't switch away from coal / natural gas this year, typical heat pump coefficients of power are well above 4. Going from 100% gas furnaces to 100% heat pumps powered off of natural gas peaker plants would more than halve natural gas demand! (And, in coming years, the natural gas plants could be replaced with greener options.)
Note that in moderate/colder countries (taking the Netherlands as an example), heat pumps are not a solution when your house is not up to modern insulation standards. Which is true for almost all houses older than say 15-20 years.
The insulation needs to happen first for those houses, and this can be a massive undertaking costing tens of thousands of euros. The next best thing is a hybrid heat pump.
Although there's some subsidies here and there, you're very much right that we need something way more aggressive. For the houses I mentioned (which is almost all), a total sum of ~50K EUR is just not something the average family can afford. Those that do probably up their mortgage to finance it.
Also take into account the shortages. I have a family member that installs heat pumps, he orders them by the dozens. Currently he's afraid to place orders as the delivery time is a minimum of 6 months with no guaranteed final date nor is the price fixed. It's "6K but we will charge you whatever it will actually be when we deliver". "I don't know when it is coming or what it will cost" is not a great message towards home owners.
Sure for the purpose of sequestering CO2 it may not be the most "economically efficient" but in general attempting to restore Iceland back to the pre-settlement forest coverage of 40% seems a worthwhile goal in of itself.
Agreed. I’m also of the impression that cutting down the trees led to intense soil erosion (winds and rains washing the topsoil off of the relatively flat island). In addition to minimizing soil erosion, I also wonder if forests will help regenerate topsoil.
Also, I wouldn’t mind retiring early and doing some tree planting in Iceland or similar volunteer work to pay my way around a country.
It’s complicated. Iceland is less corrupt than many nations with tropical rainforests, so your dollars are more likely to actually be used as you intended. There is very little logging industry competing against you and virtually no poaching so your effort is more durable, too.
It’s hard to quantify these things and get a conclusive answer on which is better; I think we can leave it at “both are good.”
When I was in Iceland, they told me the reason they don't have forests anymore is that the vikings and other later settlers logged it. (Of course, a random horse tour person isn't the best source so I could very well be misinformed.)
you were correctly informed, it was a combination of early settlers logging heavily plus long forest regrow times due to sparse sunlight plus sheep overgrazing saplings.
If the goal is to sequester CO2 then its not enough to just grow trees, you also need to prevent them from being cut down and burned. One thing that I would argue in favor of using iceland and other areas around the arctic circle is that people has demonstrated in the last several decades that it isn't economical worth to grow and farm the land for anything, which include trees. That might then mean that people will leave the trees alone for a long enough time that the sequester of CO2 matters.
if your only metric is CO2, you miss the forest for the trees ;)
the problem with climate change is the wild swings in weather - if you want to stabilize and buffer these swings, you need to maximize biomass. having a mature forest ecosystem acting as a carbon/nitrogen buffer does a lot of good, but in a way that is difficult to measure
I think we get tunnel vision on CO2 ppm because it's a metric with a nice clean causative effect (greenhouse), but more energy on earth is not what's actually causing us grief, we've destroyed most of the mature ecosystems and decimated total biomass, and we are surprised that this causes issues with the total ecosystem because we consider atmospheric problems somehow unrelated to all the living things participating in chemical cycles with that atmosphere. we need more buffer wherever we can get it, and I hate to see someone poo-pooing ecosystem restoration in favor of carbon sequestration.
Carbon sequestration is a technological problem so technology people will absolutely love it - unlike something as mundane and boring as planting trees or breeding frogs.
personally my favorite is coral propagation, just take some coral and split it into smaller chunks and let those chunks grow up - they are self replicators, what more could a techie want?
No, because as soon as a tree is dead it will begin to rot and decompose (there's fungi everywhere in the air that is just waiting for a piece of juicy fresh tree to digest), thereby releasing CO2, methane and other decomposition gases.
The only way to sequester CO2 using trees is keeping the trees alive (or blasting them with chemicals to prevent rotting).
If you bury the trees reasonably deep, that CO2 takes a very long time to get to the surface (like tens of thousands of years) so it’s good enough for our purposes.
You can also weigh it down and sink it to the bottom of oceans that don't have wood eating organisms. The Baltic and the Black Sea are the ones I know.
But of course, the solution you mention is the simplest: Treat the wood with one of the several known ways to make it not break down, and leave it in big piles somewhere.
I mean, it worked for the Carboniferous, until some cheeky fungus figured out how to digest lignin. But we had a nice 60 million year run, and got lots of useful hydrocarbons out of it, so hey!
Truly bioengineering at a galactic scale. In a hundred million years, geological processes will have turned your polymers into some cool new exotic fuel source.
This "my particular country doesn't import most of its cattle from Brazil" doesn't mean that you're not creating demand and perhaps also influencing the market in a way that someone's beef is. (Collectively, obviously.) The argument sounds similar to "but my country isn't polluting, it's China where we order all our stuff!" And, yeah, animal feed like others already said. It's all not quite as simple as "source? I don't believe I'm part of the problem by creating demand for meat here" coming from the country where the average person contributes the most to global warming
The OP was clearly saying that the importation of beef into America was causing clearing of the Amazon, when the link is a bit more complicated. Yes, some things are a bit fungible in the world economy, some trade tariffs encourage things like soya from Brazil for food etc. But just nailing the US for it when the EU, Japan, and China is just as culpable is silly.
> The OP was clearly saying that the importation of beef into America was causing clearing of the Amazon
I don't see them mentioning the Amazon or hinting that the USA's imports are contributing there, but maybe I'm misreading their comment then (also when re-reading it now I don't see what you're referring to). Oh, or are you referring to the link they posted rather than their comment itself?
"The easiest way to support tropical rainforest is to eat less beef. The amazon is cleared for cattle grazing, much of which is imported into America."
In addition to what ipqk said, a large amount of deforestation is for growing soy. Approximately 77% of global soy production [2] is used for producing animal feed. It's much more environmentally friendly to just get eat soy directly, rather than eat meat, because animals are very inefficient at converting food they eat to food that people can eat [2].
quick search for Beef (carcass weight) per month, international trade with the USA, for Dec. 2021, shows Canada, Mexico as number one and two, but Brazil as a close number three. In that month and year, the trade with Australia is very low.
In January 2022 alone, Brazilian beef imports registered a more than 500% increase.
Record high U.S. beef prices and drought-impacted supplies in Australia, where the U.S. would otherwise source beef, have also contributed to growing imports of processing-grade beef from Brazil
Just a note that two of the best things you can do for your own carbon emissions is to compost all organic material instead of throwing it out and planting native plants, trees, shrubs, and reducing the size of your lawn while also mowing what's left less frequently.
If everyone did it, it would mean double digit percentages in reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. And they are two things everyone can do today and is actually actionable. Native plants have far more benefits than just carbon capture. And by the way, decomposing organic waste in landfills emits methane, which is several more times potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So yes, it matters.
It would not result in a double digit reduction. It would result in a tiny reduction. Please source it if you think residential compost would have a double digit impact. I honestly suspect it might be less than 1% of household emissions.
It’s hard to convince people who have made up their own mind. I’ve posted links here before. It’s a complicated matter, but there is material that addresses this. Just search “compost greenhouse emissions”.
And note that my statement also included restoring native plants. We cannot survive on agriculture without pollinators, and given that forest cover has been reduced from around 70% to 20% in less than a century, it’s not hard to believe. Just look around you and notice the expanse of lawns around you. Lawns do almost nothing. They don’t support wildlife, pollinators, and they don’t capture carbon.
And like I said, this is something people can do now. People can’t magically start driving electric cars fueled by green energy or start driving substantially less or rework city and nation transportation infrastructure. It’s actually debatable how much electric cars will reduce emissions. I think it’s not much. Same for so-called green energy.
The benefits of composting and retiring native plants are undeniable.
Which means that you should prioritize it relative to cycling instead of driving, not ignore it entirely.
(More concretely: individuals cycle, while household units generally compost together. A household of 4 produces a nontrivial amount of compostable waste and diverting it can be a significant ecological outcome, especially if it's replacing purchases of topsoil or artificial fertilizer. It also makes taking the trash out more pleasant, since it doesn't spend days rotting indoors before being tossed to the curb.)
My household drives 0%, because we live in a major city. I don't even have a valid drivers' license. I already bike or take public transit to work every day.
> If you’re spending your limited time and effort on 2% measures we’ve all already lost.
We're talking about one measure, one that's specifically coextensive with managing your waste (assuming you don't throw your trash into a pile in the corner of your room). It takes me no extra time to throw a banana peel in the compost bin instead of the trash can; they're right next to each other.
From a quick search (not some verified peer reviewed source deep dive), transportation seems to be about 30% and food 17% of USA household emissions. Calling it 1% is marginalizing the impact people can have with a very simple change.
Also note that buying a different product in the supermarket is an entirely different order of magnitude than changing your life around so that you can cycle to work without less free time / degrading quality of life. I'd argue there's sense to recommending doing low hanging fruit.
This probably depends on the quality and volume of your paper waste. If it's junk mail (weather treated, bleached and dyed), then putting it in your compost is likely to do more harm than good. On the other hand, if it's mostly minimally processed cardboard, you shred it and mix it into your food waste[1].
Most of us live in capitalist societies, where it is ingrained into people that capital can solve all of our problems & that short term capital gain is more important than anything else. This is a case where it will not, since we can't buy our way to a new planet. :(
As a sidenote: "Carbon footprint" as a concept is mostly about industry gaslighting consumers. The original intent was to divert attention from industrial policy to consumer choice. Unfortunately the consumer has very little choice all in all as our economy runs on fossil fuels and individual choice matters very little [0].
"Carbon footprint" was originally invented by the public relations agency Ogilvy & Mather for BP as a concept to divert attention from industry to individuals.
That's not to say that public pressure is not a good thing. It is. But the actual causal effect it has for a better future is in the form of creating political sentiment. Individual carbon economy is mostly about promoting a political sentiment via signaling.
But generally it's a fools errand trying to scientifically balance your "carbon footprint" since this was not an engineering concept to start with. If it makes you feel good to plant trees do it! Trees are awesome. Buying less stuff you don't need is also always good I think. For example I use my cell phones until something irrevocably gives up and drive my current car as long as possible (generally making a new car is always more resource consuming than driving the current one I think).
[0] For example Vaclaw Smil "How the world really works" discusses our fossil fuel based economy at length
The article claims that a PR campaign "popularized" the term "carbon footprint" in 2000. That's pretty vague and I'm not going to dispute it. The article doesn't claim BP coined the phrase.
In German, it's more common to refer to an ecological footprint, its usage which goes back to at least 1992, and it wasn't coined by a PR company, but by very straight laced environmentalists.
Ah yes, the obligatory "we don't have a responsibility, that's just a BP invention from the 90s". It's always the evil bigcorps, of course.
I don't know whether BP falsified the evidence here, but everything kinda points towards that it really is the consumers that drive demand.
> generally it's a fools errand trying to scientifically balance your "carbon footprint"
How would you, then, unscientifically solve climate change if we aren't supposed to take individual action to bring our own footprint to net zero, encourage others to do the same, and bring about societal change using market pressure and all that?
> If it makes you feel good to plant trees do it! Trees are awesome.
But if the "you" in this sentence is being made to feel good for the wrong reasons, isn't that dishonest? Shouldn't we be looking at what is actually effective use of your money, and not let people fall for feel-good tree planting only for them to find out ten years down the line that their hard-earned money went into /dev/null and they should have done (and could have been told about) something like meat reduction or solar panels instead?
> How would you, then, unscientifically solve climate change if we aren't supposed to take individual action to bring our own footprint to net zero, encourage others to do the same, and bring about societal change using market pressure and all that?
The simple answer is to vote, and if you can spare the time/money/effort to go and become political active.
Removing coal/oil/natural gas plants won't occur without political will. We need political will to build out rail infrastructure, regulating air/boat fuels, changing subsidies for fossil fuels into emission free alternatives, prioritize bike/pedestrian infrastructure, and so on.
Right now we had politicians in EU voting that natural gas is "green", driving primarily by a specific political party in Germany, and now the same people are turning on coal and oil power plants. Societal change need to start with replacing people in power that view fossil fuel as a tool to be used rather than something that should be left in the ground. No individual action can get near to undo the damage that those politicians are doing by allowing fossil fuels to be burned.
Gas makes sense as a reliable backup power generation if you are intent on building wind/solar. This is still a net positive since hopefully you dont need that much and its better than currently used coal/oil.
Ofcourse if you get your gas from a not so friendly imperialistic autocrat who decides to go full in on military territorial expansion and uses gas as a economic weapon you are screwed and need to do whatever you can and is necessary.
If you intend to grow tress in order to offset the gas burned as "backup power generation" then you will run out of land, and given the fact that climate change is already here and doing harm, there isn't land enough to both combat the harm done in the past and offset harm done today.
Gas is a terrible for backup for wind/solar, especially further up north. Even in countries who in optimal weather can have 100% energy from wind (Denmark reached this a while back), gas and other fossil fuel power plants are still the single highest source of emissions by a large margin. Wind operate on average around 40-60%, which mean that half the energy used has to be sourced elsewhere. When ~50% of your energy comes from "backup", then the word "backup" looses its meaning, and that is in fairly good situation where wind has been built out to have 100% capacity.
I could see an argument for gas if it was used less than 1%, and with a decrease use as the grid expanded their capacity, but that is not the reality we got in northern Europe. Instead we see an increase in fossil fuels usage each year. With increase use we also get increased prices, with energy prices being exceptional high and rising. Politically this is a terrible loss for everyone except those investing into fossil fuels, and in the current economical downturn, fossil fuel companies are doing very well at the moment.
> Ah yes, the obligatory "we don't have a responsibility, that's just a BP invention from the 90s". It's always the evil bigcorps, of course.
They didn't say that.
> How would you, then, unscientifically solve climate change if we aren't supposed to take individual action to bring our own footprint to net zero, encourage others to do the same, and bring about societal change using market pressure and all that?
The individual action here is minor. Market pressure can work but only in certain circumstances. They already suggested working on political sentiment, since laws can do a lot here to tax or force certain methods.
> But if the "you" in this sentence is being made to feel good for the wrong reasons, isn't that dishonest? Shouldn't we be looking at what is actually effective use of your money [...]
I'm pretty sure the person you're responding to is also an advocate for effective use of money, specifically by focusing on the wider changes and not focusing much on the carbon footprint concept.
But you don't have to spend all your money on improving the world as much as possible.
Consumers cannot decarbonize the economy by their choice because fossil fuels are used in everything at some point in their value chain.
It’s not about will you fly or take the train. The food we eat, the clothes we wear - everything has fossil fuel inputs at some point.
One can choose to consume less. Buy second hand etc. Then the fossil inputs in mining, transport, farming and whatnot will not be repeated.
Consumer choice electricity? You can’t choose non-fossil based electricity unless someone has invested large amounts of capital in e.g wind power.
The only thing that can affect things this large is industrial policy which again in democratic countries needs political support.
That’s why consumer carbon footprint is gaslighting. The individual choise does not exist, and trying to spin the carbon economy narrative towards consumer responsibility was a backhanded attempt to delay the energy transition which only the war in Ukraine launched to a better trajectory.
I was not suggesting people spend all of their money planting trees. I was thinking it in the context that sometimes people want to do something symbolic with extra cash that makes them feel better. It was not intended as a moral imperitive.
this is not the whole story -- a Swiss do-gooder in the San Francisco Bay Area had a "Carbon Footprint" project running for quite a while (still?) .. he was nerdy and sincere. His close staff certainly were sincere. If there was someone taking Oil money, they didn't show it.
Plenty of well meaning people want to do better personally and don’t realize that they’re shifting the discussion to a damaging frame. It happens all over politics!
I don't really know and I've been wondering for a while. HN might be the best place to get an informed answer.
Here is my reasoning. Say I give enough to plant 10 trees a month. In 10 years that's 1,200 trees. Let's say half of them die, we're left with 600. Assuming a tree absorb 1 ton of CO2 throughout its life, that 600 tons. I live in a place where CO2 emissions per capita are about 6 tons a year (check for yourself here and don't forget to compare with the US https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis... ).
According to this back of the enveloppe calculation after 10 years I would have planted enough trees to offset 100 years of carbon emissions.
I just "bought" 21 trees as a gift to someone (to be planted in Denmark, not Iceland). This amount supposedly offsets what the average Danish person emits in a month according to the organisation I bought it from. Not sure where you're from, but the average American emits something like 2.5 times what the average Dane does, so that would work out to ~60 trees that need to planted monthly (if you're American). Obviously, your mileage may vary.
In any case, it really puts into perspective how messed up our continued use of fossil fuels is.
Just found this estimate 'the average tree absorbs an average of 10 kilograms, or 22 pounds, of carbon dioxide per year for the first 20 years.' My quick calculation of 1 ton of CO2 being absorbed is off by a factor of five then (200kg over 20 years).
There are also islands in croatia and all over the med that are barren from venetian shipbuilding centuries ago as well. Shipbuilding stripped a lot of forests in europe.
I just came from a trip to Iceland and most of the country had no trees. Some corners had a little, there were also obvious plantations. There was one place that had old forest and was in other respects very magical: Ásbyrgi Canyon. Just downstream from Dettifoss which was an insane experience by itself.
From what I have gathered the biggest obstacle to tree regrowth in Iceland are sheep which can roam anywhere in the island for I think 4 months in the year and just eat saplings.
Obviously the sheep farming industry does not want to hear about limiting their herding areas and you can guess the result.
I just came from a trip there too. Took a week to road trip around the island and it was an experience that's for sure.
Before that we had visited the redwoods in California and those absolutely dwarfed our trees here in the midwest of US (Iowa specifically) and made us feel like all the trees here were just tiny, but our trip to Iceland and their lack of trees made us feel good about our small trees.
Like everyone else said, it's easy. We had 2 people who didn't speak perfect English and one could understand us, just struggled speaking it, and another just straight up didn't speak or understand English.
Went to the witchcraft and sorcery museum and the girl who was working the counter spoke perfect English and even sounded American and she said to us "Oh Americans, where ya from?!" and we told her and she goes "Oh cool, I'm American too!" and we followed up "Oh cool where you from?" she said Colorado, then laughed and said nah she's Icelandic but loved pulling that joke on Americans.
I really hope—for the sake of the reforest efforts—that this changes in the near future. The sheep industry in Iceland is way too big, and not compatible with the climate goals of the Icelandic government. The reason reforesting is not quicker is that wild gracing is such a holy rights for farmers that plenty of potential areas for reforesting, are just graced away.
The current habit of wild gracing is making reforesting much harder then it needs to be.
FWIW, I find Iceland beautiful for its lack of trees. Every place you go is filled with green arctic tundra with its distinctive fluorescent green color. Nothing obstruct your view and you feel like you are in the middle of wilderness.
I obviously support the replant action efforts, but want to highlight the beauty in the current state as well.
The native flora in Iceland is a low growing birch. In some places a “forest” has the trees only reaching the height of an average person’s hips (although shoulder is more common). Large trees—and by that I mean taller then the average person—are all non-native and have been planted by humans.
There is in fact a saying: “If you get lost in an Icelandic forest, stand up”.
Great news -- Ireland is another country in bad need of reforesting. The British took all our trees to build their navy and Irish farmers finished off what little remained. We have very few old growth forests as a result.
> The British took all our trees to build their navy and Irish farmers finished off what little remained.
That's something of a myth. Most of the deforestation in Ireland occurred long before the plantations (even BCE). While trees were cut for shipbuilding, deforestation was primarily the result of agriculture and a booming population pre-famine.
Basically my opinion is that we should be allowed to mess up our own island but another country messing with our island is a crime and infringement of our sovereignty. So yea -- thumbs up to Neolithic farmers trying to make ends meet vs a thumbs down to a global Empire bent on taking over the world through it's military navy.
I’m no fan of British rule in Ireland, but your own link states that deforestation under British rule was primarily for agricultural land, not ship building.
It’s better to have legitimate complaints when making a criticism of the British empire. There’s plenty of them.
It would help if we didn't have a cultural dislike of trees. I'm getting tired of "You'll be wantin' to cut them trees down for light" when people see my house.
My parents had a similar thing in Scotland. They have a big garden, a conservatory and a lovely sea view. They chopped down a lovely conifer (I forget which kind, just remember it had needles) to get more of a sea view, a pear tree that just needed some love and another that shaded the driveway but apparently made the cars hard to clean. This happened when I was away at university, I came back and thought that there'd been a storm or something. Really weird.
That said, there's a difference between reforesting efforts the countryside and (stupidly) cutting down a couple of trees in your garden. Scotland and Ireland are I think similarly deforested after previously having been nearly covered in it. There are reforestation efforts in Scotland, though I don't think we'll see a huge difference within my lifetime :(
edit: ok it's maybe less negative than I thought, Wikipedia thinks we've jumped from 5% forested to 17% since the ~1950s.
I wonder how much of that 17% is native species? Nothing wrong with wood farms of course but it's a point of contention here that the government calls a bunch of monoculture spruce from Alaska part of its reforestation efforts.
I can't imagine chopping down a lovely conifer. We have a dozen ~20 meter tall trees in a row and our neighbours sounded almost annoyed we didn't chop them down with the rest that we had to fell when building our house. It killed us to lose the ones we did. Mind you we're on 3 acres; we're not shading anyone else.
I have a couple hundred saplings growing, fingers crossed I have a nice starter forest in a decade or so.
I'm afraid I don't know, but you're right if it was all (or mostly) non-native it's maybe not quite worth celebrating. Your little future forest sounds great though!
The problem with that increase since the fifties is that it's mostly not 'real' forest but plantations, which are their own kind of desert. I don't know if you've ever tried to venture into one but.. it's not fun. Very dense. Very little of nature about them.
To be fair they're not native forest but I quite like a dense, dark forest. It reminds me of forests from home (which is fitting since it's a North American species).
Oh, no - I mean the monoculture is so densely planted together that it's a literal struggle to even make your way through. These are not the deep dark forests of yore that threaten Hobbits...!
Hah, maybe that's why my 4 year old likes it (harder to chase her!) Random example would be Lough Boora which has a sitka spruce plantation and they're somewhere around 2 meter spacing I think, though they're mature so at ground level you don't have too many branches in your face.
I haven't been back for a while, but I remember seeing a few little geometrically simple islands of thick woodland in a sea of farmland. So it's mostly that? Shame
I can imagine hearing that over and over again can get quite tiring. I'm planting trees all over my house to create more shade. Ambient light coming through the windows is good enough for me.
I don’t know how cultural that is. In the aggregate, humans seem to enjoy sunlight. If a house is in the middle of the woods, I imagine there’s a subset of human who would prefer that but not so much the general population over a large time span.
EDIT: though the lighting would probably be awesome for TV viewing or gaming… it’s important to remember that if the house is sticks and siding with asphalt covered shingles, there’s an increased maintenance burden and security risk from having a ton of trees close to the house.
My street is lined with trees that (in summer at least) provides great cover from rain, you can walk the whole ~200m down it without getting wet. Maybe that's a more convincing selling point for Ireland :)
It was said that a squirrel could travel from one end of Ireland to the other without ever touching the ground as more than 80% of the land was covered by forests
It would be interesting to see how this contrasts to other European countries. At a glance up to 1600 or so the history seems the same as other densely populated countries: dense forests made way for more and more farmland. "By 1600, less than 20% of Ireland was covered by forests." For comparison, both Germany and France are about 30% forest today. But where Ireland lost almost all woodlands by 1900, apparently driven by wood demand, Germany and France maintained forests for game hunting and developed sustainable foresting around the 1800s.
I think that Ireland was largely deforested in prehistory by early settlers.
Short cycle rotation cropping of Sitka spruce is about all that's been done about it in independent Ireland.
> The British took all our trees to build their navy
Not only that, they took our young men to fight in their colonial armies; and deracinated the educated to serve as middeling officials in their colonial governments!
Anyway, I'm being ironic, the Irish were part of the colonial project as much as working class factory workers were in Manchester were.
Some interesting replies to your comment. As you included an interesting sentence claiming the trees were taken by the British I just wanted to ask what your thoughts on that were now?
But in the sagas all the Icelandic outlaws would instead travel overseas (quite literally, since Iceland is surrounded by sea) - which now makes a lot of sense to me knowing that Iceland was already deforested early on, so there wasn't really a lot of forest to go to.
Perhaps related: Sweden is one of the very few European countries that never had serfdom. Swedish peasants were of course dirt poor, but they were free citizens, and had 1/4 of the voting power in the ancient version of parliament¹.
The reason I've heard for this is that most of the country was (and is) forest. Enough forest that you can hide from, and/or ambush, anyone coming to mess with you.
> BTW what a rare example of a joke that does not offend anyone
For what it's worth, I prefer jokes that "offend" my race. I'm Jewish, have at me!
I realize that being overly sensitive is an online virtue in teenager websites like Reddit or Instagram. But HN users can be assumed to be adults. No need to point out "look, a joke that _doesn't_ offend!" here.
Thats fair. Just thought I'd try to inject a tiny bit of humour, based on a semi-frequent misunderstanding that ashkenazi jews are nazis. Which seemed in line with the parent to my post at the edit time.
Oh well, thats what I get for trying to add a joke while being from Austria.
I've never heard this misunderstanding. Interesting, I wonder if it's local.
Germans have some good Jewish jokes, I posted one above in a reply to a Pole. I know it's a crazy sensitive subject, I couldn't bring myself to write the punchline in English.
"All right, I just got down from the mountain, and the good news is that I have some simple rules for living in harmony with God. The bad news is that there's something a little awkward that will need to be cut off..."
Rick Moranis (dressed as an Orthodox rabbi) and Dave Thomas (as Scotsman named Angus Crock) are probably your best best in this old SCTV skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rShkTyq-r24
> For what it's worth, I prefer jokes that "offend" my race. I'm Jewish, have at me!
Since I would personally call that a religion and not a race, which is likely some heated discussion hence proper material for humor: do you happen to have a joke covering that aspect?
Sure, but it would probably be funny only to religious Jews.
God comes down from heaven and says to Moses: "Thou shall not cook a lamb in its mother's milk". Moses asks in reply "So, I shouldn't eat meat with dairy?". Said God: "No, Moses. Just don't cook a lamb in its mother's milk". Moses asked for clarification "So, I shouldn't put cheese on chicken, no more Cordon Bleu?". And God clarified: "No, Moses. Just don't cook a lamb in its mother's milk". And Moses asked "So, I should keep separate dishes for meat, and separate dishes for dairy? And wait a few hours between meals?". And God clarified thus: "Do whatever you want Moses."
Considering our history, yes, I could see that Poles might not want to laugh about Jews. My gmail username is the same as my HN username, I personally would love to hear a Polish Jewish joke and promise not to take offense or think that it represents your personal viewpoint.
A German once told me a German Jewish joke. How do you get 100 Jews into a Kafer (VW Beetle)? Im Aschenbecher.
I'm still yet to hear Arab jokes about Jews, even though I live with and am friendly with Arabs. I know they probably have some good ones.
You can tell what kind of Jew someone is by how they pronounce Adonai. Orthodox say "Ah-Doh-Nye", Conservatives say "Ah-Doh-No", and if they're Reform they say "Eye-Dee-Nye".
The Catholic equivalent of this joke is that a Dominican, a Franciscan, and a Jesuit are told that a Mercedes has been donated to them on the condition that they say a Novena for the good will of Vatican II. The Dominican says "What's Vatican II?" The Franciscan says "What's a Mercedes?" And the Jesuit says "What's a Novena?"
Last time i heard some pretty smart people were pushing a Kg standard made of a very exact number of molecules of Si. So yes, by definition it should have a exact number.
From the title, I expected they were sounding an alarm that they are losing forests. It appears the opposite is happening. Really bewildering, given how just a couple centuries ago for most European countries having less than 70%+ forest coverage would be an oddity.
> just a couple centuries ago for most European countries having less than 70%+ forest coverage would be an oddity.
70%+ seems a lot; I'm not sure where you got that number from? For example in [1] mentions about 15% in 1086 for England, [2] mentions ~2% 1750 for the Netherlands and ~11% in 1775 for Belgium. Numbers will undoubtable differ for other countries, but 70%+ is really a lot.
Neolithic people already cleared a lot of forest for agriculture in Europe, which happened thousands of years ago. In some countries (such as the Netherlands) forests have actually grown in the last few centuries (from the ~2% in 1750 mentioned before to ~10% today).
Iceland had "only" about 30% forest before settlers arrived.
I don't remember where I got the number, but a quick look at Wikipedia finds some claims that Free Germania used to have 70% forest area. I think I've also heard similar numbers in some museums given for Poland in Middle Ages. Can't find it now though.
Sweden and Finland today have ~70%. 30% is the number for most of Europe today, and it's usually considered low, among the people I know. So it seems that Iceland historically already had very little forestation.
Ok, one of the things that totally bugged me about the Viking tv show's visit to Iceland is that it only showed the harshest of environments, not the forests that used to exist there when the vikings colonized the island.
Peat was used heavily, as well as animal dung and there was drift wood (not a stable source though, and mostly used for other endeavours). Also the fairly unique construction of the turf houses which had the animals living along side the humans, maximized the capture of body heat.
Then again, life in Iceland was cold, dark and miserable for centuries all the while nature kept trying to kill everyone.
Some interesting things in there beyond the more obvious things like hot springs, peat, and other biomass that Iceland would have. But drift wood being a thing that I did not think off. Of course, there would have been some forests initially and also the ability to import timber and other materials from elsewhere in exchange for some of the exports (fish, whale oil, etc.).
When I was hiking around in Hornstrandir a few years back there was a surprisingly large amount of driftwood on many beaches on the north side. Some pictures I found online:
To the latter part of your question, the main strategy was:
- Build incredibly insulated turf+stone housing
- Put livestock in the basement
- Body warmth of livestock heats up the house during winter
- The good insulation keeps the home temperature liveable all winter
Rather than relying on the aggresive burning of wood in a fireplace, they relied on the consistent burning of livestock's body temperatures fed by a store of feedstock grown in the prior Summer.
The turf and stone houses didn’t have a basement AFAIK. Livestock in the basement was always a later thing I think. As well as basically everyone living and sleeping in the same room. Our house was originally built in 1897 and had only been renovated a bit by the family that owned it when we bought it. I’ve always marvelled at the number of people that lived in it and how cold it must have been before hot water heating became ubiquitous. It was mostly clad in wood from shipping crates and insulated with the packing material and wasps nests. Pretty draughty with a whole large family living in about 40 sqm.
This is great. But it isn't nearly enough to offset the amount of forest burning due to climate change right now. In just one area, Siberia in 2022 there have been 100,000 hectares of forests destroyed by wildfires.
This article says that in all of Iceland there are now 45,000 hectares of forest. So there is 225% more land burning in Siberia this year alone compared to all the forest planted in Iceland.
On a trip through Scotland, we were driving through some backroads and all of a sudden, there would be a forest with clear lines along some property boundry. The trees were more or less the same. It was essentially a tree farm. Apparently the Brits started offering special tax incentives to get people to plant trees and many listened.
Slightly off topic: I was recently in Iceland and the country is covered in Alaskan lupine that was introduced decades ago and has now become invasive. The result is these blue tinged landscapes. According to the tour guide, there is some benefit as the Alaskan lupine improves the soil (I don't know how true this actually is).
The most interesting fact was that Iceland was 40% forested when settlers arrived. I'm not sure their goal is to return to 40%, but certainly a long way to go at 2.6% 20 years from now.
I've been there 25 (maybe 30) years ago and cannot remember seeing any tree at all. It might be my memory. I'm not sure if everything else was simply more memorable or there were none.
6-fold increase seems easy starting from there. The 2% is impressive.
