Imagine going on quora and answering somebodies carbon offsetting question by pushing your own stupid fucking agenda with propaganda answers like

"oh we need rainforest money!"

"oh we need grassland!"

"oh support the cows"

jesus fucking christ, THIS is why we have a problem with people not accepting climate change, becuase every fucking liberal wants to pile on one another and have their 'most important' cause behind it

give me a break you fucking idiots, it won't be solved by acting this way

sorry this is in no way software related, but it's the only place left i have to rant (however in some ways it is somehow software related, due to being able to think about the real world without being an absolute idiot and pushing some stupid peer pressured political idea because your social identity and friends are more important than actual facts, but whatever)

So did the grassland and cows answers actually happen?

before i get berated by libs here, i want to be clear i am in no way a "trumpster" but goddammit its so cringe to vote for even democrats in the US right now, both parties are so gone it's not even funny

@Oktokolo https://quora.com/How-many-trees-do...

first answer: "trees don't really BLAHBLAHFARTSPLAT I"M AN IDIOT BLAT BLAT BLAT SPLAT"

i mean really, someone is curious about carbon offsetting, and you just shoot them down with your own agenda. god i hate idiots

@fullstackclown Well the whole treeplanting thing is just copium-level stupidity anyways. You can't offset carbon footprints by just planting trees. That isn't how the carbon cycle works. You would have to plant trees, let them grow, then fell them and make sure that their biomass doesn't decompose "ever" again. To actually offset anything with planting tress you would literally have to emulate them going into new coal or oil deposits...

So yep, it's all just greenwashing. Always has been.

Buy more books!

I don't understand what the problem is with trees...

The guy in the second post says "Trees do not sequester atmospheric carbon." and then proceeds to say that they do sequester atmospheric carbon, but they release it all when they die...

ok?... but they do do it... So if you have 1 tree, and say it lives an average 100 years, which for some species is really damn short... it will sequester about 2000kg of carbon... I mean, that means that for 100 years, it still removed 20kg of carbon a year... that at least gives you time to work on other solutions, not to mention, it doesn't just release 100% of it's carbon in a split second, that takes time too, and if you just plant 2 trees for every 1 tree every death cycle you still end up with net negative carbon in atmo, because you keep buying more inventory space to store it in and shift it over...

It doesn't magically disappear carbon, but it still contains it for about a century or more, reducing greenhouse effects n stuff

I mean, I'm not an expert or anything, didn't even look all that hard at this. But this seems pretty intuitive... If you produce 20kg of CO2 a year, and you build a biological machine that filters it from the air and stores it in itself for at least a century at the rate of 20kg a year, then it's in no way worse than a barrel storing it. Except this machine can also serve as food and housing for plenty of other wildlife so that's nice.

I mean, it's all very finicky and imprecise and naive in nature, but it isn't doing nothing. It's still significantly better than nothing, which is what most companies are doing.

More nukes please!

@Oktokolo even if it wouldn't offset the carbon, you can't deny other benefits of reforestation regarding soil erosion, animal sheltering, etc..

or it might be just me - i always liked stories like Sebastião & Lélia Salgado's or Jadav Payeng's

@qwwerty Hey, i am not anti-reforestation. We actually have to turn as much land as possible into moors and forests.

That will not fix the carbon problem though. For that the only fix is to literally emit less carbon into the athmosphere than the moors absorb. There is no way around stopping to use any fossil fuels. You just logically can't offset permanently adding carbon to the ecosphere with temporarily storing it in trees.

Focussing on trees now is like focussing on fixing a broken window of a burning house. You will have to do it eventually, but there really is a more pressing issue to fix right now.

@Oktokolo while i agree with the priorities, reforestation is still something an individual can do on his own and at least somehow try to contribute and partially improve something.sure, the carbon gets released once the trees die, but if it can slow current situation, its still better than nothing.
It's hard to imagine an individual would overturn china's/russia's industry pollution, plastic garbage from fishing ships, ecology of cargo ships, etc...
All i'm saying is that i dont think squashing individual's motivation as a first response, just because he can't fix the major issue first, is a good approach.

@qwwerty When it comes to China's pollution, we actually can do something about that: We can buy less stuff in general and make sure that the stuff we buy is of good quality and/or repairable.

When it comes to Russia's pollution - they fear Nato more than the ongoing terraform project and now, after thirty years of really trying hard to botch geostrategic politics for Europe, there sadly really isn't anything that can be done about that anymore... Did you know, that they couldn't just shut the gas fields down that supplied Europe and are just burning all that gas now...

Individuals could do reforestation - but normally, the fall for scams: https://youtube.com/watch/...

The single most impactful when it comes to lessen the impact of the terraforming project is just not having kids. Then comes not having a car. Then come other consumer choices like being a vegan and buying less stuff in general. Reforestation comes somewhere after these things individuals can do.