Read the article. This isn't a climate solution, it's a solution to mitigate the effects of climate change on people, making them even more likely to go on with their wasteful ways.
Don't get me wrong: planting trees is a good thing. But the word "solution" implies a reduced rate of increase of CO2 over time, which this will not do. We have to use far less energy and far less fossil fuels to actually do that, and shift away from consumeristic innovation, which no one will do. Instead, they'll just plant trees to keep them cooler.
Degrowth isn’t a realistic nor acceptable solution to climate change. People aren’t going to accept a lower standard of living because scientists and activists told them they should. The only solution is technological progress.
Don't worry, unlivable conditions will force lower standards of living on everyone except the elite.
It's already happening for many people today who had no choice in the matter while people in developed countries have an endless stream of excuses.
Degrowth is inevitable. The only difference is when it happens, which is dictated by our choices. We're speed running it and using every excuse we can come up with.
> Don't worry, unlivable conditions will force lower standards of living on everyone except the elite.
Thank you, I didn't know that was the real goal of the climate movement. Just one question: How do you intend to force unlivable conditions, which in turn will force lower standards of living? I mean, which is the cause and which the effect if they are at all different?
Also, you have to advertise your goals more aggressively, don't be timid. I imagine the billboards:
"Degrowth is inevitable"
"Fight for unlivable conditions and low standards of living for everyone except the elite".
60 percent of Americans can’t afford a basic quality of life. People are having less kids because of their economics globally. The existing system is the forcing function.
Living standards won’t increase because demographic dividends from growing working age populations is over, and total fertility rates are rapidly declining globally.
That went completely over your head. Was missing the point on purpose?
Climate change is already here and happening. You can easily see how it's changing global supply chains and agriculture. Many coastal and island people's have already had to relocate or are spending massive amounts of money trying to relocate(or mitigate sea level rise).
Tens of thousands of people are dropping dead every year from just the heat. Heat that's never hit their parts of the world. Then we have drought(desertification), hurricanes/typhoons of record size, dust storms, disease outbreaks, flooding, wildfire, extreme winter weather. The list is huge and obvious.
There are no lack of clear examples that the climate is becoming less hospitable to humans. And there's no denying it is being caused or accelerated by human behavior. Our models are accurate and paint a very clear picture of what's causing the climate to change: human consumption derived climate change.
Climate change is already forcing growth to slow. It won't be long until degrowth is happening. There are no downsides to curbing our consumption now.
The reality is we have been enjoying subsidized food and products since the industrial revolution. We have known our extreme-consumption is not sustainable since the 1960s. We've been taking on climate debt with our $3 patriot beef burgers and cheap plastic shit. The climate is now calling due on that debt.
In Spain, a private company has planted almost 1 million trees in one year as what I guess is in part a marketing effort[1]. Barcelona itself counts with 1.5 million of exemplars.
So yes, you are probably right. 60K in 25 years is a PR note.
Not disagreeing with you, but I also wanna make a small effort towards being less cynical.
Not knowing much about Nevada or Las Vegas politics, I'm sure the political environment in Spain, and specially in Barcelona, is very different. 60k trees in however many years (we don't know if they were mosty planted in the last 5) might be all that they could get, and this PR note is their attempt at bringing more attention and try to muster support for more.
That private company that planted 1 million trees is a massive corporation with tens of thousands of employees in Spain. I'd bet their budget, even for marketing stunts, is bigger than Clark County's.
Also, marketing stunts are not /just/ marketing stunts. Companies, specially huge ones, contain multitudes. I'm sure many of the folks pushing for this actually cared about planting trees.
You are absolutely right. I don’t have detailed knowledge about the internal administrative organization of U.S. states, and I simply assumed that a county housing a world-class city like Las Vegas would have a very large budget. Even if this initiative is primarily symbolic, it could still play a valuable role in shifting public perception about managing street temperatures.
beyond insuficient,perhaps a record in insuficiency
friends were tree planters durring college years,
"high ballers" who would clear more than $200/day
5¢ a tree, 4000+ trees a day, one woman I know did it for 10 seasons, and hurt her kicker foot after planting millions of trees.
It is the literal truth that a small tree planting crew could handle all of the worlds urban tree planting scheams in a very short time.
humanity has cut a lot of trillions of trees, there are (not enough) trillions left
urban tree planting is tokenistic set dressing for the political theater to come.
this is like a government anouncing funding
for 60000 bits of new code to be written over 25 years.
Story like this are perfect examples of how far from understanding the scale of human caused climate heating we are, and points to how bad things will get before anything substantive is done.
I believe we have more trees today then ever before.
That isn't all that matters though. We replant monocultures and harvest them. This isn't a good ecosystem. It's also a net negative on the environmental emissions(carbon sequestered).
The age of the forest, variety, etc all matter a lot.
I spend a lot of time in forests. The difference between a harvested in the last century and an old growth forest is very obvious. They are drastically different.
I'm breathing air polluted by Canadian forest fires as we speak. Maybe you aren't getting the point I'm trying to make?
Almost all issues discussed around here are complex and multifaceted but way too many comments display obstinate tunnel vision... You may want to think about that when you stop crying.
off the cuff, recent news about a satellite to count the worlds trees, mentioned current estimates in the trillions, and it would be way low to suggest that we have not cut 3/4 of the pre
bronze age forests.....read the epic of Gilgamesh,
and read about the timbers, still holding up the internal chamber in Jhosers pyramid and all of the storys of what north america looked like pre colinisation, and well..... the story of the world and all of the epic forsests that are gone now.....it's all there if you look(archeology,dendrocronology,general historical acounts,etc), humans cut them down , starting in earnest about 10000 years ago, the earliest wooden structure was(likely) shaped by humanitys ancestors more than 1000000* years ago, we kind of owe the trees a break eh!
* yes 6 zeros+, forget the exact reference, but one of the best hominim sites in africa, perhaps oldavi gorge?
Neither labor nor capital are free. If you want to donate yours, I'm sure they could plant a few extra trees. But those resources need to come from somewhere, and they aren't unlimited.
> Maybe if it wasnt suck by funding hyperinflated bogus military tech… there would trees.
US military spending for 2024 was approximately $850 billion. Let's say we put all of that money into one of those $1-per-tree charities. That is 850 billion trees taking up around 7.98 million km^2 at typical planting densities. This is about 2/3 of total US land area. Maybe we can get some more value for money at scale and plant 1.275 trillion trees covering the entire US land area instead.
Once all those trees are grown, they would absorb anywhere from 10kg-25kg of CO2 per year. That's about 12 to 31 gigatons per year for all of the US land area.
The world currently generates ~41 gigatons of CO2 per year.
The just-plant-trees "solution" doesn't really work.
> Do you really think Las Vegas is cash strapped so that they can't afford it?
I've been to Las Vegas a handful of times, and it's really striking how much poverty exists there.
To be clear, I'm European and even Los Angeles or San Francisco are dystopian from my perspective; but Las Vegas is much better at keeping it out of tourist areas and it goes unreported because of it. I don't know a single person in Las Vegas who is living the middle-class lifestyle comparable to my friends in New Jersey, Philly, LA or Seattle.
Statistics be damned, because likely there's massive inequality that's pushing those numbers up.
They are both free when you are the one who prints the money. Governments can definitely afford to plant trees, even though I agree that it won't solve the problem.
Printing money (monetary inflation) is essentially just a stealth tax on everyone who holds or earns dollars. I'm not opposed to increased government spending on mitigating climate change but let's be honest about it and budget for it properly rather than wrecking our currency.
Interestingly, that’s exactly where this mantra is false.
Printing money for projects that benefit the greater good does not create any inflation and costs barely anything to anyone.
Print 100 for no reason and give it to the economy and for sure you create inflation. Print 100 and plant a tree, you just have a tree and a worker who get paid for doing real work.
But everyone gets a tree.
Printing money shouldn’t be seen as a crime in the context of climate change. But it must only be directed towards everyone benefit like public infrastructure projects that will stay public forever.
Bonus : great infrastructure reduces a lot of other costs and boosts the economy.
Not agreeing with either side here, but, printing money and handing it to an investment class who then launders it through their companies, to acquire more assets vs printing money that goes into infrastructure, works projects, or R&D are wildly different.
Not all monetary inflation is the same, and the destination of the money and the work produced with it can actually have quite an impact on the true wider economic effects of that increased money supply.
To be very clear, I'm not saying monetary policy is magical, or that it doesn't cause inflation.
It has very little to do with "things you like" and a lot more to do with "utility to society accomplished with the policy" along with the velocity of that money afterwards in local economies (IE. a worker is more likely to buy, well, food and rent, education. A PPP loaned exec will buy assets, or another yacht)
Believe it or not, one of those can generate more widespread economic growth than the other, for the same amount of money printed
> They're identical from the perspective of creating inflation, even though they might have different outcomes
That will only hold true if you look at only the singular issue:
Printing money while not changing economic output increases it's availability and thus decreases it's purchasing power, which we call inflation.
However: if the money goes towards things like clean air and other infrastructure, there are suddenly less things you need to pay for (clean air, water, cooling in summer, cost of transportation become cheaper), which effectively leaves more money for you to spend on wants, offsetting the effect of inflation partially/fully.
Another effect is that correct public can increase overall value generated (think: "nice, with cheaper transportation my home sales business is now viable and contributes to the value/tax pool"), so the "new" money can become backed by real value, again offsetting the loss of spending power for the average Joe.
I agree that if you add more variables that counter the effect then the effect will be countered. But that seems tangential to whether you pay for something by printing more money vs another means. If you use another means you don't inflate the currency, and you decrease inflation, leading to a better outcome.
Spending on things like infrastructure or R&D might in theory increase productivity by more than it increases money supply, in which case it would not result in inflation.
It's not on "things they like" it's on productive output.
Because as long as the folks who buy your Countries bonds believe you are spending the money in a way that will eventually return on the investment, your bonds are still valuable and you con continue spending on projects.
> Printing money (monetary inflation) is essentially just a stealth tax on everyone who holds or earns dollars.
Of course it is. My point is someone doesn't need to donate labour or capital to make this happen. Governments, not people, should be the ones who are doing it.
For one, the trees used here are mostly the desert variety that can withstand the hash conditions of our summers and infrequent waterings [1] -- they're actually quite beautiful too!
Secondly, LV is one of the most water efficient cities in the world. We recycle nearly all of our indoor water back into Lake Mead, and despite the city growing by 800K over the last 20 years we've reduced per-capita water consumption by 55% [2]
Our water crisis is a symptom of the water rights debate between the four states, not our over-consumption of water. You could actually eliminate the state of Nevada from the water crisis debate over the Colorado river and we wouldn't even make a _dent_ in the impact, it's the irrigated deserts of AZ and water intensive farming in CA that's the unsustainable piece (coming from a proud local who grew up in LV).
For sure a concern. Water-stress on one hand vs pretty dirty electricity sources (NV is like 2/3rds fossil fuel iirc) on the other. The overall calculation would be pretty complicated (and like how water-hungry are these trees?) but presumably someone's done it...
Lol. If Las Vegas city planners can't single handedly solve climate change then they shouldn't beautify their tourist district.
You seem to dislike the article's framing, which is fine, but then you start on a crusade.
It's ok to plant trees so that hot people will feel slightly less hot. It doesn't need to fix every problem, just the small problem that there's too little shade in their tourist district.
The unstated premise of your post is that you know better than the Las Vegas city planners and that your ideas are purer than theirs. It's just so annoying to see this smugness from online commenters. "Their solution isn't Pure enough [therefore I'm smarter/purer than them]."
Maybe the Las Vegas city planners have good reasons for doing what they did. I mean that's possible right? Could it even be possible that there's more to this story than you understand?
> The unstated premise of your post is that you know better than the Las Vegas city planners and that your ideas are purer than theirs.
Wrong. The unstated premise of my post is that I'm sick of articles pointing out "solutions" to the climate change problem which contributes to people believing that recycling and planting trees in their yard of their big house will help. This has to do with the person who wrote the title, not the city planners. The city planners didn't claim it was a solution. I'm not commenting on the city planners at all –– and I understand the situation perfectly.
This framing of climate change (as a problem which can meaningfully be addressed by private individuals changing their habits) must be loved by people who stand to benefit from climate change.
One night in a garage with a car with a running engine and you’re dead. Is it really that hard to imagine what happens if you have millions and millions of humans, cars, factories and other poluting items for many years? The atmosphere is not that big, that’s actually one of the main observations that astronauts have who have been to space. And if it is humans that have changed the climate by their behavior, it is also in our power to change it differently.
Sure, but the GP is referring to the tactic wherein orgs making money hand over fist from polluting substances or industries like to frame it as an individual problem to solve, not a massively systemic problem that'll require conscious collective action to resolve.
E.g., BP used to advertise in my country with ways you could reduce your carbon footprint.
You know, have shorter showers, recycle, etc.
BP is a company profiting massively from fossil fuels,and for funsies, on whose behalf the British government asked the CIA to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran, and install the exiled Shah, who was much more business friendly.
So they pay clever people to try to refrain climate change as "if only you did some things, it'd go away, it's your fault, all of you."
Pay no attention to the corporation behind the curtain.
Unless I missed it, the article doesn't say anything about a tourist district. If anything, it's focused on the neighborhoods that are not in the tourist district.
That said, we need to start qualifying the phrases we use to describe climate change issues. This one (if it works) is a "climate change adaptation solution".
You’re right—based on everything I’ve heard about the development of Las Vegas by mobsters in the 1950s, it sounds like they started with a very intentional multi-decade plan focused on ecological impact and sustainability.
If people walked more because the route was actually pleasant and cooler with shade, that's less automobile miles, perhaps lower AC costs, and likely less healthcare costs in the long term. So even a relatively small number of trees in the context of "climate change" could have an oversized indirect impact.
There is nothing bad in CO₂ .
When all of the now buried alive CO₂ was in the atmosphere, the planet was a tropical paradise and could support tall heavy cold-blooded reptiles.
We need to burn more coal and return more land nowadays covered by permafrost into the agricultural circulation.
Whoa are you serious? During past fluctuations of CO2, the world had millions of years to adapt. Though, I think tall, cold-blooded reptiles would be preferable to the current state...
>During past fluctuations of CO2, the world had millions of years to adapt
We won't need to explicitly "adapt". The excess released carbon dioxide is going to make Sahara and Gobi greener, because it will be easier for the plants to grow with a higher concentration of CO2 in the air.
In other words, it's not going to stay in the atmosphere for a long time, it's going to become embodied in the trees and other plants.
Unless we diligently self-destruct by cutting literally all the trees living on the planet. (Possible, but unlikely.)
But even if we just keep doing what we are doing now at the same pace, it's going to be more or less enough. The excessive CO2 is _already_ making the planet greener.
(I guess it's a good idea to plant more trees anyway.)
> Homeothermy is one of the 3 types of thermoregulation in warm-blooded animal species
> Some homeotherms may maintain constant body temperatures through behavioral mechanisms alone, i.e., behavioral thermoregulation. Many reptiles use this strategy
They seem to actually have nearly all been birds or what birds evolved from. A simple check on your favorite dinosaur to see if it still was probably a reptile is whether it's legs come out of the side like a crocodile or Komodo dragon
Dinosaurs look way less cool covered in feathers, but hopefully we get some new Jurassic Parks where the people start getting victimized in snowy environments too.
Don't get me wrong: planting trees is a good thing. But the word "solution" implies a reduced rate of increase of CO2 over time, which this will not do. We have to use far less energy and far less fossil fuels to actually do that, and shift away from consumeristic innovation, which no one will do. Instead, they'll just plant trees to keep them cooler.