human actions, global climate change, global human solutions
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UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 19:38
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Phantom Forests: Why Ambitious Tree Planting Projects Are Failing
Or, why carbon credits are a scam
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High-profile initiatives to plant millions of trees are being touted by governments around the world as major contributions to fighting climate change. But scientists say many of these projects are ill-conceived and poorly managed and often fail to grow any forests at all.
By Fred Pearce October 6, 2022
It was perhaps the most spectacular failed tree planting project ever. Certainly the fastest. On March 8, 2012, teams of village volunteers in Camarines Sur province on the Filipino island of Luzon sunk over a million mangrove seedlings into coastal mud in just an hour of frenzied activity. The governor declared it a resounding success for his continuing efforts to green the province. At a hasty ceremony on dry land, an official adjudicator from Guinness World Records declared that nobody had ever planted so many trees in such a short time and handed the governor a certificate proclaiming the world record. Plenty of headlines followed.
But look today at the coastline where most of the trees were planted. There is no sign of the mangroves that, after a decade of growth, should be close to maturity. An on-the-ground study published in 2020 by British mangrove restoration researcher Dominic Wodehouse, then of Bangor University in Wales, found that fewer than 2 percent of them had survived. The other 98 percent had died or were washed away.
“I walked, boated, and swam through this entire site. The survivors only managed to cling on because they were sheltered behind a sandbank at the mouth of a river. Everything else disappeared,” one mangrove rehabilitation expert wrote in a letter to the Guinness inspectors this year, which he shared with Yale Environment 360 on the condition of anonymity. The outcome was “entirely predictable,” he wrote. The muddy planting sites were washed by storms and waves and were otherwise “ecologically unsuited to mangrove establishment, because they are too waterlogged and there is no oxygen for them to breathe.”
“It was a complete disaster,” agrees Jim Enright, former Asia coordinator of the U.S.-based nonprofit Mangrove Action Project. “But no one that we know of from Guinness or the record-planting proponents have carried out follow-up monitoring.” Guinness has not responded to requests for comment.
Such debacles are not unusual. Forest scientists say they are surprisingly frequent, and they warn that failed afforestation projects around the world threaten to undermine efforts to make planting a credible means of countering climate change by reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or generating carbon credits for sale to companies to offset their emissions.
In another high-profile case, in November 2019, the Turkish government claimed to have planted more trees on dry land than anyone else in a single hour — 300,000, in the central province of Çorum. It beat a record, also confirmed by Guinness inspectors, set four years before in the Himalayan state of Bhutan. The Çorum planting was part of a National Afforestation Day, when volunteers planted 11 million trees at 2,000 sites across Turkey. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was among those wielding a spade.
But two months later, the head of the country’s union of forestry workers reported that a survey by its members had found that as many as 90 percent of the national plantings had died. The government denies this, but experts said its counter-claim that 95 percent of the trees had survived and continued to grow was improbably high. No independent audit has yet been carried out.
In an investigation published last year into extensive government-organized tree planting over several decades in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, Eric Coleman of Florida State University and colleagues found little evidence that it had resulted in more tree cover, carbon uptake, or community benefits. Typically, tree species growing on common land that were useful to local peopleNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Occidental Petroleum hopes to bring its bold plan of developing direct air carbon capture to a famous ranch in South Texas, the Houston-based company said this week.
Oxy and 1PointFive, its subsidiary focused on carbon capture, said they’ve agreed to lease more than 100,000 acres in Kleberg County for potential development of up to 30 direct air capture plants. The lease is with King Ranch, the 825,000 acre historic ranch south of Corpus Christi, and includes access to land to store captured carbon underground in geologic reservoirs.
Occidental said the direct air capture facilities at King Ranch could remove up to 30 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. The leased land has the potential to store up to 3 billion metric tons of CO2 in geologic reservoirs, according to the company.
Oxy broke ground on its first direct air capture plant in the Permian Basin in West Texas over the summer. The project is expected to be operational by the end of 2024 with the ability to capture up to 500,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year.
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20221102212849/https://www.houstonchronicl
e.com/business/energy/article/Oxy-continues-aggressive-carbon-capture-plans-17552044.php
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Peatlands store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests -- UN Environment Programme
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/peatlands-store-twice-much
-carbon-all-worlds-forests
In her latest book Fen, Bog and Swamp (Scribner), Annie Proulx delves into the history of peatland destruction and its role in the climate crisis.
At the dawn of the third millennium, the American novelist Annie Proulx was living in Wyoming and saw a perfect but terrible storm brewing. Extended droughts and warmer winters were providing the optimal conditions for the mountain pine beetle to thrive, and its ongoing infestation — as well as wildfires continuing to ravage the state’s old dense forests, including those of Yellowstone National Park — was turning towering lodgepole pines into ashen tombstones. “That was the first moment when it really sank in that something momentous is going on,” Proulx, who is 87, recently told me over the phone. “I’m a great believer in keeping notes on what you see from year to year. Repetitive observation is my idea of the way to live. This is not a once-in-a-lifetime chance, but a once-in-a-species' existence, to observe these huge changes.”
And so began her transition from fiction to writing about ecological issues.
More at https://www.vogue.com/article/annie-proulx-fen-bog-and-swamp-interview
Free download of Annie Proulx's book from the mirrors at https://libgen.unblockit.nz/search.php?req=Annie+Proulx+Bog
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Call for Public Comment: Fifth National Climate Assessment
https://www.globalchange.gov/content/call-public-comment-fifth-nationa
l-climate-assessment
Climate change threatening ‘things Americans value most,’ U.S. report says
Since 1970, the authors state, the continental United States has experienced 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit of warming, well above the average for the planet. (In Alaska, at Utqiagvik, annual temperature has increased by more than 12°F since 1976. https://statesummaries.ncics.org/chapter/ak/ )
The study highlights how the frequency of billion-dollar disasters has now increased from once every four months in the 1980s to once every three weeks in the present. It finds that the United States is experiencing some of the most severe sea-level rises on the planet.
And it details the ever-greater certainty that rainfall and heat extremes are proliferating, as are damaging wildfires and crippling floods.
Over the long term, the only real solution is for humanity to muster the political and technological will to stop polluting the atmosphere.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/11/07/cop27-cl
imate-change-report-us/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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This is a little complicated, but it shows the sources of California electricity throughout the day. During daylight hours, solar and wind provide about 18,000 megawatts of power, far more than any other source. From dawn to midafternoon excess solar power is stored in the battery network. When it gets dark, the wind keeps blowing but we lose 12,000 megawatts of solar power. This is currently replaced by 8,000 megawatts of natural gas, 5,000 megawatts of imports from other states, and 2,000 megawatts of battery storage in order to meet peak demand during the hours of 7pm-10pm. Meanwhile, nuclear baseload chugs along at a constant 2,000 megawatts all day.
Today, battery storage provides about 7% of peak demand, but the plan is to keep building massive battery capacity to reduce the use of natural gas plants during the evening.
NOTE: California is by far the biggest user of battery storage in the country. It has about twice the capacity of the #2 state, Texas, and five times as much as #3, Illinois.
https://jabberwocking.com/battery/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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A major paper released on the sidelines of the COP27 climate summit in Egypt has started a countdown. At the current rate of global emissions, the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels will likely be permanently out of reach in nine years.
https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/14/4811/2022/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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This jet fuel is made from CO2 pulled from the atmosphere
https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2022/11/09/air-company-co2-derived
-jet-fuel-jg-orig.cnn-business
Electricity splits water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen then goes into a reactor with carbon dioxide to make jet fuel. The same technology uses a different catalyst in the reactor to make vodka and the waste stream is pure oxygen.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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How Should We Think About the End of the World as We Know it?
“Yes, it’s a catastrophe,” Elizabeth Weil writes of climate change. “And no, you would not be better off if you continued to tell yourself otherwise.”
By Kiley Bense, November 19, 2022
Anthropologists Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer in Iceland 2019 installed a plaque, titled “A letter to the future,” with this message:
This monument is to acknowledge
that we know what is happening
and what needs to be done.
Only you know if we did it.
Knowing what needs to be done is one thing; having the will to do it is another.
More at https://web.archive.org/web/20221119235904/https://insideclimatenews.o
rg/news/19112022/warming-trends-how-should-we-think-about-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Middle East and US global power: Fossil Fuel- Lifeblood of the American Empire
by Phillyguy for The Saker Blog
...
6. Military– The Pentagon is the largest single consumer of fossil fuel and polluter in the world. To give this some perspective, on average, the US military consumes 12,600,000 gallons (48,000,000 L) of fuel per day. One F-16 fighter jet consumes over 20K gallons of Kerosene per hour (333 gal/min) [32].
http://thesaker.is/the-middle-east-and-us-global-power-fossil-fuel-lif
eblood-of-the-american-empire/
That's about 4.6 billion gallons per year. By comparison, the USA uses about 135 billion gallons of gasoline per year. So US DoD represents about 3.5 pct of civilian auto fuel usage.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake
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Airbus has announced it is developing a hydrogen-powered fuel cell engine -- and that it plans to test it on the largest commercial airplane ever to take to the skies.
The French aviation giant revealed at Airbus Summit 2022 on November 30 that it will mount the engine between the wings and the tail of a modified A380 superjumbo. Test flights are estimated for 2026, as part of the Airbus ZEROe initiative to launch a zero-emission aircraft by 2035.
"In terms of aerodynamics, the A380 is a very stable aircraft. So the pod attached to the rear fuselage via the stub doesn't pose much of an issue," said Mathias Andriamisaina, head of ZEROe demonstrators and tests at Airbus, in a statement.
Airbus had previously revealed concept designs for an aircraft utilizing liquid hydrogen fuel and combustion engines, but vice president of Zero-Emission Aircraft Glenn Llewellyn suggested fuel cells alone might be sufficient to power smaller commercial aircraft.
The engine uses fuel cells to convert the hydrogen into electricity, which then powers a propeller. "At scale, and if the technology targets were achieved, fuel cell engines may be able to power a 100-passenger aircraft with a range of approximately 1,000 nautical miles," he said.
The journey to decarbonize air travel
Hydrogen has long been touted as a sustainable alternative to traditional jet fuel, either as a combustible fuel or used to generate electricity via fuel cells. The aviation industry produces 2.8% of global CO2 emissions but it faces harder challenges than other sectors in decarbonizing itself, and progress has been slow.
While hydrogen-powered aircraft have been in development since the mid-20th Century, they have faced significant obstacles, mainly hydrogen's low energy density compared to kerosene, and the latter's availability and historically low price.
The infrastructure required to produce and distribute hydrogen is also an issue. At Airbus Summit, Airbus boss Guillaume Faury warned that this was "a big concern" and it could derail the company's plans to introduce a hydrogen-powered aircraft by 2035.
But hydrogen could become a key asset in commercial aviation even before entirely new aircraft based around it are developed. Days before Airbus' announcement, Rolls-Royce and budget airline EasyJet said they had successfully converted a regular airplane engine to run on liquid hydrogen fuel — a world first, they claim.
The ground test involved a type of Rolls-Royce engine currently used in commercial and military airplanes, and a second test is already planned. Next, the trial will expand to a Rolls-Royce Pearl 15 engine, which is used to power Bombardier business jets capable of long-haul flight.
Future fuel
The fuel for Rolls-Royce's test was sourced from wind and tidal energy, an example of "green" hydrogen.
Green hydrogen is commonly derived via the electrolysis of water -- using electricity to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen -- and using renewably sourced electricity to do so. "Gray" hydrogen uses non-renewable electricity, while "blue" hydrogen is similar to gray, but captures most of the carbon emitted in production. Green hydrogen is considered the cleanest option.
How the hydrogen is utilized also creates a different footprint. Burning liquid hydrogen in the open-air releases a small amount of greenhouse gas nitrous oxide. Using green hydrogen to generate electricity in a fuel cell, however, emits only water and warm air.
The next decade will reveal which of the hydrogen technologies will take off. Either would be a positive step in securing the long-term viability of low-carbon air travel.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/airbus-fuel-cell-engine-rolls-royce
-easyjet-engine-c2e-spc-intl/index.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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