TREES!

A Guardian article about a Swiss research study published in Science on treeplanting as a potential partial climate change strategy got passed around a lot this week, and because the internet is the internet there was a whole lot of “well why aren’t we all doing the obvious thing, which I know was the obvious thing, because I know trees exist!” commentary on Facebook and Twitter (and I presume Instagram and Snapchat but I don’t check those that often) and… it’s not quite as easy as it sounds and it’s not as big a cure-all as many people thought. But it is definitely good news on climate change in that it identifies something that could at least be a potential partial solution. So let’s discuss it a bit.

The article suggests, first off, that a worldwide treeplanting plan could “remove two-thirds” of all current carbon emissions that humans have put into the atmosphere. This sounds like a lot, and it certainly is: 205 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide. The two-thirds figure, however, is sort of a modern era figure - basically, since the Industrial Revolution (when we really started burning fossil fuels in earnest), humans have put about 450 gigatonnes of CO2 into the air. So it’s not really two-thirds; it’s more like “a little less than half.”

Still, a little less than half of all CO2 is pretty great, right? That sounds like it would avert climate emergency right there. And it would! But the problem, of course, is that we’re still dumping CO2 into the air. And what’s worse, we’re doing it faster and faster than we ever have. Humans emitted almost half of those 450 gigatonnes of CO2 in the last thirty years. And here is the other thing: trees do not grow up instantly. Sure, there are tropical species that reach maturity super-fast, within ten years. But most temperate and boreal trees - IE, the trees in the countries most able to cheaply grow trees - take fifty to sixty years to reach maturity and then sink all that carbon. So that’s 205 gigatonnes over, say, forty or fifty years at least. When we’re emitting carbon faster than we ever have - right now we’re projected to go through the next 200 or so gigatonnes of CO2 in about a decade. So the trees are really a relatively small help, all things considered. Oh, and there’s a reason we’ve deforested so much land: farming/grazing and housing are the two biggies, obviously.

And finally, there’s the problem of token behaviour. Treeplanting is like recycling: it’s easy to support and it makes you feel like you’re contributing to environmental rehabilitation. Except, as we have discussed in this newsletter previously (see June 16th), recycling doesn’t actually help nearly as much as most people think it does, and possibly makes things worse because when people recycle, they feel like they’ve done their bit. Actually avoiding climate catastrophe is going to take major, systemic, everybody-feels-some-pain action, and if you let people think “oh, the government just has to plant some trees and it’ll all be fine” - and I can assure you, plenty of people already believe this - then they will cheerfully think it and resist doing literally anything else.

Okay, so now that I’ve pissed all over this newfound hope, let’s discuss the positives. The study suggests that there are 1.7 billion hectares of undeveloped and deforested land which can be reforested. It estimates the cost of planting one trillion trees at $300 billion (USD), which sounds like an awful lot of money - and it is a lot of money - but it’s basically the cost of cleaning up maybe one and a half major hurricanes, and it’s over a period of several years (since planting one trillion trees isn’t exactly an overnight job) so it’s really reasonably affordable, all things considered. Doing this would sink a very significant amount of carbon - granted, over a long period of time, but there are actually potential strategies for dealing with that issue (planting faster-growing fruit trees, and harvesting the lumber for permanent use and then replanting is one of them). It doesn’t interfere with other decarbonization strategies, either, so basically the takeaway from this is that treeplanting is basically an excellent value-add for decarbonization: it is cheap, it is popular, it doesn’t get in the way of anything else and it is surprisingly effective.

Of course, electing climate-denier politicians (or do-nothings, for that matter) won’t help no matter how effective the trees are, but that’s a whole different problem, so…

[PUN INVOLVING SOUVLAKI TO INTRODUCE GREEK ELECTION NEWS TO BE ADDED LATER]

The Greek election has come and gone, and surprising nobody, the Greek electorate swung the centre-right New Democracy party back into power, because they were angry at Alexis Tsipras’ Syriza party, who cut unpopular deals with the EU to get a bailout to help with Greece’s crippling debt. Tsipras of course came to power when he defeated the New Democracy party, which was then led by Antonis Samaras, who was unpopular because he cut unpopular deals with the EU to get a bailout to help with Greece’s crippling debt. Samaras, for the record, came to power by defeating George Papandreou of the Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement party, who was unpopular because he cut an unpopular deal with the EU to get a bailout to help with Greece’s crippling debt. So, you know, see you guys in four years when Greece does all of this again, because their economy is crap and nobody’s really figured out a way to get Greece moving again.

(I snark, but one good thing did happen this election: Golden Dawn, the fascist party with the I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-A-Swastika logo, got their nuts crunched: their popular vote share dropped to less than half of what they managed in the previous election and they lost every single one of their parlimentary seats. So good on you, Greece.)

HAJJBALL

A bit late on this one since I missed it when it first happened but it’s a good story so I want to write about it. A couple weeks ago, the Tunisian Union of Imams criticized the act of undertaking the hajj - the pilgrimage to Mecca that observant Muslims are expected to make at least once during their lifetime. This is because Mecca is, of course, in Saudi Arabia, and Saudi Arabia is increasingly alienating the rest of the Muslim world. This isn’t even the first public argument against performing the hajj: Libya’s most important imam called for a full boycott of the hajj back in April, and one of the most powerful clerics in the Muslim Brotherhood in Qatar announced a fatwa last year against the hajj.

Why is this happening? You may have heard last year about that whole “assassinating a journalist” story when Saudi officials kidnapped and then murdered Washington Post correspondent Jamal Khashoggi, and certainly the “Arab street” did not think highly of that, but it goes beyond that and even beyond Saudi Arabia’s complicity and involvement in the civil war in Yemen (where they’re responsible for thousands and thousands of deaths) or their repression of the Shi’ite protests in Bahrain in 2011 or… look, there is a very long list of shitty things that Saudi Arabia has done over the past decade or so, and the Muslim world mostly isn’t happy about them at all, but this relatively recent trend of imams suggesting that maybe one of the five pillars of Islam is maybe not necessary is more than a reaction to a country being shitty.

It’s also a reaction to Saudi Arabia’s increased interest in promoting itself as the country that gets to be in charge of Islam in a general sense: the country that has Mecca and Medina within its borders and which spends an enormous amount of money promoting its preferred flavours of Islam (which tend to be fundamentalist, forgiving of the use of violence, and, unsurprisingly, nationalist with respect to Saudi Arabia). And because Saudi Arabia is effectively in a cold war with Iran, it’s banned Iranian nationals from undertaking the hajj (along with Qataris, since Qatar and Saudi Arabia don’t get along - in large part because Qatar is the home of Al Jazeera, the Arabic news network that has been quite willing to investigate all the things the Saudis - and other Arabic royalty - get up to on a regular basis). And the imam of the Great Mosque in Mecca has been willing to all but endorse Mohammed Bin Salman’s regime, which most Muslims quite understandably feel he should not be doing.

The hajj isn’t just important to Saudi Arabia in a spiritual and influential sense. It’s also an important sector of the Saudi economy - it’s billions of dollars every year and the biggest sector of the economy that isn’t oil. Obviously this money pales in comparison to the oil, but when the Saudis are undertaking massive economic development programs in order to have a future beyond oil, that money matters to them not just because it’s money but because it’s a symbol of their economic power and importance. And the Saudis having such control of the hajj is a problem for a lot of Muslims.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched/rewatched this week:

Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019, Jon Watts, theatre) - 3/5

Shoplifters (2018, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Netflix) - 5/5

The Little Prince (2015, Mark Osborne, Blu-ray) - 4/5

Made In Dagenham (2010, Nigel Cole, Kanopy) - 3.5/5

We’ve also started watching The Expanse, and man, just when we thought we were done watching Jared Harris in teevee shows, who should show up but Jared Harris?

See you in seven.