Ethiopia Plants 350M Trees in One Day to Combat Drought and Climate Change
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
It was the only country in Africa to resist the Scramble for Africa and was only occupied by Italy for less than 10 years (after putting the Italian Army to shame initially... and it was only occupied because it got almost 0 outside help).
This seems like an awesome initiative, but they will need a lot of help. Their population went from 70 million in 2007 to 100 million in 2017. The current forecast is for about 200 million by 2050.
I hope they grow peacefully and without internal conflicts, Africa desperately needs a pole of stability and prosperity in the region.
It's going to be a tough struggle for them!
In general, the developing countries are mostly "behind the curve", meaning their economic growth mostly wasn't that much lower for most of history, but rather they started somewhat later, often because they needed the technology developed in the west (modern agriculture mostly) to start increasing their population density. As far as I understand it, Africa is suitable for both very primitive and very advanced agriculture, but not much "in between" and so they got stuck with hunting/gathering and subsistence farming. They also didn't have access to proper domestic animals before Europe industrialized, though they had better animals than the South Americans, apparently. Neither a LLama nor a zebra can pull a plow.
Many countries in Africa were jumpstarted by colonization, and the colonists didn't have any interest in making that growth sustainable or giving the natives the tools to sustain that growth on their own. That's why white African farmers can say the black Africans can't manage huge farms for sh. Well, the white farmers didn't teach it to them and prevented them from learning it on their own...
Ethiopia is probably slightly different.
Europe's industrialization as well as other Western countries heavily depended on the exploitation of third world countries in Asia and Africa, especially after WW2.
Sweatshops and slavery and cheap mass transportation of goods make our lifestyle possible. For a very recent example, smartphones produced in the US/Europe would simply not be affordable for most users and the technology would be nowhere near where it is nowadays since initial smartphones would have never been popular. It took suicide-level conditions in places like Foxconn to get us our gadget at <$1000.
So who are African nations going to exploit? Each other?
Not that I disagree with the rest of the post, but it's time the suicides at Foxconn story dies a fiery death.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/07/10/apples-c...
The juicy quote:
At the time of that spate of suicides Foxconn had nearly 1 million workers in its plants. There were up to 14 suicides (it depends whose count you want to use) among that 1 million. The average rate of suicide in China is 22 per 100,000 people per year. That is, the suicide rate at Foxconn was under 5% of the general suicide rate of the Chinese population.
Meanwhile the general suicide rate in China is for any number of reasons.
Playing a pure numbers game with peoples lives is distasteful.
While I am all for improving conditions of employees, it should be in context to the environment. If the whole country is working on 1$/day, expecting few companies to got 5$ just because they have global visibility is not feasible. It is not good for the company, economy and social dynamics of that region.
It seems #1 reason for sucide is mental illness or chronic pain/disease severely impacting their quality of life.
You need to ask can mentally ill people get employed at foxconn? They would be having interviews like for every other job, and probably the workers are selected based on their efficiency which can exclude a lot of mentally ill people.
If not, then we've to remove the number of people who commit suicide due to chronic health issue or mental illness then compare the data again.
Disturbingly the later anti-pattern has held shockingly true with ethical standards and as infamous actors go on with bad practices for decades while those who improve are subjected to increasingly harsh criticism and boycotts. Ethical Tall Poppyism is a disturbingly common trend.
That's a pretty wild assertion.
Is there a reason to believe that the folks working at Foxconn have otherwise 100% idyllic lives with no divorces, deaths of loved ones, clinical depression, etc.?
So the CEO argument during trial was to compare the suicide rate to cop's suicide rate and say "that's not too bad". This is dumb. You should compare to the suicide rate in similar company, or if you cna't find similar company in your country, you take the suicide rate 5 years prior and adjust for intangibles. Turns out the suicide rate in telco was way inferior to the population average prior to the "new management" methods. The ex-CEO will probably avoid prison still. But the trial isn't over yet, so anything can happen.
15 per, for men.
I say this as someone who's considerably more negative about Apple than the median here. I just think you're wasting your breath assuming intellectual honesty from people repeating a canard years after it's been debunked (Note that I'm excluding people aware of the statistic who are interpreting Foxconn's suicides as still notable for whatever reason)
So, it's not a waste of breath at all.
This isn't a rhetorical question,as I'm actually curious: taking you at face value as subjectively not having your "head in the sand", I don't have a model for how you'd end up believing the Foxconn suicide claim without being aware of the counterargument.
On the other hand, industrial growth isn't just exploitation. Whom is China "exploiting" right now? Sure they are trying to do this to a few countries, but with very limited success compared to European Colonization.
There is no fundamental difference between the growth-rate in different developing countries, or between them and Europe during industrialization. In the final analysis, wealth can only develop through exponential growth. There is no sustainable short-cut.
Robots
And still, lots of natives in colonies managed to overthrow their exploiters, usually with higher technology or more ressources than their original hunter-gatherer culture had.
Native Americans were outmatched by the population pressure from Europe. They didn't get the time to develop agriculture and everything to the point that they could compete in population density. And on top of that, a lot of violence, accidental harm and wrongful deeds have been done to them.
Currently your international relations with most countries are in shambles. You've got a nearly 20 year war going with Afganistan over a terrorist attack that wasn't sponsored by the country, and it doesn't look like the Taliban is going to actually disapear. Your other misadventure into Iraq completely destabilized the area, and resulted in creation of ISIS.
>culturally yes of course
Gonna agree to disagree on this one.
That's an empty, meaningless claim. Even if it were true (it's not), it simply does not matter very much. When Obama was in office, it was celebrations, so to speak. When Trump is gone in N years, normalcy will return, even if it requires some relationship repair. A few years does not matter in any grand scheme when it comes to relationships between the US and eg France or Britain. One President is not going to wreck relationships that are hundreds of years old. Trump is not worse than what Bush put us through with Iraq 15 years ago when it comes to international relations, not even remotely close.
> You've got a nearly 20 year war going with Afganistan over a terrorist attack that wasn't sponsored by the country, and it doesn't look like the Taliban is going to actually disapear.
That's a bogus premise. The US didn't go into Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban. The US achieved its primary objective in Afghanistan a very long time ago - neutralizing Al Qaeda as a globally threatening, effective, large terrorist organization. Removing the Taliban and establishing a stable democratic Afghanistan, is the stretch goal that was always going to be very difficult to accomplish. It's questionable that such a thing could be accomplished short of fully occupying every inch of the country and pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into it annually. Is the US going to fail to achieve an impossible goal of nation building a democratic Afghanistan in under 20 years? Yeah.
> Your other misadventure into Iraq completely destabilized the area, and resulted in creation of ISIS.
That one is partially correct. It's the dictatorships of the Middle East (nearly all nations in the Middle East are without functioning democracy and most are very illiberal; the US has introduced two of the few examples of democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan), their systems of government, and Islamic extremism, that perpetually destabilizes the region. Some of that mess is entirely localized, some of it has been introduced by foreign powers over centuries. You already know that of course, the Taliban (the theocratic group you mentioned the US is failing to remove) are a prime example of it. There is no such thing as a stable dictatorship or stable theocracy (they require constant threats or applications of violence to hold their positions). Nearly all dictatorships in modern history have resulted in disaster and chaos in their wake. Whenever Saddam's regime fell (however long that would have taken without the US involvement), it was always going to result in the sort of chaos that we've seen in Iraq, as the country is a forced-together bifurcated society of conflicting factions. The US should have never gone into Iraq, however it's also false to pretend that Iraq was stable or functioning well before that (What does a wildly violent, murderous stable dictatorship mean exactly? That's a contradiction in terms. Stable in what regard, the lack of all basic human rights and democratic institutions? Stable in the application of consistent terror to oppress the people?).
That's how the U.S. came to stand "head and shoulders" above European nations: unlimited land and free labor, which yielded almost unlimited wealth, which was all acquired by Europeans.
Today slavery is abolished, and Native American nations are recognized as sovereign entities; but descendants of slaves and Native Americans continue to live in a country where colonial descendants of European settlers hold all the wealth and power, and the history of expropriation and massacre of their ancestors has been whitewashed as quaint folklore.
So if you look at it from the perspective of the colonized people and their descendants, North America has had it even worse than almost anyone.
So no, nothing to do with "unlimited land and free labor".
I look forward to watching you attempt to demonstrate that appropriation of native land, and free labor from slavery, aren't the pillars on which most wealth in the US was built. I'm sure it will be entertaining.
Anyhow, one has to observe to be first aware of such things like the butter production in the south as compared to the north to realize that the basic argument of "free labor and unlimited lands" doesn't hold up very well.
I'd also like to point that during the peak of the British Empire in the late 19th century up to the early 20th century, the British had by that point outlawed slavery.
Lastly, it is amazing to me that you keep bringing up certain groups of peoples. My sister recently took a genetics test and confirming what I already knew I'm roughly 25% "native" like you keep referencing to. Is this my mic drop moment?
This is something that has been proven repeatedly by studies that have looked into slave labor in the colonies and elsewhere. When people on the Internet say otherwise, my experience has been that they never support their claims, they're always empty statements held up as fact.
The US would have developed faster if the slaves had been free. Along with being obviously morally evil, slavery inherently must involve a great misallocation of human resources. It's an extreme example of command economics. The Soviets, Chinese and others more recently have demonstrated how poorly slave-based economics works in practice. We're not lacking for proof; there isn't a single example from modern history of it working well versus free labor.
The greatest example of this in action in recorded history, is modern China. They only developed at all after they began to shift away from a de facto slave-based labor system, to something closer to free labor. Simply put, they unleashed their human capital and it has done the rest, going to work building out modern China (in spite of the restraining, backwards, command economics system that remains, rather than because of it; something Internet pundits frequently get wrong about China).
> butter production in the southern states where there was "unlimited free labor" was roughly 20% of the national output, even though they had 40% of the total dairy cows.
So from this one example, you're extrapolating that slavery did not play a major role in the creation of overall US wealth? That is a... bold claim, to put it lightly. It is not supported by contemporary historians, and your other comments don't exactly inspire confidence as to your mastery if History, so forgive me for being skeptical.
How about you start by telling me, of the 13 original colonies, how many had slaves? And, perhaps, how much wealth had been accumulated in the original colonies before they abolished slavery?
From there, perhaps move on to researching how slavery enriched the North, even after abolition.
> I'd also like to point that during the peak of the British Empire in the late 19th century up to the early 20th century, the British had by that point outlawed slavery.
I fail to see how that is relevant to the US.
Before you take your British Empire comparison too far, you might want to research the origin of the empire's wealth during the 19th and 20th century...
I'll give you a hint: it's explained in this book, which I recommend reading if you're interested in this topic. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32618967-an-era-of-darkn...
> I'm roughly 25% "native" like you keep referencing to.
Oh you're Native American, that's great! What tribe?
Not only does your genetics test not matter, by claiming native heritage in this way you are participating in something which actual Native Americans find problematic.
If you want to learn more on this topic, here is a good starting point: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129554-400-there-is...
You can define Native American ancestry in some way or other, but that would say nothing about an individuals connection to that culture which may be high or may be zero.
Sure. To quote the interview linked in my previous comment:
"We have debates amongst ourselves about whether being Native American is about being a citizen of your tribe – a political designation – or about culture and traditional practice. I tend to come down on the side of political citizenship. It’s true that it’s about much more than blood – culture matters. But our political autonomy matters too, and that helps produce a space in which our cultural traditions can thrive."
So it's true that there isn't one unique, immutable rule for determining Native identity.
But there is also a very real pattern of white people claiming Native identity in a way that 1) all tribes disagree with, and 2) erases the voice of actual Native Americans, and sometimes even actively hurts them.
> it may be the best thing to let people call themselves what they want.
They can call themselves whatever they want. But if they're going to use some bullshit blood test as a "get out of jail free card" to make a white supremacist argument, furthering a well-documented pattern of disrespectful behavior to Native Americans, then I'm going to call them out on it.
Just imagine someone saying "Hey, I'm sick of you always bringing up specific people when you mention the Holocaust. A got a blood test and I'm 25% Jewish. Is this my mic drop moment?" . In this context would you also say "Meh, let people call themselves what they want". Context matters.
The North lost roughly one soldier for every African slave brought to the South and the least we could do is not imply they were some impoverished slavers who couldn't plant a crop, open a factory, or build rail lines without some help from the South.
Interesting argument. And what was the wealth of the North built on?
To put the economies in the starkest of differences, 90% of all the capital in the United States, prior to the Civil War, was located in the North. The North employed 1000% more factory workers, in factories that were magnitudes more profitable. Steel production, railroads, engines, chemicals, all this was produced in the North in almost their entirety.
The South produced only three things of note: cotton, slavery, and traitors.
Would you like to guess whether businessmen in the North invested in the slave trade and grew rich thanks to it?
And what do you make of the fact that the North abolished slavery only after decades of using slaves, making it plausible that they never could have succeeded as colonies without slaves in the first place?
The Confederates had probably hoped the North would not want to go to war over the Union thing.
And also: Even though slavery is not an effective means of production (though it probably was, at some points for some people), it's still wrong.
Something like that did in fact happen -- the post-civil war period coincided with the Long Depression (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression), which some economic historians would date between 1873 and 1896.
However, the Long Depression was at least in part a global phenomenon, and with any economic story there are many confounding factors. (And on top of all of this, nations did not keep rigorous economic statistics at the time anyway.)
Why do you think the slave-free north was much richer than the south, before the civil war?
If slavery makes a country rich, why isn't Africa rich?
Why wasn't Brazil, which imported ~4 million slaves (compare to ~200k for USA) significantly richer than the USA?
Native Americans had slaves:
> "An exhaustive search of some 725 late 18th/early 19th century ethnohistoric sources and 20th century ethnographic works indicates that predatory warfare, or preying on other groups for plunder and captives, was engaged in by virtually all Northwest Coast societies."
> "Source after source notes, either through specific instances or in general terms, and with almost monotonous iteration, that within this large area a prime motive for raiding was to gain captives for enslavement."
(From: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3773392?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...)
Why weren't those people rich?
If you think slavery was instrumental to any rich nation getting rich, I suggest you read a lot more history, and look at who had the most slaves in history, and who has the most slaves today.
Because the North had a diversified, industrialized economy, while the South specialized in cotton production.
But the North never could have diversified in this way if it weren't for the South. First because slave-grown cotton was a major source of capital for the overall US economy - it provided over half of all US export earnings. Second, because the demand for textile factories, meat processing plants, insurance, shippers etc. in the over-specialized South is precisely what created a market for the North to diversify into.
This is on top of the fact that the North itself had slaves for a long time, from initial settlement to abolition many decades later.
> Other findings of the NHC, such as the assertion that the Cotton South was the primary force driving national expansion in the antebellum period, are neither original nor correct.
As you say:
> it provided over half of all US export earnings.
This is not true. It may(?) have been over half of US exports, by some measure, but cotton was definitely not over half of earnings. Per Olmstead 2016:
> North’s fellow new economic historians promptly assaulted his thesis. It was widely recognized that cotton was leading U.S. export in the antebellum period. But exports represented less than one-tenth of total income (Kravis 1972). Figure 2 graphs the values of cotton exports as a share the value of U.S. merchandise exports, and then both U.S. cotton and merchandise export values as shares of GDP.30 As the bottom line makes clear, cotton exports were a very small share of national product—less than 5 percent over much of the of the antebellum period (Engerman and Gallman 1983, p. 28).
Emphasis mine. It goes on:
> Perhaps more surprising, given the NHC narrative, is that in 1839 and 1849 corn, not cotton, was even the South’s leading crop in terms of value! Some familiarity with historical data might have moderated the sensational claims of the NHC literature.
If you're interested in the topic, I suggest you read it, especially the section "The Economic History Slavery Debates". You should also read the sections relating about diversification if you have a strong belief in the over-specialized south.
https://www.law.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/microsites/...
We don't have a counterfactual Twin Earth where those countries did not have slaves, but we know for sure slavery is not necessary for a country to be successful. And if we look at countries that had way more slaves, the advantage of simply having slave labor seems hugely insufficient for a country to be successful.
It is possible that the USA had slaves and was able to economically leverage them far greater than all the other countries that had slaves, but this seems unlikely, and such a scenario would also be the biggest gain for a counterfactual scenario that the USA would have been successful without them, too.
I never made the claim that any country can become rich simply by having slavery. The question of why the West is so much richer than e.g. Africa or Brazil is obviously vastly complex and does not boil down to "because of slavery." But whether or not the American South was richer than the North at the time of the civil war, it certainly very very wealthy, and slavery was instrumental in this.[0] I don't think this is really controversial.
> Native Americans had slaves:
The existence of slavery in these or other societies does not in any way absolve the US from its past in this regard. Pointing an accusatory finger at some Native Americans who enslaved prisoners of war and the like, in contrast to a vast and extremely profitable business empire built on systematic enslavement, which has had ripple effects of racism on individuals and communities since, seems incredibly tone-deaf. Even more so when you consider that we killed the Native Americans by the literal millions.
[0]: https://www.history.com/news/slavery-profitable-southern-eco...
Since lots of places had lots of unpaid labor and did nothing particularly successful, there must be more to it. If there is more to it, it is (usually) evidence that the USA would have been successful without slave labor.
However, if your intention is to dispute the claim that slavery was immensely beneficial to the development of the American economy, or to suggest that the morality of American slavery was somehow mitigated by other historical examples of slavery, I strongly disagree. I think in general this mentality is incredibly disrespectful. Acknowledging the role played in our success by the (unwilling) sacrifice made by millions of slaves and Native Americans is the very least that we can do.
I don't see how these can be orthogonal. If the claim of benefiting from something isn't a comparison to a world in which you didn't have that thing, then what is it?
And since we don't have access to a world in which the US didn't have slavery, the best we can do to get information is to compare to other somewhat similar societies. Other places in the Americas with (and without) slave economies seem extremely relevant.
One comparison not mentioned so far: The cotton mills of England spun a lot of slave-grown cotton, just like the ones of New England. It was debated at the time how essential this was. And the civil war blockade provided a useful natural experiment, in which it turned out not to take very long to switch to cotton from other places, like Egypt.
The moral questions don't seem tightly coupled to the economic ones. Would anyone claim that slavery in what's now Haiti (or Brazil) was less of an evil act than slavery in the US, on the grounds that these places are poorer now? Or more evil, on the same grounds? And if not, then why is disputing the economic benefit of slavery in any way taken to be disrespectful of suffering?
The second issue is that regardless of the accuracy of the claim, downplaying the value of slavery is a way to devalue the debt owed to black Americans and has been used as such in arguments. The less valuable slavery was, the less white Americans should feel owed to pay back. So I think there’s a significant moral cost to this argument, and yes I think it’s disrespectful. But again, it’s factually controversial as well.
I had also made a variety of significant points which GP failed to respond to, instead focusing only on a hyper-literal interpretation of one subset of my argument. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The fact that England, another state with a horrific history of exploitation and colonialism, was also guilty of slavery, is hardly exculpatory for the US. Whether slavery was economically beneficial in every single historical example is a separate question from whether it was beneficial to the United States.
My argument re English cotton mills was much more focused than you credit. It was about how rapidly they switched from slave-grown cotton to non-slave cotton, once there was a blockade, not some denial that they consumed slave-grown cotton before this.
I agree that the expansion to west was facilitated by forced migration of native americans from their homelands in a process that was borderline genocidal.
The fun part is about american industrialization - quite lot of it was based on directly stealing the IP of european industrialists (i.e not respecting their patents). This is quite fun in the sense how vocal US is now in upkeeping IP laws.
If colonialism was necessary for industrialisation the European powers with no or smaller colonial empires would have had lower growth. Germany would have been behind the U.K. and France. Austria would have been obviously suffering compared to Germany. This didn’t happen. The evidence is ambiguous as to whether Empire had any effect on economic growth and what it had certainly wasn’t large. You can not detect decolonisation’s effect on historical GDP by eye. That’s how significant colonialism was to economic growth in the developed world.
If actually being the government and in charge of other countries, being able to loot them more or less at will, and being able to direct their populations’ labour and economic development did basically nothing why would trade immiserate Asia and Africa?
More to the point, literally every decade since WWII has been the best ever, on every continent, since WWII. Lifespan, healthy lifespan, education and literacy go up on every continent. Every continent but Africa sees growth in GDP per capita and they look like they’re joining that trend now too.
As far as Foxconn goes they have a lower suicide rate than the general Chinese population.
> ABC News and The Economist both have done some simple comparison— although the number of workplace suicides at Foxconn is large in absolute terms, the suicide rate is actually lower when compared to the overall suicide rate of China or the United States. According to a 2011 Centre for Disease Control and Prevention report, the country has a high suicide rate with approximately 22.23 deaths per 100,000 persons. In 2010, the worst year for workplace suicides at Foxconn with a total of 14 deaths, its employee count was a reported 930,000 people. The total number of Foxconn employee suicides in 2010 is unknown.
Which countries are you referring to? First of all borders in Europe were not the way they are right now 150 or 200 years ago.
Second, an example for a tiny country that was exploiting an african nation well into the 20th century is Belgium [1]
It's the next sentence: Germany, Austria.
Belgium indeed went on a bit of an exploitation spree. But it's never been notably wealthier than its neighbours. (Of course the king got some nice palaces, but that's not country-level wealth.) Instead the industrial part of Belgium was wealthy in the same era that the nearby industrial part parts of France were (and Detroit was). Now that's rust-belt poor, and the wealthy bits are tracking Holland. These patterns seem hard to explain by referring to the (very real) evils of the congo empire.
- What is now Belgium was one of the wealthiest parts of Europe in the Middle Ages, long before any colonization.
- Belgium was the second European country to industrialize. This caused the economy to boom and Belgium had the 4th highest GDP in 1900. Congo was only a colony since 1908.
- In 1918 the whole economy was destroyed because of the war. The Germans had plundered the country. Whole factories were dismantled and shipped to Germany.
- In 1945 the economy was once again destroyed because of the Germans.
- In 1956, at the heigh of colonial exploitation, Congo was 3,3 % of Belgian GDP and 75000 direct and indirect jobs. Not nothing but hardly the base of all wealth. It was much lower in the preceding decades.
- Congo became independent in 1960. Annual GDP growth rates were much higher during the 60's than during the whole colonial period.
I would say Belgium is currently wealthy because of the Marshall plan.
source: https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/history/twent...
This assumes that the colonialists countries didn't trade with non colonialist countries in Europe.
Prussia initiated the concept of a common market in 1818 and in 1833 a treaty extended the Zollverein to the larger states of Germany, although Austria, by Prussian design was excluded.
As demand for coal increased, Germany rapidly developed railway and coalfields
We see lots of migration between Europeans countries specially ones with linked borders. There is movement of goods and people which itself can pull multiple of European countries to higher wages levels and living standards.
If french were getting richer and Germans were extracting coal. Germans could sell their coal at much higher price to French and grow rich without getting into colonialism.
If you cross the border and make much higher wages, the news would spread and regions would equalise overtime unless there is something which artificially stops migration.
Here's the data (which confirms high migration rates): https://brewminate.com/internal-migration-in-france-and-germ...
Look at the US and Mexico: Despite having a lot of trade and migration, the two countries significantly differ economically.
So it plainly does not hold that trade and migration entirely eliminates differences.
Back then labor was in more demand. Evidence is the salves were imported often at great cost and risk.
There were fewer commodities in market.
Germany had coal, French needed it.
There was no limit on immigration.
People from Germany and France were more equal in education and social status than the difference you've between Americans and Mexicans.
Technology wise countries in Europe were quite equal, what differed is the amount of resources at their disposal.
>So it plainly does not hold that trade and migration entirely eliminates differences.
It doesn't have to entirely eliminate differences, just have to make them more equal.
> People from Germany and France were more equal in education and social status than the difference you've between Americans and Mexicans.
Good way to disqualify any counter-examples to your theory. If they're more equal in status (i.e. have more equal economies), then they don't count.
Brahmins in India had high social status but less money/assets in past. So I am not talking about economic status.
And indeed, Mexico is gaining ground on the US, not least because of bilateral trade and bilateral migration.
I believe exploitation is simply a not so useful label. Trade agreements, even those that appear lopsided, are in my opinion not morally wrong. The moral issues arise from accompanying violence, corruption and theft.
The developing countries who arguably have been "exploited" could not have developed even to their current state on their own. At least not within centuries.
The oil-rich countries in the middle east couldn't have used their oil for anything until they got the technology to get it out of the earth and somebody paid them for exporting it.
Same goes for many exports of African countries.
Sure thing, the "first world" has done a lot of wrong to the "third world". But the latter isn't going to get anywhere without help from the former, either.
One of these things is not like the others!
Cheap sea transport is a triumph of engineering. Sweatshop is just a term for a factory which the speaker disdains. Usually implying that the peasants should stay on their fields in picturesque poverty, and not make their own life choices.
Slavery, on the other hand, is actually evil. Fortunately it's now confined to certain backward parts of the world which have very little to do with the modern economy. I mean how many things manufactured in Mauritania have you bought recently?
Slavery is more common than you think, and especially because there are conditions equal to any definition of slavery, which are just not labeled that. There still is plenty of such slavery almost all around the world.
Also, slavery is not the standard for exploitation. Subsistence wages alone may or may not be exploitative, but they don't constitute slavery. You need additional restrictions, for example on your movement, choice of work, human rights, etc
Serveral landlocked European countries industrialized just fine without a single square foot of colonies, certainly no worse than first generation colonial powers.
Causality and time moved the other direction.
Industrialization made Britain and a few other countries rich and technologically advanced. That enabled them to conquer and exploit third world countries. On balance, that enriched a lot of individuals and made a lot of leaders feel powerful, but didn't actually make the countries any richer.
The earlier conquests of the New World by Spain and Portugal was a whole other thing, mostly based on astonishing immunological luck.
Somehow it's easy to imagine that the Iraq war could happen for the benefit of some people's careers, and Halliburton's stockholders, while being a complete disaster for the US as a whole (not to mention for everyone else).
Yet when we discuss 19th C colonial adventures, the default assumption is that the much weaker states of the time certainly knew exactly what they were doing, for their own good. And could make sure that their generals, months away by post, certainly obeyed, and never got rich themselves...
Resources from the Indian Raj, in particular, played a crucial role in enriching Britain and therefore financing the industrial revolution.
I think you're confusing lack of domesticated animals in primitive times. Cows and such have been farmed in africa for a long time. For example, Nguni cattle[0], seems to have brought to southern africa as early as the sixth century.
And, well, there were a host of empires on the coast of northern africa before the industrial revolution.
https://www.amazon.com/There-No-Me-Without-You/dp/1596912936
The country is overrun by Islamic Extremists killing and terrorising at will. See the daily news.
Africa's population growth is fundamentally destroying any hope they have for stability or progress. People emigrate to informal settlements near major cities in an uncontrollable/unaccountable way destroying delicate balances of resources with only a tiny fraction of the population contributing to the national or municipal coffers.
You can't grow your population so rapidly, with so few resources and expect standard of living increases equivalent to the west. With that you can't expect the stability of the west.
They will inevitably keep looking to officials who will promise the earth with no hope of delivering.
^ https://m.news24.com/Africa/News/under-siege-somalia-moves-t...
Underdeveloped Africa is actually a good but risky place to invest partly because or diminished returns run backwards - smaller investments can get bigger returns but they are more vulnerable to things like economic downturns. And fortunately that also boosts efficiency to sustain the resource needs.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/08/abiy-ahmed-upe...
Indeed. In many ways you do better to think of Ethiopia (of that period) as a colonial power. Although there were no sailing ships involved, a fairly small center conquered lots of surrounding territory, inhabited by people who linguistically and culturally were about as foreign as could be.
> Their population went from 70 million in 2007 to 100 million in 2017. The current forecast is for about 200 million by 2050.
And from 20 million in 1960, when America was about 200 million.
(Italy and Germany had a dispute over Austria, which seemingly manifested in this way.)
They claim it happened in 12 hours. Unless they're talking about planting seeds, I find it hard to believe and take this story just as a political stunt.
Ethiopia's population is 100M. Did 10% participate in this somehow, and each person plant 35 trees across the country?
How would you even get that many trees to plant?
Though the limiting factor on how fast you can plant trees is more the production of seedlings than the physical labor of planting. So I guess if they've spend the last several months growing and distributing seedlings in preparation for this campaign, actually plainting them all in one day isn't so crazy
I asked him and he said it would be little trouble to plant that many seedlings if you coordinates the efforts and planned for it.
He also told me that these stunts, like airlines planting a lot of trees to go carbon neutral, often ends up with a lot of dead trees. Because the hard part isn’t planting trees it’s making sure they survive the first five years.
There is also quality of the seedlings. The best example is kitchen herbs. If you buy some rosemary in a pot at you local supermarket, it’ll taste fine. It’ll probably also survive long enough for you to eat it. If you try to plant it in your garden with the intention of keeping rosemary around for years, then there is a good chance it’ll have died within its first month. That’s because supermarket herbs are mass produced in safe environments, where long term survival isn’t valued. You could get lucky, but you’d have a much higher rate of success if you buy your rosemary from a grower who grew them to be planted outside. This is both slower and more expensive though.
Getting 350 million seedlings, often as cheap as you can, is easier with the mass-production approach, and that’s typically what these projects do.
Which is interesting because the article already mentions a lack of water resources:
>> as Ethiopians heeded Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s ambitious plan to roll back years of drought and scanty rains that the United Nations says has left some 3.8 million people in immediate need for assistance.
Won't these new trees demand a lot of water?
1. Https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/59/4/341/346941
They state that you can plant 100-200 trees per hour, and extrapolate that to planting 8x a day (presumably assuming an 8 hour work day).
Simply using common sense will tell you that this number is total nonsense, unless you're using seeds and just tossing them into the ground. 200 trees per hour assumes 1 tree every 18 seconds.
Multiple issues here:
1. The work is strenuous. I've planted trees before the proper way and it's not something you can do for 8 hours day in day out without breaks. Digging is intense work that requires frequent breaks even for a person who is in shape.
2. You need to have 1600 saplings available somewhere. Simply taking the time to bring 1 sapling to the dug hole will take you probably anywhere between 10 and 30 seconds. The farther away the hole from the sapling collection, the longer it will take, possibly up to a minute.
3. 18 seconds for digging a tree hole is absolute nonsense as well. This assumes top quality topsoil that's already been prepped for planting (trees or other plants). It basically assumes garden soil quality and no need to dig the hole back up once you planted the tree.
4. You need put the dug up soil back and cover the exposed roots with either soil that you dug up or good soil that was brought to the planting site. You also need to water the soil afterward and compress it around the roots to make sure the sapling doesn't fall from the slightest gust of wind. This easily triples the time compared to just "digging a hole".
Basically - don't believe the first number you see on the wikipedia or the internet. The source is not reputable and sounds like it was written by a person who hasn't done a day of garden work in their life.
I also wouldn't really consider anything less than a 2-3ft sapling a tree. And I wouldn't consider it "planted" unless it survives at least the next year.
Edit: This doesn't account for all the volunteers that they say participated in the effort, so they probably didn't use this method.
Regarding the trees - it is the rainy season in Ethiopia, should last another few months. The country is huge and while parts of it are very very dry, other parts are borderline jungle. There are some cloud rain forests, not sure if they have "proper" rain forests. Ethiopia actually as a country has a lot of water (though it does need to be carefully managed)
The government invests heavily in the country (as does China). In the span of a few years I saw huge changes in the infrastructure.
An example would be olive trees, but hey there's a whole wikipedia article about it that definitely knows more than me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_greening
"Trees store water, raise water from underlying aquifers, reduce evaporation after a rain, attract animals (and thereby fertility through feces), and they can cause more rain to fall (by temperature reduction and other effects), if the planted area is large enough."
A great example of transforming large tracts of land is the UVM Jericho research forest in Vermont. It was farmed for nearly 150 years, its soil degraded to the point where it was sandy and barren. I've heard it described as a moonscape. After planting 70,000 trees [1] and letting nature do its thing, it now resembles an old growth forest. It's a prime example of nature's capacity to heal itself and is a source of hope for me in the context of climate change.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microclimate
1: https://www.uvm.edu/rsenr/jericho_research_forest_and_conser...
Many trees could be said to have been planted by someone scattering apple seeds out of their pockets.
When we hear of tree planting we picture a mayor or rich person planting a four year old tree in a park. The reality is that trees grow from seed.
In the case of commercial forestry all the trees planted won't make it.
A better vision of tree planting is Johnny Appleseed.
Edits. The Twitter from the Ethiopian minister says tree seedlings.
Yeah but trees are hardline r-strategists and produce millions of disposable seeds with a very low survival rate. Planting a seed is in no way equivalent to planting a germinated, sprouted, and developed seedling.
Personally I'd expect a sapling to be the minimum developmental stage to qualify as "planting trees".
I think there are a lot of countries finding out that they are not passive participants in the curve balls nature is throwing them and that they can influence what happens with simple, low tech solutions like planting trees and taking care of them and maybe a few simple changes in behavior like keeping sheep and cattle away from volatile areas.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/07/pakistan-s-billion-tr...
[2] https://www.upworthy.com/how-india-managed-to-plant-66-milli...
But, in Ethiopia many of those trees are going to need watering, surely? Protecting from people gathering firewood?
Sweden and Ethiopia seem pretty different wrt tree planting?
The strides that the current Ethiopian government has taken in terms of human rights and commitment to resolving ethnic disparities are tremendous [1]. Since most humans have an Ethiopian grandma in the family tree, these are accomplishments that we can all take pride in.
[0] http://www.greenbeltmovement.org/
[1] https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2019/country-chapters/ethio...
I worry they're destroying native landscapes by replacing them with non-native tree plantations.
I wonder why the numbers are varying so wildly.
Based on the thread from yesterday, they're pushing for carbon taxes because that will solve everything. /s
It always astonishes me how central government control is the only possible solution. Even if planting tree isn't going to solve climate change tomorrow, it does increase the amount of CO2 that is subtracted from the atmosphere, trees provide living spaces for numerous types of wildlife, they help prevent erosion. Given how many benefits there are to trees, people should be planting them even if they did nothing for moderating green house gases. The only thing they don't do is provide control and opportunities for graft. So I guess it makes sense that some people will poo-poo tree planting in favor of enriching their team.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zctymnb/revision/4
http://www.ipsnews.net/2018/11/importance-goats-east-africas...
Seed planting is a different story
I might be underestimating Ethiopians though...
I'm inclined to disbelieve these numbers unless I see some trustworthy non-govt source. Everyone's quoting the minister.
> Lyrics of the song included description of the country saying, "where nothing ever grows, no rain or rivers flow..."
The idea is to plant 350 million knowing that a lot won't survive, but that in planting a huge amount, many millions will survive and nature can take over.
(for the record, those evil guys that cut down trees for profit, plant 52 million trees per year every year in the US)
Meanwhile, as per the 353 million-in-a-day estimate: let's say for sake of argument that the average person can manage to plant one tree per minute and they are working an 8 hour shift with no breaks, pauses, distractions or complications. That's close to half-a-million people to cover all three shifts in a single day. And that's with generous assumptions. The Ethiopian government says that they expect a single volunteer to be able to plant 100 trees in a day. Which means if the 350 million in a day is accurate, they had 3.5 million volunteers. Call me suspicious of such an ambitious estimate.
with a little more digging, to their credit, these 350 million trees are just the latest on a re-forestation project that now boasts 2.6 billion trees planted since it began. But math again, that equates to 739 square miles of equivalent US forest (less than 0.2% of the total land mass of Ethiopia or an equivalent square of 27 miles on a side of typical US forest. That's just over half the size of the state of Rhode Island or about the size of Washtenaw county, MI where I live.
Tt their ultimate goal is to plant 4 billion trees total before the project is finished. Admirable indeed. But, I did find figures on my home state of Michigan for comparison. While I have yet to find a number on the total number of trees before the reforestation in Ethiopia, I can guess based on the decline of 25% cited and the goal of 4 billion trees total. ((4/25) * 15) = 2.4 (billion) for a total of 6.4 billion trees assuming their desire is to re-achieve the 40% number from a century ago. Estimates for the state of Michigan are a total of 13.5 billion trees across the entire state. That's more than twice the assumed 'final goal' for the entire country of Ethiopia. Oh, should I mention the land area of Ethiopia is 4 1/2 times more than that of the state of Michigan? Other things worthy of consideration which I noticed while digging. Many areas of Michigan were clear cut in the late 1800s and early 1900s. (i.e. about the same timeline as the de-forestation in Ethiopia) To be fair, some of the areas cut were re-forested by WPA government work programs in the 1930s. But not all. The reports I was pulling my figures from were actually surveys done by the state government for the purpose of evaluating potential future timber cutting, and they noted a large number of hardwoods (oaks, maples, elm, etc) in those numbers (most of the wpa planted trees were pine trees) and a growing quantity of older trees as a percentage of the total. aka "old growth" or mature forests.
---Original comment---
Here's why I downvoted you:
- It doesn't matter if the water is clean or dirty because that's not what's causing climate change.
- The United States was the second largest emitter of carbon dioxide in 2015. CO2 is a leading cause of climate change.
- The term "bigly" is often used by people who are proud of their ignorance. Ignorance isn't something to be proud of.
...might also be a marker of sarcasm here.
> https://www.tripsavvy.com/the-worlds-cleanest-tap-water-4159...
The US does not have the best tap water in the world, I think everyone here can guess that already. It does have extremely safe tap water overall however, save for a few examples like Flint (and fracking regions in West Texas or Oklahoma, both of which get bad ratings on water violations). Its rate of serious drinking water violations is low nationally going back over the last 20-30 years.
There are two camps of people who either don’t believe in climate change entirely or see climate change as a means to achieve an ecofascist state.
"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Note that they include: "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
Not exactly a carbon sink...
The reason is because forest do not change CO2 levels noticeably, in the long run. The reason is because there is roughly constant amount of carbon in Earths biomass. Planting treas only increases the amonut of biomass by a little bit but has no lasting effect of scrubbing CO2 from atmosphere.
The real solution to climate change is undoing decades of constant addition of CO2 to atmosphere. This requires not only scrubbing CO2 from atmosphere but also sequestering the carbon somehow which means preventing it getting back to carbon cycle.
If you really wanted to make planting trees have an effect you would not only need to plant trees, you would need to regularly cut them (before they burn) and store them somewhere, maybe at the bottom of ocean, from where it will not be released (decomposed, burned, etc.)
Of course, planting trees have other beneficial effects like helping to keep rainwater. It is just important to make sure right kinds of trees (and large variety of them!) are planted to not repeat mistakes that were made in other places.
ETH Zürich seems to disagree with that statement.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/01/negati...
More offbeat approaches might include modern giant pyramids built of timber, perhaps in the Australian outback. As long as they could be secured from fire and decay.
All good when things are in balance - but they're not.
To sequester the c02, you need to prevent rot.
And I'd go with radiation or heating for sterilization.
Just throw it into the empty mining pits instead.
These sources are far from unbiased, but nevertheless:
http://www.greenspec.co.uk/building-design/crosslam-timber-f...
https://www.woodworks.org/wp-content/uploads/presentation_sl...
Maybe but it's relatively cheap, and it can't hurt so why not?
Seems like there are many reasons not to do a fix unless you know it works to some reasonable extent.
Why would they not do this is often a question I've been left with after talking to climate change nihilists. No, it won't fix global warming. But it doesn't cost very much, helps their population and economy, and makes a dent in global warming.
At least they're not turning off perfectly functional nuclear power plants like in so-sophisticated Germany. They're reforesting. Do what you can and try not to make things worse.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet [1] https://a16z.com/2011/11/13/lead-bullets/
And they produce perfectly radioactive nuclear waste nobody knows what to do with right now...
Did I say something to the contrary?
[1] https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0...
There was this experiment with just dumping 12000 tonnes of orange peel a while ago that turned out to be a huge success: https://www.sciencealert.com/how-12-000-tonnes-of-dumped-ora...
Maybe something like this can also work with wood, although it might take a bit longer to compost.
Although, maybe you could use concentrated solar or even geothermal for the heating part. Hell, you could probably make it profitable selling the petrified wood for use in construction (mantles, counter tops, tile). If it retains a decent amount of the carbon.
Even if not done, still think a living forest has to be much better than a plain or desert.
What does "in the long run" mean? Will it suck up carbon for the first 20 years while the tree is growing? 20 years would of borrowed time would be quite useful.
Deforestation is definitely a big deal. We need to preserve nature's diversity and forests are extremely important part of that.
What I meant is to warn people against thinking that if we start planting trees en masse then we have somehow on the right track to solve the problem. We are not.
https://www.withouthotair.com/
It's a little out of date on things like the advances made in renewables, but still very good. Also very readable.