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Comment by rorykoehler | Hacker News Reader

Would it be possible to re-green deserts with this technology? Does anyone know of any studies on using this technology to combat climate change?

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Greening deserts is not a good solution for climate change. In fact it might worsen climate change due to albedo changes. A nice video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfo8XHGFAIQ

Challenge with that video is it takes a very industrial approach to green deserts - mono cultures for trees, massive desalination plants to provide water etc

Some of the original ideas for greening deserts are permaculture based (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sohI6vnWZmk) which are a way more sustainable approach but won't bring around carbon reduction fast enough.

Yishan Wong, of Reddit CEO infamy, has been working on this for a few years: https://www.terraformation.com/

I seriously considered taking a job there (I did not for personal reasons, namely not wanting to move) and would recommend looking at them to others.

I think they are poised to be a key player in the forestry and reforestation space in the next 2 decades.

But... the reforestation occurs naturally for last 2 decades (at least, more like for 3 or even 4)

Not likely. This is much less cost efficient at scale than desalination through reverse osmosis (RO). And RO itself is generally too expensive to be used for large scale irrigation.

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