The Line, Saudi Arabia

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3 points·cyanbane··4 comments

Here's what I'd do if I were the king of SA: build a lot of solar (maybe 100 GW, like Mukesh Ambani in India), desalinate lots and lots of water and plant billions of trees. Saudi Arabia has about half a billion acres of desert. If you reforest only 10% of that with about 400 trees per acre (below average density, one tree per each 10'x10' square), you end up with 20 billion trees, or 2% of the global aim of one trillion trees to get us to carbon neutral. If you increase the area you reforest, and the density of the trees, it's not unthinkable you can reach 20% of the goal.

Sure, it's not as glitzy as a 1km tall tower, or a 100km long city, but humanity will appreciate this more.

Deserts are an important ecosystem and do have their share in cooling the planet, cf. https://climatefeedback.org/claimreview/deserts-cool-the-pla...

Deserts have albedo, and trees sequester CO2. Looking at the first without acknowledging the second is disingenuous.

Here's the view from NASA's JPL [1]. They say the idea has merit. It's obviously not a silver bullet, and any planet-scale project can have lots of unintended consequences, so one needs to proceed cautiously. But one should not dismiss outright any solution because one identifies a negative side-effect.

[1] https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2927/examining-the-viability-o...

An interesting podcast on the topic:

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/streetsweeper/id156430...

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