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Comment by ajot | Hacker News Reader

Sorry for the whataboutism, but what about european forests? Are we seeing them recovering any soon or we shouldn't care because it happened hundreds of years ago?

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"As detailed in a recent report by Nature Research, biomass loss increased 69% across Europe between 2016 and 2018, with large losses occurring in the Nordic and Baltic regions. In the past five years, the rate of deforestation in Estonia has risen 85% – a surge linked to a 25% decrease in bird populations. "

We are on a fast track to deforest Europe in the name of CO2 reduction [0]

[0] https://www.friendsofeurope.org/insights/eus-biofuels-addict...

And sadly, not even the actuality of CO2 reduction. Burning those trees releases a lot of CO2, and has the same impact no matter where that CO2 came from.

The claim of course is that the trees will grow back, but that takes decades, and emission reductions are very time-sensitive at this point due to feedback loops kicking in.

Yup, this is why the line of “net zero” and “offsets” is another delay/distraction tactic. This is still the crucial decade for GHG reductions and it seems like every country is just ignoring the starting gun instead of running.

Going off recent accounts, it's not looking great:

https://weather.com/science/environment/news/2017-11-28-germ...

https://www.hs2rebellion.earth/2021/04/27/high-court-judge-g...

Poland still has something like 30% tree coverage which is quite impressive, given the decimation that has occured in other european nations.

Here's a global tracker, for anyone who's interested:

https://www.globalforestwatch.org/dashboards/global/

Forest cover in Europe is increasing for a hundred years already if I recall correctly. Let me look that up.

Edit:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/12/04...

It's not about increasing or decreasing. It's about doing your share. Germany has half the forest cover percentage of Brazil. Either pay for the remainder to stay up or understand that as Germans burn fossil fuel to live in an inhospitable land (they will literally die if they don't fund the slaughter of Ukrainians) after they've clear cut their forests, others will not sacrifice without being paid or placed under duress.

If you add x CO2 to the atmosphere and take out y, then others who are adding x'<x and taking out y'>y will not just listen to you.

Now - that they've already gotten very rich by exploiting theirs (and OURS brazilian forests) - it's forbidden.

Sorry to switch to a meta-topic, accusations of "whataboutism" have shutdown self-awareness of hypocrisy and prevented holistic thinking in so many cases. It needs to go away.

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