The real news is that it's also slightly happening in other developed countries too, another rhetoric point towards Steven Pinker's concept that as nations get richer they become more environmentally conscious, cause they can afford to care about it.
I'm not sure it's environmentalism. It's efficiency. From the article.
> In richer countries, where farming has become more efficient, deforestation has slowed or even reversed
You simply don't need as many people living in villages, farming marginal land. New England re-forested because the land was never that good for farming, and it made a lot more sense to work in factories.
I think in this case it's more of a correlating factor. The countries struggling with deforestation have very little state capacity to enforce property rights or any sort of environmental regulations. Whereas in the developed world it's much easier to stop illegal logging or homesteading.
People like nature - all things held equal we want to live in a beautiful natural world... but if that world comes at the cost of having food on the table. Whether that inefficiency is technologically, environmentally (e.g. New England's poor soil) or conflict driven doesn't significantly change public opinion.
Thus far, getting rich has been dirty business. This is what leads people to care more so than them being able to afford to care. Their richness is a side effect of their pollution, thus, caring is a side effect of richness but that's not the root cause. Pollution -> Money -> Caring. If you removed the money, people still care they just can't afford to do anything about it.
I'm not familiar with Pinker or this theory, just poking at it :)
China is following this path and we will celebrate it. As always, do not do what the developed nations say you should. Instead do what they did. After all, Norway did not become prosperous by keeping their oil in the ground.
Sure if you need to bootstrap to the 18th century. It’s much faster and cheaper to skip a few hundred years ahead by importing equipment.
The deforestation goes back much further than that. Europe experienced significant deforestation in the middle ages. It was a major issue for many countries long before industrialism.
Either way, you need to fit the needs of the same number of people. If they're in a dense city near everything they need, they use less space.
Policies to limit urban sprawl just an expensive way to create more sprawl elsewhere - and roads to it.
It is. I have seen the data
But I live in a rural area of New Zealand and I also see how people moving onto farm land greatly increases tree cover (not forrest) and biodiversity, I assume because people plant gardens, and closely husband them
In New Zealand farmers are grossly damaging to the environment. They clear everything and plant mono cultures and treat water as exhaustable and rivers as waste dumps
So yes people in cities is a good thing, but people in rural areas are good, to
Sigh. No, unfortunately it doesn't. Natural plants are very rarely rate-limited by the CO2 concentration. So forests don't grow faster.
However, higher CO2 does make the forests a bit more drought-resistant.
The abnormally rapid rise in CO2 levels we are seeing is unusual and accords better with the unusualness of rapid global greening. It isn't climate change that is causing it. It is CO2, directly.
Upstate NY was ideal maple syrup production territory for years. Now, we’ve changed from USDA Zone 5 to 6, so the region will be more like western Virginia in 20 years.
Edit: to clarify, I'm saying the greening thing already happened due to increases in CO2 levels (though it's possible this is due to heat and not CO2 itself, I guess?).
For residential, solar + batteries straight up beats legacy infra on cost, and with the upcoming cheap sodium batteries, things are only going to get better.
You'll read about some 70 year old woman/man in an obscure village who's reforested thousands of acres on their own, or resuscitated a lake (e.g. the lake guy in Bengaluru).
But there's little effort to harness their knowledge in a systematic way, add knowledge from others into the knowledge bank, do peer review, and then systematically dispense the knowledge in the form of a kit to environmentalists and bureaucrats across the country. China did this, and that's why they're so successful.
For example if you go from Cumberland Gap to Virginia Beach, a distance of 499 miles, it will take you 10 hours and 25 minutes.
North America does this with South America readily.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/04/europe/china-ukraine-eu-war-i...
"Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told the European Union’s top diplomat that Beijing can’t accept Russia losing its war against Ukraine..."
Reforestation alone doesn't matter. What matters is total result of deforestation and reforestation. Russia reforests only about 1Mha/year :
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1059300/russia-reforeste...
while the total resulting loss is
https://www.globalforestwatch.org/dashboards/country/RUS/?ca...
"In 2020, Russia had 748 Mha of natural forest, extending over 44% of its land area. In 2024, it lost 5.59 Mha of natural forest, equivalent to 816 Mt of CO₂ emissions."
>But export of Baikal fresh water? That’s fake news. Didn’t happen and won’t happen
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/07/parched-chines...
in Russian, that another waterpipeline - from river Ob' was approved at some Russian Parliament "roundtable on strategic projects with China and Kazakhstan".
https://topwar.ru/159671-bajkal-xxi-veka-druzhba-druzhboj-a-...
and there were strong leaks, not officially dispelled, that Baikal water was raised during the most recent Putin/Xi meeting.
You may read it whatever way you like. If we look at the facts - statista and globalwatch is some Western sites/orgs, topwar is straight Russian and Guardian is Great Britain.
>Kind reminder - this is not reddit.
This is why you're using that offensive "404" notation (an expression of the Russian propaganda point that Ukraine isn't a sovereign independent state) when referring to Ukraine?
Regarding you Guardian and Topwar links, you are citing the sources that speculate about rumors about some science fiction projects. Russia does not export water from Baikal or Ob River and won’t export it.
Official state news https://ria.ru/20160503/1425318933.html
"Moscow invited Bejing to discuss fresh water transfer project from Russia to China - stated the Russian Minister of Agriculture"
and the further description of the proposed project is exactly the second project described in the topwar link.
I think more fascinating has been Russia's surge in forestry growth, also very notable in the report. Unlike China their forests have expanded almost completely accidentally. Communist-era collective farmlands have slowly been getting abandoned. Their frontier has been shrinking and the forests have crept in, tree growth being aided by longer growing period and thawing permafrost.
One of their projects is allowing them to undertake infrastructure projects in the desert. They simply stick bales of straw into ditches to stop soil being blown away by wind. The straw traps soil, water, and breaks down over a few years allowing plants to take hold. It's a simple approach that works. Very pramatic, dig a ditch, stick in some straw. Done. Repeat.
Outside of China, the green wall in Africa is a very pragmatic approach that involves digging a lot of half moon shaped ditches to trap rain water. Simple and effective.
Other approaches involve using fences to stop sheep and other grazers from preventing anything vaguely green tinted shoots from being eaten and giving them a chance to actually turn into trees.
What I like about these approaches is that some relatively simple measures can have big effects. People spend a lot of time hand wringing over seemingly insurmountable problems. The Chinese are showing that in addition to the power to destroy landscapes, we also have the power to remake them. It works. They aren't tree huggers. Better landscapes also mean local economies benefit. Deserts don't feed people. Water retention means agriculture gets a second chance.
What I admire in the Chinese is the pragmatic can do attitude. Their motivations are of course self serving. They value having clean air in their cities, clean drinking water, and a landscape that can support agriculture and infrastructure. And in the end that's the best kind of motivation you can get. It's something worth copying. Whenever economy, science, and environment align, everybody wins.
A lot of areas in the rest of the world that are subject to desertification, pollution, etc. are fixable. And there's value in fixing them that needs more attention. I don't see this as a green/left topic. If you exist on this planet, why wouldn't you want something to be done to clean up the mess we've all created in the last centuries? Breaking out this topic from the usual left/right day to day politics is key. The rest is just work. The Chinese put the rest of us to shame with hard work.
A few good ones that I watched:
- Inside Africa's Food Forest Mega-Project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbBdIG--b58
- China Buried Tons of Dead Plants Under the Desert Sand https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev8DsPH_82Y
- Green Gold: Regreening the Desert | John D. Liu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3nR3G9jboc
There are way more. One channel that I might call https://www.youtube.com/@MossyEarth. They basically use donations to take on projects to do smalls scale nature restoration. I am actually considering making a donation to them because I like what they do. There are more examples of such channels.
Not everything on this front is without controversy of course and I'm not blind to that. But I like the positive, constructive nature of these approaches. Just the simple notion that it's fixable with a bit of cleverness and lots of hard work. China is of course an autocracy that you can criticize for a lot of things. But they are doing a few things right as well. And it's worth calling that out and learning from them.
It's an ancient practice that was forgotten and rediscovered. The beauty of this approach is that it shows results within a few short years. Basically in Africa if there's water, nature shows up and consumes it. So you get lush growth and rapid soil restoration. Trees, vegetables, etc. on what was a heavily eroded flood plain before.
It's easy to explain, the locals get why it works. And they get a very fast response from nature and all the produce and riches that come with that. And all they need is shovels and some elbow grease.
No nonsense, an actual practitioner, and not very "YouTubey"
Edit: for the downvoters
They build 10x more solar power (total numbers compared, in percentages solar nearly tripled since 2021, nuclear had a 10% increase)
That seems more like a modest increase.
Honestly solar seems to have an exponential growth, nuclear linear at best.
Numbers from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
There's a lot of work to be done and there's a lot of friction, corruption and economic pressures constraining that work but there seems to be a genuine desire to do that work.
My home country we are only 40 million. I am sure they consume much more than us.
Was pretty obvious, but I wrote it down for you as you seem to be having trouble understanding the concept.
"Per capita consumption-based CO₂ emissions" (emissions adjusted for imports/exports)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
"Imported or exported CO₂ emissions per capita" (shows the effects of imports/exports alone, as tons)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/imported-or-exported-co-e...
"Share of CO₂ emissions embedded in trade" (shows the effects of imports/exports alone, as percentage of total)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-co2-embedded-in-tra...
Spoken like somebody that never stept a foot in China.
Sure, manufacturing for the West is part of it, but up to a few years ago, entering Beijing alone resulted in your naval cavities burning, the moment the airplane door opened.
Because of the usage from coal in households. It was only until a few years ago, that they banned the usage of wood/coal around the city. Outside the city, its coal everywhere for the normal class people who own their (country)house. Near other large cities its still very coal centric in the winter.
And the heating (communal for apartments) is mostly coal and while the coal may burn a bit more clean, and there is some filtration going on, its not a ton. So while open coal burning was reduced directly in the cities like Beijing, they simply moved a lot of it outside the 6th ring.
All those EV's ... great, no more gasoline/oil usage but ... wait, where does a lot of the electricity come from? Oeps...
But wait, all that crypto mining, where do you think that electricity comes from?
And now AI...
And the consumer goods.
Your statement ignore a large part of the coal consumption in the country.
Thanks.
The US is fairly high but below Canada, Russia, and many Middle Eastern countries. US emissions have also consistently fallen for the past 25 years or so.
They aren't relevant to the climate, but they are relevant to how much energy and wealth you allow each person to have.
Does a person in China deserve to have less energy or wealth than a person in America?
There is some per capita carbon emissions budget such that if each human on earth stayed within that budget, climate change could be mitigated[0]. The average Chinese person exceeds that budget, but does so by significantly less than the average American. So the average American is more at fault for climate change than the average Chinese person is.
Of course, your second claim, that this is a global issue, is correct. But if we solved the global issue in a fair way, China would still emit a few times more CO2 than the US.
0: “Mitigated” rather than totally solved, because to go back to pre-industrial temperatures the budget would have to be negative. But let’s say we’re talking about staying within 2C or some similar goal.
I would expect air conditioning to also be among the easier energy uses to match with solar power as we go forward. Better building design and more efficient AC devices also make a huge difference.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-just-put-c...
The shallow decline in 2015 and 2016 was due to a slump that followed a round of stimulus measures, while zero-Covid controls caused a sharper fall in 2022.
(Or not, there's at least theoretical paths to make those examples better, this is just meant to moderate hope rather than to deny it entirely).
If we focus on rates of growth, China is building much more solar and nuclear than the US per-capita. And they don't have as much available domestic gas which with shorter carbon chains makes much less CO2, and that's the big problem. The US has twice as many natural gas reserves as China, with 1/4 the population, so, post-dissemination of fracking technology, that's largely down to geographical luck.
There's going to be big spikes in data center energy consumption in both countries. It's still somewhat marginal at the moment at a little over 4% here and less there but it is going to be a main driver of energy consumption growth going forward.
Banning China from leading nodes may result in doubling or more their consumption in this area as a direct US policy outcome.
The lack of a single world government is why.
Agreements between nations are only enforced by honour, and while that's more than nothing, it's not great.
The practical outcome of this is that who is "allowed" to do anything is dynamic, and who may do something the most can be inverted extremely quickly.
Indonesia: 275M / 650M ton / 2.3 ton
Pakistan: 240M / 225M ton / 1 ton
Nigeria: 220M / 110M ton / 0.5 ton
Brazil: 215M / 475M ton / 2.2 ton
I can go on and on about the countries that are emitting less than the US. People and animals live in areas that are liveable. So countries near the equator and fertile countries will always be more populous. So how else do you propose we compare countries? Which are themselves mostly arbitrary lines as far as the earth is concerned - so why chunk by countries? It has to be per person right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...
> Over the last three and a half decades China has planted roughly 120 million acres of forest, according to U.N. figures, much of it added to contain the spread of deserts. Last year China completed a project, begun in 1978, to plant a 2,000-mile-long belt of trees around the Taklamakan Desert in the west. Work continues on a belt of trees around the massive Gobi Desert in the north.
It was the entirely predictable result of the policies we adopted. You don't get to be sloppy and shortsighted and then sail off into the sunset without consequences.
Kicking the industrial layers of the economic pyramid overseas and telling people to learn to code is what you do when you want a quick win and don't care if people will rightly hate you in a couple decades (IMO it's a miracle we're discussing this now and not in 2002).
Behaving that way isn't socially/politically sustainable and it doesn't take a genius to figure it out.
Our children’s generation will never forgive us for abandoning nuclear energy abundance. Truly a crime against humanity.
My other glib thing about nuclear is that France, a much denser nation than the US (though of course density is a local property...), has a bunch of nuclear, but even with "full" buy-in it's hard to make the whole thing profitable, and a lot of the nuclear reactors are running at like 80% capacity.
Electricity is pretty fungible at smaller scales but when you start building reactors you need water and you need consumers of a lot of electricity to be close by, and that does cause its own sets of constraints.
Would still be better if the US had built a bunch more nuclear reactors, but my assumption has often been that there are limits to how much it could be expanded in the US given those constraints.
Recently, I wonder if a nuclear winter (I mean this in the cold war context) is likely enough to make renewables massively less efficient. If the current administration were more competent, I'd assume that they are pushing non-renewables for that reason.
But then again, after a nuclear winter, our energy consumption will probably drop to near zero (the population being near zero), so it probably wouldn't matter either way.
It's kinda fitting that NOW trump jumps on board with nuclear, once the data says it isn't really necessary anymore. It's possible we can maybe build some useful small reactors for some stuff, but yeah.
IMO, the old style regulated public utilities were cheaper and more reliable.
Both are over their fair share, but the US is over by a larger factor so is farther behind on getting to where they need to be.
(This is not taking into account trade. Divvying up the world emissions budget by population gives the fair amount for each country if there is no trade. If there is trade the best way to handle it is probably to count the emissions for making things in country X that get consumed in country Y as being emissions in Y. With that correction China comes out even better).
For now. Look at the rate of growth on their per capital carbon emissions. Then compare it with that of the USA.
Why?
Its like saying that you are 0 emissions because you have an electric car with no tailpipe while ignoring where the electricity is coming from.
The only thing moving the needle is renewables and nuclear generating power more cheaply than fossil fuels, so it becomes stupid to not switch to them even if you have no regard for the long term health of the environment.
Per capita emissions give us a better idea of which groups of people require the largest change in their lifestyle in order to hit net zero. The current numbers suggest that the typical person in the US will have to do a lot more to hit net-zero than the typical person in China. Obviously, you can do better and estimate per capita emissions for each province/state/city or by wealth level. For instance, in many poor countries, most of their emissions come from the top 5-10% of the population. Everyone else emits basically nothing.
On the other hand, the total emissions of a country, absent other information, has little actionable value. It can only be uses to assign blame, so quite useless.
The environmental impact from these would be immense, I'd imagine.
A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945 - by Isao Hashimoto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY
1 second = 1 month
> A bomb on its own does not emit carbon dioxide… It’s the infrastructure, the construction (cement emits a lot), fossil fuel use, manpower, consumption, supply chains etc that all contribute.
> A study published in the Energy & Environmental Science journal has documented that using 1/1000 of the total capacity of a full-scale nuclear war weaponry would induce 690 tonnes of CO2 to penetrate the earth’s atmosphere. This is more than the annual carbon footprint of the United Kingdom.
[1] https://lakenheathallianceforpeace.org.uk/carbon-footprint-o...
It's the massive infrastructure to do the things profitably at scale that is often the problem with much of the stuff we consume and use. Then the "cost" of the environmental damage down the line. The "intangibles" get split up.
Then we see these insane figures when these intangibles are all lumped together. This further disconnects people's brains from the real scale of what's going. Cuz our brains suck with big numbers.
1. China 26.16%
2 United States 11.53%
3. India 7.69%
4. Russia 3.75%
5. Brazil 3.16%
6. Indonesia 3.15%
7. Japan 2.15%
8. Iran 2.06%
9. Saudi Arabia 1.60%
10. Canada 1.54%
The top 10 countries account for about ~60% of global CO₂ emissions.
Better context can be found here[1] (countries by emission per capita). It's still not great because it shows a lot of small countries at the top. For example: Palau is the first, but it has a population of a few thousand people, so their emissions are a rounding error when compared to other countries.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
What is more important is efficiency.
Otherwise the logical argument is “the US should have remained poor with more human suffering because our carbon footprint would be smaller”
That’s an insane statement
Glad they are trying to do good things though.
China is by far the leading emitter. Over double of the US as of 2023 (latest available data I can find). China's emissions also aren't falling, they are skyrocketing. The US emissions ARE falling.
The US dominates in cumulative, which is essentially the measure of the total damage done to the planet. The US is doing something about it though. Yearly emissions have been dropping since 2007.
If China is the factory for all of these products sold in the US (and elsewhere of course), then isn't China just accounting for even more US emissions?
In that sense, some sort of eco-Trump could put all the tariff money into green tech or something, to balance out the exporting of emissions.
Though to be fair, I gotta imagine that... a lot of chinese emissions are purely for domestic purposes.
Whereas the US is trying to increase its fossil fuel industry and cancelling renewable projects.
China can't have it both ways, they are glibly blaming the rest of the world for their emissions while reforesting due to importing timber from rest of the world illegally.
> The Environmental Investigation Agency says: "The immense scale of China's sourcing [of wood] from high-risk regions [of the world] means that a significant proportion of its timber and wood product imports were illegally harvested." And research by Global Witness last year said there were "worrying" levels of illegality in countries from which China sources more than 80% of its timber.
Or actually, if per capita doesn't matter. Then China could fracture into 10 separate nations, and their output would sudenly be negliable?
You are incorrect that China isn’t doing anything to lower its impact. It’s emissions would be much much much worse for the standard of living increases it achieved without investments in clean energy and EVs, tech that it is exporting abroad to the benefit of the world and to the dismay of America’s petro dollar dependence.
With such thinking, I now get why the rest of the world is beginning to hate America so much.
But trees are nice.
Source: https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.918
We shouldn't consider the fact China did much more deforestation to start with and even after all this reforestation China has lesser forest area than the US despite being larger in size:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_forest_ar...
https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54719577
> The US claims: "China is the world's largest consumer of illegal timber products." > And, according to studies, that is true.
> The Environmental Investigation Agency says: "The immense scale of China's sourcing [of wood] from high-risk regions [of the world] means that a significant proportion of its timber and wood product imports were illegally harvested." And research by Global Witness last year said there were "worrying" levels of illegality in countries from which China sources more than 80% of its timber.
> “the doomsday outlook [on climate change] is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.”
I guess it's cool there's something to be hopeful about, westerner's just seemed excited to make money off of melting ice in Greenland.
China isn't following a particularly unique path, they just did a speedrun of economic development - they had nearly everyone living in extreme poverty in the 1980s. Before long, they'll be looking for cheap markets to outsource manufacturing and extractive industries to... which is why they're lending money to forgotten African nations. Keeping Russia an international pariah and making them economically dependent on China is probably up their alley too.
India 22 million acres,
Russia 52 million acres - an area about the size of Kansas.
https://news.agu.org/press-release/a-century-of-reforestatio...
Honest questions how much forest the US and UK added since they are probably the loudest in the issue of deforestration?
Does that include the forests russia has burned down in Ukraine?
It's also hard to balance afforestation without causing scarcity of water and displacement of native forest habitats. For example, instances where shrubs are misclassified as forests inflate the report figures. China seems to be the global leader in biodiversity loss, with about 80% of its coral reefs and 73% of its mangroves gone since 1950. Everyone knows their abusive fishing practices, and the millions of tons of plastic pollution into the ocean every year.
So, keep up the good environmental efforts, China, and hope you do even better.
source from Global Carbon Project, is this reliable?
They've been around for over half a billion years.
They survived the Great Dying, which killed 80-95% of marine species.
And now the ocean gets 0.9 C warmer and it's game over for coral?
Coral and coral reefs will surely exist for the next few hundred million years but e.g. the Great Barrier Reef as an example of a vibrant reef ecosystem might not.
> Since 2005, the FRA has relied on data provided by a network of officially nominated national correspondents...
My understanding is that these reports are heavily based on data reported by respective governments. I think "officially nominated national correspondents" means bureaucrats of different governments.
But the governments of Russia, India, China are all known to lie. A lot. About a lot of things. I would know.
My default stance is to be skeptical of such claims based on national reports. Independent verification using satellite imagery seems like a better approach.
About 130 million.
> Over the last three and a half decades China has planted roughly 120 million acres of forest
Where did the rest come from?
Xi Jinping may be a rather dull person, but his most famous saying is “Lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets.” As for building roads — the Belt and Road Initiative speaks for itself. We’ve built bridges in Croatia, in Bangladesh, in Mozambique, and roads and railways all over the world. That slogan is probably engraved in every Chinese person’s memory.
The most common nationwide subsidy is 3,600 RMB per child per year, which is basically ineffective. For a woman on maternity leave, the government will subsidize her based on her salary, which can be substantial—in places like Shanghai it could reach 200,000–300,000 RMB—but still not enough to stimulate population growth.
To put it in a darker perspective: the only way to truly boost birth rates would be to reduce women’s rights or compensation, which is unlikely in any civilized country. A historical example is Romania.
So in my understanding, China has only two viable paths: solve the cost of raising children through household robots or by means of coercion, the government could require state-owned enterprise employees and Communist Party members to have children. China has 100 million Party members and roughly tens of millions of SOE employees. SOE employees usually have stable benefits and income, so childbirth could be tied to salary, benefits, or promotion opportunities. To some extent, this could be argued as reasonable—after all, they are supported by taxpayers and arguably should contribute to society. But it still counts as a rather dark idea, and I imagine it would be a last-resort option.
yesbut•1d ago