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We used to know this. Almost every road and housing development included parks, verges and trees, enough to influence the micro climate. Roads and rail often had more space for greenery than purpose. There used to be enough of the natural environment left that you still knew where you were. Parks were more arboretum and public garden than the lowest maintenance acres of grass they have tended to become today.

Post war became concrete and optimisation of how many plots you could pack in. First things to go were anything green. The temperature difference between the two approaches is easily noticeable. UK railways and towns are still reducing the amount of trees - mainly to eliminate the need to send some contractors out occasionally to tend to trees and bushes.

It's yet another case of humanity sawing the branch they're sitting on for $2 more.

The silliest part is the older developments, even former public social housing, are now often the valuable areas as they are nicer to live in.

Much maligned Robert Moses, of urban blight fame, was a proponent and fan of "parkways" around the post war period. So much so he built 450 miles of parkways in NYC surrounds. Nowadays people blast him for razing neighborhoods to build roads, bridges, parks, schools and other infrastructure the city needed. It surely could have been done better --but it was also necessary to build, given the growth.

It’s easy to see things as necessary in retrospect. Things are rarely necessary, except to a specific end. Maybe you just lack imagination!

> The reason why projects like this aren't so popular and aren't subsidized is not because they aren't effective, but because it is hard to make money from actually saving the environment.

This. I've been hearing for 30 years how important trees are, and that we should plant way more of them. It is just not happening in any significant way. Politician's talk.

Makes me feel old and tired, when I keep reading this same conclusion over and over, and "We should take action now", but nothing much happens on the action side.

Pakistan has recently planted 1 billion trees [1]. And the new government has pledged to plant 10 billion more [2]. India has had similar projects in the past few years.

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/07/pakistan-s-billion-tr...

[2] https://nation.com.pk/03-Sep-2018/10-billion-tree-tsunami-dr...

What I hear less and less about, is how the Amazon Rain Forest constitutes 'The Lungs of The Earth' (together with The Great Barrier Reef).

Oh? We are making good progress in cutting it all down, you say? Makes sense.. all that beautiful hardwood just standing there is just a waste of cold, hard wealth /s

This dynamic could change if previously arid land can be put to agricultural or residential use. But that requires a lot of initial investment. The first step I think is to convince people that the problem can be fixed - and be profitable at the same time.

So I grew up in fly-over land. That part of the USA where in Daniel Boone's time "A squirrel could go from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River without ever touching the ground.", but today is horizon-to-horizon corn and soybeans.

Today, we make price-support payments to farmers if grain prices drop below the support trigger. We require corn-derived ethanol in gasoline even though the energy economics of it make no sense. It's mildly nuts.

Let's just put some of that land back to trees. I mean really, instead of paying people to grow an over-abundance of feed grains, pay them to grow organic carbon sequestration units.

I am from a rural area of the country and paid for college in part by working for a farmer up to and during wheat harvest for several years. I completely agree with you.

America's fetish with the preservation of small family farms is incredibly destructive both environmentally and economically. People seem to have this romanticized concept of farmers as Ma and Pa working hard every day just to scrape by and raise their 6 kids. In reality these are businesses with massive amounts of capital tied up in businesses that are only sustainable with government subsidy.

Let these businesses fail, create economic incentives to use the land for more productive purposes like carbon sequestration.

Farm subsidies are still important, they are what stabilizes our food supply so we don't pay 5x as much for bread when we have a bad year for wheat. Its main purpose is more like food supply insurance, if you only produce EXACTLY what you need/get paid for, then even say a 5% less yield in a large area than expected, maybe from weather, storm, or other environmental conditions, could result in food shortages and huge price spikes. You always plant extra to keep you from starving, but if it was completely unregulated, nobody would ever want to overproduce what they could sell or it is pure lost profits. If you couldn't sell 5% of grain last year, you plant 5% less this year, but if this year was a bad season for other farmers, now you don't have enough to meet demand and the prices skyrocket, good for you personally but bad for thousands of other people that need to eat.

Farming is already not perfectly predictable yield to yield, when you add in even wilder price swings it only crushes farms under further financial risks and leads potential famine.

This! At 5.5% of USA GDP [0], some oversupply to avoid supply shocks causing famine is a totally acceptable cost to me. Hell, look at server supply before AWS came along: everyone bought way more servers to account for peak demand and now we can amortize those demands across thousands of different customers. Another example is utilities in how electric supply is way overbuilt with peak generators that are cheap and inefficient to run only sparingly during heat waves in the summer when everyone's AC is on.

[0]: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...

> Farm subsidies are still important, they are what stabilizes our food supply so we don't pay 5x as much for bread when we have a bad year for wheat.

I am not a farmer, so just giving the example I know about: In Holland farmers get 9ct/kg for potatoes. Then in the supermarket this becomes $1.80! Talking normal year here (last year). No long supply lines or nothing. How is that fair or even reasonable? How can they build the reserves to survive a bad yield? So, yes, they need subsidies.

I’m not saying we should completely eliminate farm subsidies. Only that the current model focuses way too much on propping up specific crops and types of farming. Corn and wheat subsidies go far beyond what is necessary to stabilize those markets.

This is partly related to the presidential race starting in Iowa. That's got to be worth a couple of points of Iowa GDP in subsidies alone.

>and be profitable at the same time.

It seems unlikely that it will be.

except that there are more trees now than there were 20 years ago, of course. As the TFA says, Europe is reforesting.

Reforesting with what? In Portugal this has mostly been with Eucalyptus and Pine (forget the variety, but less native and more flammable).

Creating highly flammable non native monocultures that support very little wildlife.

The reason for this is that smallholdings aren't viable, put down some eucalyptus, come back in 9 years, chop it down and get some cash. These used to be olive groves or just wild land for feeding goats etc. Sorry but the reforestation is largely a myth.

Except we're talking about the tree's effect on the climate. A billion stoma is a billion stoma, regardless of how many shrews live in the forest.

I totally agree with you that it's not the best way of reforesting... but baby steps. At least we have more trees now.

Maybe, I'm not sure if it actually is a gain, massive forest fires and trees that are pulped in 9 years, no idea if this benefits the climate or not when all factored in?

yeah, maybe. Though increasing humidity and rainfall should decrease forest fires. And there's a lot of science in forest fire causation, it's not as simple as "monoculture tree plantations = more fires".

Do we actually have a good grip on emissions for industries yet? I though we were still at the stage of "CO2 has gone up by this much, let's allocate that to human activities according to some metrics we made up based on guesses about emissions", but I could be wrong...

Israel has also been very successful at reforesting their land. You can see the borders of Israel by looking at where green stops on satellite images.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Satellite_image_of_I...

This is not intended to contradict your point, but the first video is an obvious marketing fluff piece almost certainly funded by the Chinese government (China Daily is not an independent news source). It is designed to manipulate foreign opinion in favor of China and distract from their pollution problem. The video does not represent scientifically persuasive evidence in favor of your point.

"As we get closer, I can feel the temperature change. Here it's not just cool, it's actually a little cold."

Well no shit; those mountains you're strolling through peak at 7000 feet and higher [0].

[0] http://en-gb.topographic-map.com/places/Hebei-7042315/

Yes, I realize that it is obviously Chinese propaganda, but I used it to show that deserts are entirely reversible. You are right that the altitude definitely has a cooling effect, but it also doesn't change the fact that the trees stabilized a desert into a forest.

"desert" has nothing to do with temperature. Deserts are areas of extremely low rainfall. Antarctica is a desert. /pedant

> If you tame the flash flood [3][5], you can change deserts

This is very hyperbolic. Yes it is helpful but desert are deserts.

Californians have been planting and watering huge in-land areas for decades. All these areas have reverted to pure desert every time there is a drought and water quotas.

Reforestation (and saving the rain forests) are x10 easier and cheaper in rainy regions !!!

This seems to work, from what I gather:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17931839

Did you see [1]?

There was also an experiment with dumping tonnes of orange peels on the land [1] and it went surprisingly well.

[1] https://www.sciencealert.com/how-12-000-tonnes-of-dumped-ora...