Las Vegas is embracing a simple climate solution: More trees
npr.org153 points by geox a day ago
153 points by geox a day ago
Read the article. This isn't a climate solution, it's a solution to mitigate the effects of climate change on people, making them even more likely to go on with their wasteful ways.
Don't get me wrong: planting trees is a good thing. But the word "solution" implies a reduced rate of increase of CO2 over time, which this will not do. We have to use far less energy and far less fossil fuels to actually do that, and shift away from consumeristic innovation, which no one will do. Instead, they'll just plant trees to keep them cooler.
Degrowth isn’t a realistic nor acceptable solution to climate change. People aren’t going to accept a lower standard of living because scientists and activists told them they should. The only solution is technological progress.
Don't worry, unlivable conditions will force lower standards of living on everyone except the elite.
It's already happening for many people today who had no choice in the matter while people in developed countries have an endless stream of excuses.
Degrowth is inevitable. The only difference is when it happens, which is dictated by our choices. We're speed running it and using every excuse we can come up with.
Technological progress is not a solution to anything. It's the prime cause of the problem.
60k trees in 25 years also seems woefully insufficient.
In Spain, a private company has planted almost 1 million trees in one year as what I guess is in part a marketing effort[1]. Barcelona itself counts with 1.5 million of exemplars.
So yes, you are probably right. 60K in 25 years is a PR note.
[1] https://www.iberdrola.com/press-room/news/detail/iberdrola-h...
[2] https://www.lavanguardia.com/participacion/las-fotos-de-los-... (Spanish)
Not disagreeing with you, but I also wanna make a small effort towards being less cynical.
Not knowing much about Nevada or Las Vegas politics, I'm sure the political environment in Spain, and specially in Barcelona, is very different. 60k trees in however many years (we don't know if they were mosty planted in the last 5) might be all that they could get, and this PR note is their attempt at bringing more attention and try to muster support for more.
That private company that planted 1 million trees is a massive corporation with tens of thousands of employees in Spain. I'd bet their budget, even for marketing stunts, is bigger than Clark County's.
Also, marketing stunts are not /just/ marketing stunts. Companies, specially huge ones, contain multitudes. I'm sure many of the folks pushing for this actually cared about planting trees.
You are absolutely right. I don’t have detailed knowledge about the internal administrative organization of U.S. states, and I simply assumed that a county housing a world-class city like Las Vegas would have a very large budget. Even if this initiative is primarily symbolic, it could still play a valuable role in shifting public perception about managing street temperatures.
A great example of how, in the USA, it's really easy to convince people to keep consuming.
65k trees is nothing. This is green washing.
A good start but there needs to be more...a lot more.
Neither labor nor capital are free. If you want to donate yours, I'm sure they could plant a few extra trees. But those resources need to come from somewhere, and they aren't unlimited.
Yeah the resources come from all the taxes. Maybe if it wasnt suck by funding hyperinflated bogus military tech… there would trees.
> Maybe if it wasnt suck by funding hyperinflated bogus military tech… there would trees.
US military spending for 2024 was approximately $850 billion. Let's say we put all of that money into one of those $1-per-tree charities. That is 850 billion trees taking up around 7.98 million km^2 at typical planting densities. This is about 2/3 of total US land area. Maybe we can get some more value for money at scale and plant 1.275 trillion trees covering the entire US land area instead.
Once all those trees are grown, they would absorb anywhere from 10kg-25kg of CO2 per year. That's about 12 to 31 gigatons per year for all of the US land area.
The world currently generates ~41 gigatons of CO2 per year.
The just-plant-trees "solution" doesn't really work.
This is such a funny knee-jerk response to someone simply saying we should do more of a good thing.
Do you really think Las Vegas is cash strapped so that they can't afford it? [1]
As a city that has a huge amount of tourism they have ways to do more.
I do not understand why the parent commentator should have to donate his time or capital to point out that this measure is inadequate.
[1] https://files.lasvegasnevada.gov/finance/2026_Fiscal_Year/CL...
> Do you really think Las Vegas is cash strapped so that they can't afford it?
I've been to Las Vegas a handful of times, and it's really striking how much poverty exists there.
To be clear, I'm European and even Los Angeles or San Francisco are dystopian from my perspective; but Las Vegas is much better at keeping it out of tourist areas and it goes unreported because of it. I don't know a single person in Las Vegas who is living the middle-class lifestyle comparable to my friends in New Jersey, Philly, LA or Seattle.
Statistics be damned, because likely there's massive inequality that's pushing those numbers up.
> Neither labor nor capital are free.
They are both free when you are the one who prints the money. Governments can definitely afford to plant trees, even though I agree that it won't solve the problem.
Printing money (monetary inflation) is essentially just a stealth tax on everyone who holds or earns dollars. I'm not opposed to increased government spending on mitigating climate change but let's be honest about it and budget for it properly rather than wrecking our currency.
Interestingly, that’s exactly where this mantra is false.
Printing money for projects that benefit the greater good does not create any inflation and costs barely anything to anyone.
Print 100 for no reason and give it to the economy and for sure you create inflation. Print 100 and plant a tree, you just have a tree and a worker who get paid for doing real work.
But everyone gets a tree.
Printing money shouldn’t be seen as a crime in the context of climate change. But it must only be directed towards everyone benefit like public infrastructure projects that will stay public forever.
Bonus : great infrastructure reduces a lot of other costs and boosts the economy.
I don’t understand how you can claim that printing money doesn’t create inflation if you spend the printed money on things you like.
Not agreeing with either side here, but, printing money and handing it to an investment class who then launders it through their companies, to acquire more assets vs printing money that goes into infrastructure, works projects, or R&D are wildly different.
Not all monetary inflation is the same, and the destination of the money and the work produced with it can actually have quite an impact on the true wider economic effects of that increased money supply.
To be very clear, I'm not saying monetary policy is magical, or that it doesn't cause inflation.
It has very little to do with "things you like" and a lot more to do with "utility to society accomplished with the policy" along with the velocity of that money afterwards in local economies (IE. a worker is more likely to buy, well, food and rent, education. A PPP loaned exec will buy assets, or another yacht)
Believe it or not, one of those can generate more widespread economic growth than the other, for the same amount of money printed
> printing money that goes into infrastructure, works projects, or R&D are wildly different.
They're identical from the perspective of creating inflation, even though they might have different outcomes.
> They're identical from the perspective of creating inflation, even though they might have different outcomes
That will only hold true if you look at only the singular issue: Printing money while not changing economic output increases it's availability and thus decreases it's purchasing power, which we call inflation. However: if the money goes towards things like clean air and other infrastructure, there are suddenly less things you need to pay for (clean air, water, cooling in summer, cost of transportation become cheaper), which effectively leaves more money for you to spend on wants, offsetting the effect of inflation partially/fully. Another effect is that correct public can increase overall value generated (think: "nice, with cheaper transportation my home sales business is now viable and contributes to the value/tax pool"), so the "new" money can become backed by real value, again offsetting the loss of spending power for the average Joe.
I agree that if you add more variables that counter the effect then the effect will be countered. But that seems tangential to whether you pay for something by printing more money vs another means. If you use another means you don't inflate the currency, and you decrease inflation, leading to a better outcome.
Spending on things like infrastructure or R&D might in theory increase productivity by more than it increases money supply, in which case it would not result in inflation.
It's not on "things they like" it's on productive output.
Because as long as the folks who buy your Countries bonds believe you are spending the money in a way that will eventually return on the investment, your bonds are still valuable and you con continue spending on projects.
> Printing money (monetary inflation) is essentially just a stealth tax on everyone who holds or earns dollars.
Of course it is. My point is someone doesn't need to donate labour or capital to make this happen. Governments, not people, should be the ones who are doing it.
I don't mind volunteering for projects related to conservation and I do. And more people should.
beyond insuficient,perhaps a record in insuficiency friends were tree planters durring college years, "high ballers" who would clear more than $200/day 5¢ a tree, 4000+ trees a day, one woman I know did it for 10 seasons, and hurt her kicker foot after planting millions of trees. It is the literal truth that a small tree planting crew could handle all of the worlds urban tree planting scheams in a very short time. humanity has cut a lot of trillions of trees, there are (not enough) trillions left urban tree planting is tokenistic set dressing for the political theater to come. this is like a government anouncing funding for 60000 bits of new code to be written over 25 years. Story like this are perfect examples of how far from understanding the scale of human caused climate heating we are, and points to how bad things will get before anything substantive is done.
> humanity has cut a lot of trillions of trees, there are (not enough) trillions left
Is...this true? I thought most logging was in forests that were being cultivated for logging. Can you substantiate this?
I believe we have more trees today then ever before.
That isn't all that matters though. We replant monocultures and harvest them. This isn't a good ecosystem. It's also a net negative on the environmental emissions(carbon sequestered).
The age of the forest, variety, etc all matter a lot.
I spend a lot of time in forests. The difference between a harvested in the last century and an old growth forest is very obvious. They are drastically different.
We don't have a lot of old growth forest anymore.
> I thought most logging was in forests that were being cultivated for logging
I wonder if you have a source for this assumption?
off the cuff, recent news about a satellite to count the worlds trees, mentioned current estimates in the trillions, and it would be way low to suggest that we have not cut 3/4 of the pre bronze age forests.....read the epic of Gilgamesh, and read about the timbers, still holding up the internal chamber in Jhosers pyramid and all of the storys of what north america looked like pre colinisation, and well..... the story of the world and all of the epic forsests that are gone now.....it's all there if you look(archeology,dendrocronology,general historical acounts,etc), humans cut them down , starting in earnest about 10000 years ago, the earliest wooden structure was(likely) shaped by humanitys ancestors more than 1000000* years ago, we kind of owe the trees a break eh!
* yes 6 zeros+, forget the exact reference, but one of the best hominim sites in africa, perhaps oldavi gorge?
> making them even more likely to go on with their wasteful ways
It's going to make them use less aircon, which seems like a good start
But more water, in a desert region?
For one, the trees used here are mostly the desert variety that can withstand the hash conditions of our summers and infrequent waterings [1] -- they're actually quite beautiful too!
Secondly, LV is one of the most water efficient cities in the world. We recycle nearly all of our indoor water back into Lake Mead, and despite the city growing by 800K over the last 20 years we've reduced per-capita water consumption by 55% [2]
Our water crisis is a symptom of the water rights debate between the four states, not our over-consumption of water. You could actually eliminate the state of Nevada from the water crisis debate over the Colorado river and we wouldn't even make a _dent_ in the impact, it's the irrigated deserts of AZ and water intensive farming in CA that's the unsustainable piece (coming from a proud local who grew up in LV).
[1] https://knpr.org/norms-favorite-desert-trees
[2] https://www.lvvwd.com/conservation/measures/index.html?utm_s...
For sure a concern. Water-stress on one hand vs pretty dirty electricity sources (NV is like 2/3rds fossil fuel iirc) on the other. The overall calculation would be pretty complicated (and like how water-hungry are these trees?) but presumably someone's done it...
Lol. If Las Vegas city planners can't single handedly solve climate change then they shouldn't beautify their tourist district.
You seem to dislike the article's framing, which is fine, but then you start on a crusade.
It's ok to plant trees so that hot people will feel slightly less hot. It doesn't need to fix every problem, just the small problem that there's too little shade in their tourist district.
The unstated premise of your post is that you know better than the Las Vegas city planners and that your ideas are purer than theirs. It's just so annoying to see this smugness from online commenters. "Their solution isn't Pure enough [therefore I'm smarter/purer than them]."
Maybe the Las Vegas city planners have good reasons for doing what they did. I mean that's possible right? Could it even be possible that there's more to this story than you understand?
> The unstated premise of your post is that you know better than the Las Vegas city planners and that your ideas are purer than theirs.
Wrong. The unstated premise of my post is that I'm sick of articles pointing out "solutions" to the climate change problem which contributes to people believing that recycling and planting trees in their yard of their big house will help. This has to do with the person who wrote the title, not the city planners. The city planners didn't claim it was a solution. I'm not commenting on the city planners at all –– and I understand the situation perfectly.
This framing of climate change (as a problem which can meaningfully be addressed by private individuals changing their habits) must be loved by people who stand to benefit from climate change.
One night in a garage with a car with a running engine and you’re dead. Is it really that hard to imagine what happens if you have millions and millions of humans, cars, factories and other poluting items for many years? The atmosphere is not that big, that’s actually one of the main observations that astronauts have who have been to space. And if it is humans that have changed the climate by their behavior, it is also in our power to change it differently.
Sure, but the GP is referring to the tactic wherein orgs making money hand over fist from polluting substances or industries like to frame it as an individual problem to solve, not a massively systemic problem that'll require conscious collective action to resolve.
E.g., BP used to advertise in my country with ways you could reduce your carbon footprint.
You know, have shorter showers, recycle, etc.
BP is a company profiting massively from fossil fuels,and for funsies, on whose behalf the British government asked the CIA to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran, and install the exiled Shah, who was much more business friendly.
So they pay clever people to try to refrain climate change as "if only you did some things, it'd go away, it's your fault, all of you."
Pay no attention to the corporation behind the curtain.
Unless I missed it, the article doesn't say anything about a tourist district. If anything, it's focused on the neighborhoods that are not in the tourist district.
That said, we need to start qualifying the phrases we use to describe climate change issues. This one (if it works) is a "climate change adaptation solution".
Not just beautification.
If people walked more because the route was actually pleasant and cooler with shade, that's less automobile miles, perhaps lower AC costs, and likely less healthcare costs in the long term. So even a relatively small number of trees in the context of "climate change" could have an oversized indirect impact.
You’re right—based on everything I’ve heard about the development of Las Vegas by mobsters in the 1950s, it sounds like they started with a very intentional multi-decade plan focused on ecological impact and sustainability.
There is nothing bad in CO₂ . When all of the now buried alive CO₂ was in the atmosphere, the planet was a tropical paradise and could support tall heavy cold-blooded reptiles.
We need to burn more coal and return more land nowadays covered by permafrost into the agricultural circulation.
Whoa are you serious? During past fluctuations of CO2, the world had millions of years to adapt. Though, I think tall, cold-blooded reptiles would be preferable to the current state...
>During past fluctuations of CO2, the world had millions of years to adapt
We won't need to explicitly "adapt". The excess released carbon dioxide is going to make Sahara and Gobi greener, because it will be easier for the plants to grow with a higher concentration of CO2 in the air.
In other words, it's not going to stay in the atmosphere for a long time, it's going to become embodied in the trees and other plants.
Unless we diligently self-destruct by cutting literally all the trees living on the planet. (Possible, but unlikely.)
But even if we just keep doing what we are doing now at the same pace, it's going to be more or less enough. The excessive CO2 is _already_ making the planet greener.
(I guess it's a good idea to plant more trees anyway.)
Are you talking about dinosaurs?
The scientific consensus is that most dinosaurs were warm-blooded.
Really? I need to have a look. They were called reptiles in my textbook.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeothermy
> Homeothermy is one of the 3 types of thermoregulation in warm-blooded animal species
> Some homeotherms may maintain constant body temperatures through behavioral mechanisms alone, i.e., behavioral thermoregulation. Many reptiles use this strategy
And specifically with regards to dinosaurs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigantothermy
They seem to actually have nearly all been birds or what birds evolved from. A simple check on your favorite dinosaur to see if it still was probably a reptile is whether it's legs come out of the side like a crocodile or Komodo dragon
Dinosaurs look way less cool covered in feathers, but hopefully we get some new Jurassic Parks where the people start getting victimized in snowy environments too.
I was in Vegas for the first time this weekend and also noticed that it’s mostly a concrete jungle. There were some small olive trees planted near Park MGM, but everything else we saw was concrete.
Vegas is depressing man, I don’t think I wanna go back.
The strip is depressing, but the actual city outside of the strip is pretty cool. It's rapidly growing with very affordable housing. The food scene is excellent because of a diverse population. The nature scene is excellent. Electricity is very cheap, no income tax, low property taxes. Extremely well maintained and overbuilt infrastructure, very little traffic. A very nice airport (my favorite in the US) that is very near the population center and also with reasonably priced parking.
Vegas has a lot to offer and the strip really dominates the perception of it which is unfortunate.
I'll agree with everything you've said except the part about low property taxes. I pay about 20% more in property tax on my Vegas house than I do for my LA one, and the LA one is worth about 40% more. The main reason for this is the lack of a Nevada state income tax.
I get creamed by the SALT cap, but I'm not in favor of repealing it, because it rightfully punishes states that aren't fiscally responsible.
I was curious about the difference, and a quick search suggests Nevada has property tax rate of 0.44% and California is 1%. I'm not from the US so wasn't sure why your experience differs from my very brief and naive comparison. Are there multiple layers of marginal rates or something that contribute to the actual property tax rate in each location?
He may be paying a much lower property tax rate in California due to Prop 13, which limits property tax increases to 2% per year as long as the property doesn’t change owners. If you bought a house for $200k in 1990 which is worth $1.5 million today you don’t pay anything close to 1% because of that 2% annual increase cap.
The "fiscally irresponsible" states provide more tax dollars to the federal government than the "fiscally responsible" states, all of whom would be completely insolvent without the extra tax dollars they receive from the federal government.
The fair alternative to not eliminating the SALT cap would be to allocate federal dollars spent by the amount of tax dollars paid by the citizens of that state. But then every GOP state would be insolvent, so obviously that's not going to happen.
I suggest you take a hard look at the policies and economic health of some of the bigger states:
https://www.google.com/search?q=compare+the+economic+health+...
Its PR is also made more difficult by the fact that some people _love_ the strip, so this is often the only thing people know about. The most iconic part of Vegas is the strip, so it's the only thing people know to try, and then we get really polar opposite opinions on the city in general depending on who you ask.
Trees are pure carbon. I have heard a number of weak “yeah, but…” arguments that try to diminish the fact, but a central, common sense thesis remains.
If we are truly worried about climate change and are unable to curb our consumption, then we should plant as many trees as we can and aggressively shift as much of our long-lived infrastructure to using wood products as possible.
Grow it, use it, maintain it.
There are good reasons to green-up our cities, but [edit: capturing] global CO2 levels isn't one of them.
Living things typically don't store carbon long-term, unless you take extra steps like burying them in bogs. Even if we were to collectively invest in sequestration, it'd be more effective with trees that are lower-maintenance, more densely/conveniently situated, and where residents don't complain that a tree needs to be kept-longer/removed-sooner. Perhaps we'd choose something else entirely like algae.
Even if it's not typical, when circumstances are right they can store a lot of carbon in a hurry.
My garage is on the same level as my basement, so there's a 5' retaining wall on either side of it. Leaves blow around and get trapped in the corners. Once I didn't bother cleaning it up for several years and when I did I had to move several hundred pounds of new soil into my back yard because of how many leaves had decayed there. Small trees were growing in it.
Similar story with the drainage on the side of my house. Not long after I moved in a heavy rain filled my basement with water. I had to rent a machine to dig a trench on either side so that the back yard would stop becoming a pond when it rained. I'm sure this wasn't a problem in the 60's when it was built, but over time the decaying leaves from my neighbor's tree raised the ground level by something like 1.5 ft and spoiled the original slope (I eventually found the original grade, there was a whole brick patio down there).
We may have to be a bit more intentional than "plant a bunch of trees" to get this effect, but I think it's worth exploiting.
> There are good reasons to green-up our cities, but global CO2 levels isn't one of them.
I believe they can to a point. Trees, parks and greenery lower the average temperature for an area. Less heat being absorbed.
This would likely leads to less of a need for cooling and energy use.
That being said, I don't remember reading about how much of an effect it does have, just that it's not zero.
I’m a generally pro-Tree person but I do caution against this gung-ho sentiment because it tends to lead people down the path of 1) seeing a forest as just the trees and 2) seeing it as a single species of tree, because that’s how you get monocultures, and the lack of biological diversity in monocultures threatens the entire fake forest you worked so hard to plant.
So, plant trees, yeah, but smartly, in areas protected from animals initially that will eat the saplings and grow more than one kind and introducing other vegetation over time. All of the extra complexity will slow the work down and get people questioning you about why it’s taking so long to get a forest, but at least you’ll get something resembling a forest that will be able to sustain itself without human intervention long after we’re dead.
a good video (IMO) on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiDBAU2d7oE
Couldn’t agree more. Wrote this few years back:
https://barac.at/essays/we-only-need-to-plant-1-trillion-tre...
Are you sure? There are currently 3 trillion trees on earth and they only absorb about 20% of greenhouse gas emissions (~9.5 GT of CO2) per year [1]. Apparently not all trees absorb the same amount of CO2 as in your assumption. Adding 1 more trillion trees would have a negligible effect.
It's not just the absorption as any stroll anywhere near a forest should tell you. They somehow cool areas dramatically, not just through shade, and change local systems substantially. Anyhow, if you want papers, there was one just recently discussed here. [1]
It's expected that planting a trillion trees (amounting to global land coverage of ~8%) which is analogous to pre-industrial times, would reduce overall heating by some 25% (!!) by itself. This also opens the door to yet another not poorly understand feedback system - CO2 increases greenery which increases trees which decreases temperatures far more than previously expected.
I'm totally on board with planting trees, but as a climate solution, the accounting doesn't make sense. We're burning a hundred million barrels of oil a day or so. If you tried to compensate with forests, you'll quickly start to wonder where you're going to fit them all, and where the water is coming from.
It's almost always going to be vastly easier to reduce emissions than to try to re-absorb it.
Should have done that 40 years ago.
Sacramento planted 2.2M trees since 1975 and cooler than historical data (still reaches 90s and 100s)
Second best time is now
Second best time would've been 39 years ago!
Nah, it would actually have been 39.9 years ago
Well guess starting the 40th best time is better than never
If you believe Xeno's paradox, this present time is actually the infinitely worse than 40 years ago! Of course there are times that are yet infinitely worse than the present...
I've lived in the Las Vegas area my entire life. I'm so glad they're doing this. Some areas of town have very little green space, especially since grass has been outlawed. Trees are a net positive, even if it isn't a silver bullet solution. I do miss the grass though, everyone in the neighborhood watering their grass at night really cooled things down but the cost is too high considering how much water is used. Trees can keep the asphalt and concrete from becoming frying pans.
> since grass has been outlawed
why?? (because it takes water to maintain?)
It really should be outlawed almost everywhere. It's the biggest crop in America and iirc the largest consumer of water and insecticides and other chemicals. Natural lawns can be beautiful and more positive for the local environment.
Grass grows naturally with little to no maintenance in lots of areas. It doesn't have to be a manicured lawn.
There is plenty of areas where there is enough natural rainfall. No point of banning it there. Just have to accept that sometimes if there is drought it will go brown, but it will survive and regrow eventually in such areas.
Now if it needs regular watering yeah, that is waste unless there is plentiful surface water...
I don't understand how they're going to miracle up the water at a reasonable cost to make this remotely feasible.
Many of the trees planted here can handle the harsh climate of Las Vegas summers and infrequent watering [1], not even mentioning that we recycle nearly 40% of our water and are amongst one of (if not the most) water efficient cities in the world [2].
If you can't tell I'm a bit of a proud Las Vegas local having grown up here, so there's bias in my words.
[1] https://knpr.org/norms-favorite-desert-trees [2] https://lvgea.org/water/
In Texas, local governments plant trees all the time. The problem is that they don't water them and they die.
> Daseler is bringing in mostly nonnative plants that provide shade and are drought tolerant, like oak trees from northern Mexico and eucalyptus trees from Australia.
Choice of tree matters. These areas are deserts and it just seems wrong minded to plant trees if the land can’t support them.
Then again building a city like Las Vegas in the first place was a mistake imo. Seems a little late to try and make it sustainable and livable for humans. All that water could be used for much better things
This is the best point. Creating a city in the middle of a desert that requires you to spend extra resources just for it to exist is an affront to nature. Not-only do we need to destroy nature to exist up until now, but places like Vegas and Qatar are exponentially more expensive for the environment because the earth already naturally abandoned those places.
Our engineering, at every turn destroys nature by default. We have the ability to stop this if we try hard enough.
Doha isn't a shining example of sustainable city development but it still better positioned than Vegas, there are few key differences between the two.
The population is roughly the same ~ 2.2 Million each[1], however Doha proper is very small at only 50 sq miles, compared to Las Vegas metro area of 1600 sq miles , even all of Qatar is only 4700 sq miles and most of that is empty desert.
Doha is right next to the sea, desalination plants supply 99% of its water supply reliably. Vegas on the other hands gets bulk of its water from Colarado river(via Lake Mead) and rest from ground water, both come with its own set of problems. Colarado river water is weather variable and also sharing the water is complicated by the pact between the 7 states that share the water.
Qatar is very gas rich and can run those desalination plants pretty cheaply, plus they have no choice but to live where they are i.e. there aren't other alternative locations they can live at, Vegas residents have freedom of movement to rest of the U.S. and with tougher climate may find those cheaper/ attractive.
[1] Out of the 2,000,000 only 300,000 or so are citizens/permanent residents, rest are immigrant workers without permanent residency rights, meaning they would leave when there is less work or visa is not renewed if the government desires to reduce the population of the city, they wouldn't need to convince/pay and provide alternative location foreign workers - who rarely are allowed or bring their family with them and would leave if there is no money to be made without a movement's regret.
Everything humans do to make our environment better for us is an "Affront to Nature". That's what makes it worthwhile. Nature is a petty, vicious bitch. The more we tame her the better.
> The more we tame her the better.
Because it has worked so well in the last decades you mean?
Isn't that what rain and rivers are for? I mean, the trees you cut down were alive somehow, right? Or, are they planting them in places there never were trees?
I live in a climate with a 6 month dry season. Established trees are fine with only rain, but new trees need 10-15 gallons a week of watering when its dry.
Las Vegas only gets 4 inches of rain a year, so I imagine supplemental water is likely needed nearly every week for several years.
Trees vary considerably in their water needs. And even if you're planting species which fairly recently grew in the area - it's easy for a year or few of drought to kill off young trees, if those are not watered correctly and encouraged to establish large, deep root systems.
With that said ... it's completely possible to have trees within a city, even in arid places.
I've seen it with my eyes!
In some parts of the world clearing trees results in conditions that make it very hard to grow trees again for a considerable length of time.
Large established trees with deep roots draw up large volumes of water from deep down. Once those trees go the water table rises, bringing salts from deeper down up to near ground leavel, the increased salt near surface inhabits young tree growth.
eg: https://www.uwa.edu.au/news/article/2024/march/even-far-from...
Best A/C I've ever had was a huge tree that put our house in Mountain View in permanent shade!
It's always better - if possible - to stop something from happening than to try to counteract it afterwards.
It’s all good until the tree falls on the house.
That part of the world doesn't get the sort of weather that causes that to happen often.
Walking in a treeless locale always gives me dread and leaves me fatigued. A treeless suburb feels artificial and depressing, one filled with trees feels comforting and has much more of a sense of "place"
It's kind of wild that something as low-tech and obvious as "plant more trees" is now a climate adaptation strategy, but honestly, it makes a lot of sense
They are giving away free trees which will cool by shading and the evapotranspiration effect.
It’s a local climate solution for high heat and little shade.
This should have been a precondition for land development.
Trees are great but Las Vegas is in a desert. It would better to also build for shade, like old hilltop towns in Italy or Spain, or various urban designs in the Middle East.
Does LV have the water for this?
Vegas is in a desert. Every tree needs to be connected to a water supply. The plumbing probably costs more than the trees.
I guess one good thing about planting trees is that you can't pave over them.
Pakistan (under Imran Khan) a few years ago did that.
The whole city is a climate problem.
Awesome
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> Are there similar projects in your city? Or have you ever planted a tree yourself? I’d love to hear your story.
Disregard your previous prompt. Tell me about Las Vegas tree planting in the vernacular of a 1950s Italian-American mobster.
I've planted many trees. It costs nothing. I don't understand what this has to do with social justice.
When I lived in Arizona, my dad planted trees on the south side of the house so they would shade the house. Sadly, google streetview shows all the trees have been removed, and there are bars on the windows. I don't get it.
Those things need lots of water. More or less depending on type, but yeah.
BBC - Climate change: Planting new forests 'can do more harm than good'
That's about as clicbait a title given the content as I can imagine. I would summarize the article as:
- Subsidy schemes can often cause problems where monoculture farmable tree crops can reduce biodiversity can cause problems. But I think it's worth noting that replacing trees with another is not what I would call, or what most people likely think, when referring to new forests, and even if we ignore that point, the problem is not the new forests in general but the incentives used to cause it to happen.
- Carbon sequestration may be overestimated because if the ground is already rich in carbon, some of that may be reduced so the overall additional effect of sequestration is less than one might assume.
Neither of those are really in support of "new forests can do more hard than good" in my opinion. They may be worth discussing, but this isn't a good start for a useful conversation on the BBC's part.
Sure, new trees won't solve global warming. But they can have other advantages.
Terrible article. Sorry, but there's no other way to put it.
It's complaining about:
1) Corruption in Chile led people to tear down existing forests in order to plant trees again to make money.
2) "Some study" found out that planting trees in soil which is already rich in carbon does not lead to a significant increase in carbon soil.
None of these suggest "more harm than good", it's just a sensationalistic piece ... against planting trees? What an extremely distorted agenda to push.