cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/58909207
Mass tree planting in China is turning one of the world’s largest and driest deserts into a carbon sink, meaning it absorbs more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits, new research reveals.
“We found, for the first time, that human-led intervention can effectively enhance carbon sequestration in even the most extreme arid landscapes, demonstrating the potential to transform a desert into a carbon sink and halt desertification,” study co-author Yuk Yung, a professor of planetary science at Caltech and a senior research scientist in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Live Science in an email.
CCP greenwashing.
Yeah, that’s great ‘news.’
Just two months ago, in December 2025, the same news has been published by the same outlet and written by the same author (see here).
Reuters new agency reported about that already in November 2024.
And this is by far not everything. The web is full with it. This same story has been appearing in the various outlets for several years now, mostly citing a ‘new’ study or ‘Chinese state media’ reports so that there is a reason to present it as ‘new.’
And it’s not the first time that OP is repeatedly posting the same ‘news’ over and again, just with a different framing, and obviously only to make China look good and to promote its propaganda.
First time i hear of this great news and happy for once to hear a little bit about propaganda that is not from USA and pro environment.
Now : Tiananmen Square massacre has been an atrocious tragedy and China’s help in ruSSia invasion of Ukraine is horrible.
While I applaud any government for attempting to better the environment, I really wish this project was done with more forethought.
Unfortunately they have done this forestation primarily with fast growing poplar and willow trees, making a vast monoculture that wont likely last in such a harsh climate for more than a decade.
Without the natural biodiversity that supports a living Forrest ecology, it only takes one disease or pest to wipe all that effort. In the end it might do more harm than good when considering the amount of ground water something like this will take out of the water cycle.
Yes, but both tree species tend to live fast and die young, so they can be used to provide first-generation forest protection until the second-generation trees can grow up.
Lol, I was gonna say this account has made 3.4k posts in 7 months. It’s just an unlabeled bot to throw on the pile of blocked accounts.
Nice observation : at least 10k comments should back these 3k+ posts, allas, only about 50 (so 0.05k) comments there … a bit concerning i say.
My rule of thumb is if a user has more than one post a day on average, I block them. At least on my other account I did that.
I don’t think regular people post that frequently. If they do, it’s likely just manual irritating spam.
you wrote :
" … the main issue is that Lemmy is a fraction of the size of Reddit …"
let me guess that you are feed up with censorship at Reddit … i left it about 3 years (4?) ago … after they blocked access through “api” so that Teddit was blocked.Haha, yea. I also left Reddit when the API change happened.
I thought I was breaking the Voyager app with the number of accounts and communities I was blocking on my original account, so I made this new one. I needed to force close the app whenever I tried viewing the whole blocked list…
Currently i only block about 125 users and out of these 11 have been banned … at one point, maybe a year ago, i may have blocked 500 … never used an application though.
Too much an intensive use (of social madium) may lead to stress and tendency to downVote, i went through that.I rarely down vote, but apparently I’ve blocked 7148 users/communities/instances on my first account.
That sounds awesome, can an independent third party news agency go into China and take pictures to confirm?
My viewpoint: turning it into a carbon sink is likely true. A desert is near carbon neutral in its natural state anyway. Not much grows and not much decomposes. Adding even a bit of vegetation turns it into a carbon sink, but the number next to the minus sign will be very small, considering the total area.
Takla Makan is big (for those acquainted with Europe, about the size of Germany). Planting great numbers of bushes, shrubs and trees along the edges and the river beds will contain its shifting and spare settlements on the edges from the nuisance, but the desert remains a desert.
There is no need to confirm, they’ve published more than a bit about it. China has been working on containing the desert since 1978. A road was built across the desert more recently, in 1995, and a railway around it. They intend to drill a 11 km research hole to study the local region of the Earth’s crust. They intend to produce solar power.
Locals… well, this is Xinjiang. Locals mostly aren’t Han (ethnically Chinese) but various Turkic peoples, including the seriously repressed Uyghurs. They would probably fear a mass of Han Chinese moving in more than a mass of sand, but they are most likely OK with the trees, because sand pesters them just as badly. So far, it looks like not much is happening in that part of Xinjiang, because there is not much to build an economy on. Solar power is nice, but if sand buries it, it’s not so great. Currently, if you build a solar power plant to a random place in Takla Makan, there is a considerably above-zero chance of the desert burying it. Fencing it with lots of trees (irrigation needed) will allow a project to perhaps operate long enough.
Am on mobile rn and can’t easily search myself but such a large endeavour could be visible from google maps maybe? Even between 2 snapshots ?
There’s people in China that put sticks in the ground to make it look like vegetation, and they even paint vegetation green to make it look more healthy. Looking at low quality satellite pictures like Google Maps is unreliable.
Yo at some point that very idea seems more efforts than planting actual trees… few months ago a French YouTuber (Tev) went deeeeeeeep into one of those Chinese desert and filmed greenery in the middle of it. Like a whole garden thingy built just for the lols or something.
Chinese are crafty and industrious fuckers, once they set to something they generally make it happen. Sometimes it’s swallows sometimes it’s trees I guess…
Source? That sounds unbelievable honestly
They stick hay in the sand to create wind breaks that trap moisture and seeds to stop the expansion of the desert. Hundreds of acres with 1 meter grids of hay pressed into the dunes. Ive never seen anyone painting anything but i don’t doubt some anti- communist propagandist is saying they are
You can make fun of it, but when party officials come to see, you bet your ass there will be local politicians forcing people to do so. They did the same in Poland in those times.
And while they’re at it, make sure that the people who completed such a feat were adequately paid for their time and given the rights and good working conditions.
What?.. it was indentured minorities? Ah yeah, I figured.
Probably fertilized the soil with the blood of the Uyghurs they’ve got in concentration camps.
I have yet to find any verifiable evidence of uyghur concentration camps. Ive looked for years and it all comes down to 1 random guy with deep cia ties.
Yeah I watched videos of inside the re-education camps and the conditions the people were languishing in in their prison cells.
China has an absolutely horrendous track record of human rights, even for their own citizens as they consider them an expendable resource in their country-sized factory
I dont know you from a bar of soap, so im just going to assume you’re a chinese plant designed to spread disinformation on the topic because EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. This topic comes out, all the chinese apologists come out of the woodwork to say it’s all fake, but everytime a chinese national tries to tell the world about the organ harvesting, they’re immediately shot down by a horde of misinformers like they’re waiting for the word “uyghur” or “Xin Jiang” come up.
You yourself seem to have a weird hard-on for bringing up Uighurs arbitrarily when it has zero to do with the subject of the post. Perhaps then you shouldn’t throw stones in your glass house and accuse others of waiting to arbitrarily pounce on the word “Xin Jiang”, when you obviously do the same thing for the word “China”.
Argue your point instead of automatically assuming everyone who doesn’t agree with you is a Chinese plant. That just makes you look whiny and weak, and brings no one around to your standpoint.
It’s always deflection with your type, sn’t it…
Instead of owning up to the crimes against humanity and standing with your fellow man, it’s “go look in your own backyard! !!! Don’t watch what we’re doing to minorities!!!” Complemented with minsofrmation and disinformation campaigns.
And yes, I have a hard-on for holding countries to account for their human rights abuses, but go off queen, tell me how I look weak and whiny while you simp for billionaires who’ll throw you in the gulag before they get held accountable.
But but… “China bad” remember?
I know is not all good, but still seem better than US in so many ways.
Don’t worry, there’s plenty of “bad” to go around. It’s not the human rights violations Olympics.
human rights violations Olympics
Dunno, kinda feels like it.
Angry upvote.
I’m sure if we try hard, like really really hard, we could also find something nice in the USA. China plants trees and ushers green energy, USA… well… I’m sure there is something. Moon program for example…
The USA was one of the first countries to ever do a green belt, China isn’t necessarily copying the USA but they are definitely building off the body of work that occurred before.
China is also committing a genocide on the Uyghurs.
USA is starting its own ethnic cleansing.
Everyone sucks.
So just celebrate the little good we do have.
I really don’t think China is committing a genocide on the Uyghurs, the story just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
Yeah I asked Winnie, he said it’s fake news and docked me -300 social credit for asking, case closed
Thanks for your contribution, the world largely disagrees but neat!
Thanks for your contribution, the
worldWest largely disagrees but neat!FTFY
This is from 2019, but is one of the few articles I found actually listing countries, instead of just saying “51 UN member states” with no further detail. Do take a look at the respective lists. No conclusions are drawn, but it’s interesting nonetheless: https://thediplomat.com/2019/07/which-countries-are-for-or-against-chinas-xinjiang-policies/
Here’s the Amnesty International report if you want to give it a bit more scrutiny. I think it’s China’s attempts to discredit it that don’t hold up to scrutiny:
www.amnesty.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Amnesty-International_China-Report_FINAL.pdf
Here’s another thing I noticed. A little farther down, it mentions they interviewed “dozens” of people, and that this represents a significant portion of all available testimonial evidence. Of course they attribute this to the Chinese government trying to keep information from getting out.
Here’s the thing: there’s absolutely no way they could be that successful in keeping this hidden. Just look at Gaza. It’s tiny, literally walled in, and israel all the best tech for oppression and surveillance (it’s like their whole thing) plus the infinite money glitch via the USA. And still, we have countless videos of the horrors perpetrated against Palestinians. Xinjiang is HUGE, and there are something like 10 million Uyghurs. Stuff would absolutely get out.
So right off the bat, the executive summary goes
Since 2017, under the guise of a campaign against “terrorism”,
So this “terrorism” did actually happen, I’m not sure why it’s in quotes, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_2014_Ürümqi_attack
Note the reference at the top to another incident only one month earlier. Unfortunately there were several more.
This tone certainly suggests a foregone conclusion, but anyway. It goes on to describe various abuses, do they amount to genocide? They sure wouldn’t if israel was the perpetrator, but I guess when it’s China we can throw around the G word no problem. Perhaps I can give it more scrutiny later, gotta work now.
