Despite major political developments in Washington and Barcelona, something else managed to grab global headlines this week—a declaration of emergency because of the increase in carbon dioxide gas in the earth’s atmosphere. Mainstream media had it on their first pages. “CO2 levels in the atmosphere hit a record high in 2016,” one news website said, sourcing data from a report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) that came out last week. The news articles’ primary focus was around … [Read more...]
How’d you like to add a new continent of vegetation?
If we could get a whole new continent---equal to twice the size of the continental United States---of vegetation by spending, say, $100 billion, would that be a good deal? How would we go about answering that? Well, we might start by noting that the total value of crops raised in the U.S. in 2016 was about $143.4 billion. That's for one year. And it's from just about 18 percent of all U.S. land. But we're talking about adding a continent of vegetation double the size of the United … [Read more...]
