I still can't believe someone like him can be president. If Jeb Bush had won, I would have been a little disappointed, but I would have gone to sleep and not worried that much about it. But he's terrifying. Maybe he'll just be unable to accomplish anything, so he will self-block, doing as much as obama with republican congress. More likely is he won't be in touch and pence can do whatever he wants.
Maybe I'm wrong (also not an American, so I haven't been as exposed to Trump as most Americans have) but my impression is that he's not dumb, he plays dumb.
What's more likely? Being lucky enough times to keep his business going, or being veery veery cunningly business-savage deep inside, yet do the stupidest things (start businesses with no expertise, no secret niche, no partner - vodka, flight, university).
He's a salesman, a snake charmer, like Reagan, the guy who keeps on going, persistent, strong, never defeated, because it's not how many times you fall, it's that you get up that many plus one times, and sell, sell, sell, do the talk, push, make deals, don't worry, there's always a next door where you can try a new pitch and dump that vacuum cleaner.
We might also want to stop clearcutting vast forests in the Southeastern U.S. to ship wood pellets to Europe, which burns them.
Then we'd have to save the rest of our existing forests, many of which are struggling due to various effects of climate change, including heat stress, drought, topsoil loss, disease, and forest fires. Many large forests are net carbon emitters now.
After we've done all that and finally stopped losing trees, we can think about having more trees. We'll need space for them, so that means reducing agricultural area even more. We've been emitting about ten billion tons of carbon every year for quite a while, so it's going to take a lot of land.
We're also running out of fish in the ocean, so with that food source going away we're going to need more from agriculture than we get now.
"Just plant trees." Like many, perhaps even most purported climate change solutions, it sounds great until you work out the scale.
You speak about deforestation in the US, but there are more forests in the United States now than there were at the time of the Revolutionary War.
I did mention the southeastern U.S., because burning wood for fuel doesn't help the global situation, no matter where it's done, even if there's more forest elsewhere in the particular country where it's harvested.
You say that like we couldn't just let them starve. If their descendants are going to be wiped out by global warming anyway what's the difference?
Even sterilization might not be quick enough.
Obviously, neither is acceptable from a humanist perspective.
Actually, now that I've read your comment closer, I noticed you mentioned serialization. Do you mean digitizing people's minds and killing them afterwards?
I think the US is about equalized because industries like the the US paper industry plant about as many trees as we cut.
If "we" is the world the lots of poor countries are unsustainably slash and burning. Starving people want to not die today so they make places to plant crops.
If we is people afraid of the expanding growth of the Sahara southward then things like the great green wall are interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall
The biggest percentage of Amazon rainforest deforestation is for the livestock industry. The beef that USA and Europe gladly import, and the soybean that Brazil gladly exports.
Palm oil in Asia also.
Consumers just have to stop voting with their money for oblivious and blind short-sighted products. Politiciancs obviously will never tax beef or Lays chips.
Do you want a pony, too?
Look, we're not talking about straight up charity. You can talk people into charity; despite the standard narrative, the United States is quite generous in that regard. What you're asking for is for us to reduce our standard of living explicitly so other people can pollute. That's going to be a hard sell.
Every gain we make needs to unambiguously be a gain otherwise some will choose to ignore the self restriction for their own personal gain and with CO2 we all lose when that happens.
To stay within the 1.5 to 2ºC bounds, the IPCC already includes massive carbon sequestering technologies in even its most simple recommendations. This is technology that does not exist. We're betting life on Earth (and truly, it is that dire) on tech that might be impossible to build and scale. Even if we reduce our carbon emissions to 0 today the delayed effects and non-linear dynamics are so poorly understood, that it could very well be that nothing truly can be done to avoid our mass extinction. And, this too goes for carbon sequestering; even if we magically suck the last 5 decades of carbon out of the air, some stuff that is broken can't be fixed. Thresholds, catastrophes, oscillations, bifurcations, etc are real. We really have to think in non-linear systems when dealing with climate, and that is something we're very bad at. Especially when it comes to the media-voter complex. But picture this, you are driving your car down some road, and everything is fine. You're minding your own business. There's nobody else there, so what the heck, let's ramp up some of the speed. And you go faster and faster. Until bam, unexpected steep corner, your car flies off the road and you die. At that point going back a couple of miles is never going to fix you. It's too late.