> The term cobra effect was coined by economist Horst Siebert based on an anecdote of a (possibly ahistorical) occurrence in India during British rule.[2][3][4] The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased.[5]
> Shortly before the Patrician came to power there was a terrible plague of rats. The city council countered it by offering twenty pence for every rat tail. This did, for a week or two, reduce the number of rats – and then people were suddenly queuing up with tails, the city treasury was being drained, and no one seemed to be doing much work. And there still seemed to be a lot of rats around. Lord Vetinari had listened carefully while the problem was explained, and had solved the thing with one memorable phrase which said a lot about him, about the folly of bounty offers, and about the natural instinct of Ankh-Morporkians in any situation involving money: ‘Tax the rat farms.’
—Terry Pratchett, Soul Music
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-190...
posted multiple times on HN, last time 4 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27264816
Sometimes I think some of the most valuable assets will be century old trees.
It's also a gross oversimplification to look at CO² balance by absorption by trees only. Floodplain forests, forested swampland and broad-leafed trees also store massive amounts of CO² even when the forest is mature.
But more importantly, mature and healthy forests offer a broad range of benefits beyond binding CO². Reducing the value of forests and the associated ecosystems to CO² is a flawed approach. There's many more factors involved, including preservation of fresh water.
Nitpick here: I see you've gone into the effort of stylizing the 2, but chemical formulas are supposed to be numbered using subscripts, not superscripts.
[1] I'm not talking about dying trees, mature does not mean dying necessarily.
It’s not obvious when walking around because adult trees significantly outnumber dead ones, but trees decay in a tiny fraction of their total lifespan.
Actually, I might tree rings not getting smaller as a tree grows taller is probably enough evidence to see that the carbon added increases over time? Would be nice to have a rigorous source to review too?
see:
https://news.unl.edu/newsrooms/today/article/study-finds-lar....
While this is true, I think you are stretching this to fit your particular narrative. Seedlings that sprout from a nut that "didn't fall far from the tree" have a lot of things going against it. The shade of the mature trees around it prevent it from getting enough sunlight. There are other factors that contribute as well.
And yet the GP's point stands; the vast vast majority of them do not sprout, or, if they do, do not make it to maturity.
But, this brings to mind that there are places where there once were forests that humans destroyed. Why don't those locations quickly re-forest themselves?
Because, in the process of deforestation, humans destroyed the entire ecosystem that made said forests possible. Nature can't repay that ecosystem debt all that quickly and it's not sped up much by way primates plopping saplings into the soil for money and calling it a day.
Climate change is the mother of all collective action problems and one of our great filters. I dream that one of the descendants of my nieces and nephews will pass through the ensuing population bottleneck.
It must be a massive temptation for the poor living near massive, high-value, tropical hardwoods to just go and fell them.
Yes, carbon credits should be based directly on mass of carbon taken from the air, we can measure forests, seems like it could be? Saplings need caring for too, there is ongoing benefit and ongoing cost.
Planting trees at the wrong time of year also seems to be a constant issue. It’s not just an issue of sticking something into the ground. Timing and location matters. A single tree might make hundreds or thousands of seeds each year but the number that sprout and survive to adulthood is a very small fraction, there is a lot that needs to go right.
Once all that happens it often takes several years before you start to realize the carbon benefits. So really things like “carbon credits” really need to be based on trees surviving to adulthood, not just sticking a sapling in the ground someplace. But once you get to that point there is ongoing benefit.