Want to Fight Climate Change? Chop Down ‘Em Trees

by Tessa Lena | Aug 28, 2023

The Science, paid for by Mr. William Gates, says that we should save ourselves and the planet from climate change by chopping down ‘em trees.

(If this proposition makes no sense to you, your re-education project is not yet complete. Give it a few more years of properly “following the science,” and you’ll see how it makes perfect sense.)

Kodama Systems, is testing and perfecting its 25-foot-long, 17-ton semiautonomous timber harvesting machine.

 

Loggers use such machines, known as skidders, to grab tons of cut trees and debris and drag them out of the woods. Kodama’s version is designed to do the job even at night, with fewer workers, using satellite connectivity and advanced lidar (light detection and ranging) cameras, the same type that are used on self-driving cars, to monitor the work remotely. It isn’t easy. “There’s a lot of texture to the trees. Every 10 feet of skid trail is slightly different,” says Jenkins, 35.

 

But logging in the dark isn’t the most intriguing part of the plans at Kodama, which has raised $6.6 million in seed funding from Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy and others. After cutting down the trees, Jenkins plans to bury them—to help slow climate change and to reap salable carbon offsets (and maybe, someday, tax credits too).

 

Yes, the conventional idea is to plant trees to soak up carbon dioxide from the air and to then sell credits to corporations, private jet owners and others who need or want to offset their emissions. But scientists say burying trees can reduce global warming as well—particularly if those trees would otherwise end up burning or decaying, spewing their stored carbon into the air.

By the way, some “business-savvy” folks in New York have arrived at the same conclusion as Mr. Gates (“cutting trees = fighting climate change and if not, at least there is money in it”) and cooked up a whole giant climate resilience project that entails destroying beautiful parks by the water, cutting down old, beautiful trees—and replacing them with, I don’t know, probably statues of antiracist syringes and surveillance poles. Yes, there were objections and protests. The “developers” are going ahead with it anyway.

What contempt for the people. What complete disregard for anything except their bank accounts.

What is next, nuking hospitals with patients in them to “fix” public health? Hey, why not. Market opportunities will be great.

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