Episode Details

This week we talk about protectionist policy, solar panels, and rare earths.

We also discuss Chinese business investment, EVs, and extreme weather events.

Recommended Book: Meet Me By the Fountain by Alexandra Lange

Transcript

The Great Green Wall—the one in China, not the one meant to span the Sahel region, straddling the upper portion of Africa—is officially called the Three-North Shelter Forest Program, and was initially implemented by the Chinese government in 1978.

This program is scheduled to be completed sometime mid-century, around 2050, and its purpose is to keep the Gobi Desert, which spans the lower portion of Mongolia and part of China's northern border, from expanding, which is something large deserts otherwise tend to do through a collection of natural, but often human-amplified processes called aeolian desertification.

The Gobi currently gobbles up about 1,400 square miles, which is around 3,600 square km, of Chinese grassland every year, as dust storms that roll through the area blow away topsoil that allows grasses and other plants to survive. And those storms become more powerful as the climate shifts, and as more grassland is turned to desert, giving the winds more leeway, fewer things keeping them from blowing hard and scooping up more soil, and as the roots of the plants on the fringes of the desert dry up, which usually keep the soil in place, become newly exposed to these influences, withering, their roots holding things together less tight than before, the process continuing to move ever outward.

Around a quarter of China's total landmass is already desert, and while there are a number of other causes of the country's desertification, including coastal erosion and the incursion of salty water into otherwise freshwater areas, this type, aeolian desertification, is one that they can tackle somewhat directly, if still at great expense and with muddled levels of success.

So the Great Green Wall of China is meant to stop that desertification, it is a potential means of tackling this issue, and it does this by keeping those winds from blowing away the topsoil, and over time is meant to help reclaim areas that have been turned into desert by this collection of processes.

And those in charge of this program do this by basically planting a huge number of trees, creating sturdier root systems to keep soil from blowing away, blocking the winds, and over time, the trees are meant to help new ecosystems grow in areas that have been previously diminished; holding everything together, soil-wise, but also adding nutrients to the ground as their leaves fall; those natural processes slowly reestablishing new layers of productive soil.

The area they're attempting to swathe with newly planted trees is huge, and by that 2050 end date, it's anticipated that they'll need to plant something like 88 million acres of forests across a belt of land that's about 3,000 miles wide and nearly 900 miles deep in some areas.

Local governments that have been largely tasked with making all this happen in their jurisdictions have claimed some successes in this ambition over the years, though one of the biggest criticisms leveled against those same governments is that they often spend a lot of time and money planting large swathes of trees, stabilizing some areas for a time, but then they fail to maintain those forests, so they more or less disappear within just a few years.

This can actually leave some of the afflicted areas worse off than they would have otherwise been, as some of these trees are essentially invasive species, not optimized for the local conditions, and they consume more water than is available, gobbling up resources other plants need to spring up around them, and they thus blight the areas they're mea