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I have a different take on it. I think Marx was indeed railing against capitalism, but not against free markets. If that sounds like a total contradiction, I encourage you to read David Korten and Kevin Carson.

Capitalism is a system run by, and for, the capitalist. There are a number of ways an economy can be organized that aren't dependent either on the state or a capitalist. Are they socialist? That depends on your definition of "socialist."

nature reserves mean less food production (especially, again, in Africa)

This is not only wrong, but it is way wrong. The study Economics, Objectives, and Success of Private Nature Reserves in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America shows that private nature reserves can be profitably run. With it's nature reserves Limpopo Province is South Africa's breadbasket.

meaning less population AND THEY ALREADY HAVE OVERPOPULATION (ie food production is insufficient to keep the population alive).

The insufficiency of food in Africa has 2 causes, climate change and politics. Ethiopia has had a food crisis because of a change in their climate. Reduced rainfall has caused "ever more frequent droughts". On the other hand Zimbabwe has turned from the bread basket of Africa into a basketcase. President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe ruined Zimbabwe. He kicked all the white farmers, who produced most of the food, off the farms. He then gave those farms to his cronies, who did not know how to farm. Zimbabwe went from being a big exporter of food to needing food donations from other nations. Another cause of lack of food was the economic policies that forced or encouraged small scale farmers to leave those farms. "Africa: Civil Society Blames World Bank, IMF and WTO". However with the new Green Revolution in Africa farmers are starting to grow more food.

Falcon

• Ice shelves in the arctic are breaking up and falling into the sea.
• The north pole is melting.
• Glaciers all around the world are receding at an alarming rate.
• This has led a number of ski areas to fear for their futures.
• Indonesia's islands are being submerged by the rising oceans.

Now, it might be reasoned that the Earth is warming naturally and that humans can't possibly effect such a change on the environment. If you believe this, I have a bridge in Minnesota to sell you. Have you been to China lately? There, in an attempt to rapidly industrialize, they have churned up so much dust and smoke so as to make most of the air unbreathable. When on travels north from Beijing to Badaling (where the Great Wall is up in the mountains), the smog is so bad it makes LA at rush hour look like heaven.

The examples I have listed above are all things which have not happened in the last several thousand years (esp. the one about the ski areas :-) ) In some cases, one must go back tens of thousands of years to see such large scale changes in the environment. It may be that it's part of the natural cycle. However pundits on this side of the issue have yet to prove that they understand the ice age any better than those on the side of climate change. However, climate scientists *have* shown that increased CO2 can lead to warming in all kinds of closed systems, and the rapid industrialization of the world is contributing to the CO2 that's out there.

In short, if you don't trust the computer models which nobody sees as perfect, don't bury your head in the sand. Look around with your own eyes and you will see that there's tons of other evidence that the world is changing.

Never mind the fact that scientists are witnessing ice shelves in Antarctica falling into the sea. Or that the North Pole is melting so that there will soon be a North-West Passage which Canada is laying claims to. Or that much of the global warming data does not come from NASA. Or that ski areas in the Alpsare going out of business. Or that there is glacial melting everywhere.. Or that Indonesia's islands are being submerged by rising sea level. Call me a deluded, but it seems that the preponderance of evidence is on the side of these so called "global warming" fanatics.

The answer to global warming is *very* simple, and *very* well known. We just need to plant massive amounts of biomass to soak up all the excess carbon.

Okay. No problem. Let's work that out then.

We need to plant X number of trees to counteract Y tonnes of CO2 being produced. As CO2 production goes up, we need to increase the number of trees we plant.

Oops. It seems that those numbers aren't exactly favourable to your solution right now. Could it be that currently, the amount of trees is going *down* while the amount of CO2 being produced is going *up*? Oops. Well, okay, let's reverse that trend.

Let's start in America, where most of the world's human contribution to atmospheric CO2 is produced (see earlier citation)? Well, to soak that up, you'd need to have about 146 25 year old pine trees for every (metric) tonne of CO2 produced. Not plant, but *have*. They have to be at least 25 years old before that sort of CO2 absorbtion is being done. And then you'd have to add 146 more 25 year old pine trees per year per ton of CO2 that that amount goes up.

So how many tonnes of CO2 does the US produce? About 5.4 billion, way back in 1997. You would need to *have* 788 billion 25 year old pine trees in 1997, and increase that number by 1.5% every year (11.82 billion) to keep up with growth.

Let's assume each tree needs 4 square meters of land to grow on. That's a wildly optimistic number, by the way, but it makes the math nice and easy. That's 3.154 billion square meters, which means 315 million hectares. Great. According to The World Factbook, that's 34.4% of the total land mass of the US.

Looks like it's time to get out there and start planting. :)

OK, so let's pull in a little more information and think about this some more.

There are roughly . At 12'x12' spacing, you can grow 303 trees per acre, or 750 trees per hectare. So your 6 million trees per year is only a net gain of 8,000 hectares. Yes, this is a pretty reasonable goal. Mind, you've got to keep it up, each year, every year, that we're pumping this much CO2 into the atmosphere.

There's a catch, or two, or more, of course. We're not adding 8,000 hectares of forest annually. We're losing 13 million hectares , for a net loss (you do the math) of 9,750,000,000 trees. Wups, that's 1,625 times the number of trees we're supposed to be adding. "New growths without human intervention" most certainly isn't "covering it".

Note too that what we're concerned with isn't merely growing another 6 million trees, but sequestering the equivalent carbon from the atmosphere. Given any unit of arable land may support trees, shrubs, perennials, or some mix thereof, at various stages of their life cycle, it's not enough to simply plant these trees. After they die, you've got to put them somewhere the sun don't shine, or at the very least, where the wind don't blow. That carbon needs to be removed from the short-term carbon cycle. Say, by burying it in an anaerobic environment for a hundred million years or so ... replenishing the current stock of hydrocarbon resources we've been depleting for the past 150 years. The natural cycle of trees is to die, fall, degrade, and release their carbon back into the atmosphere, on a cycle of a few tens to thousands of years. Perennials and shrubs do so on a much shorter scale. Simple plantings aren't going to resolve this issue, you've also got an ag material disposal problem on a fairly significant scale.

Your back-of-the envelope calculations are interesting, but hardly sufficient. They're also strongly contradicted by widely accepted current knowledge. If you dispute any of the stats presented here (granted, the results of a few minutes' Googling), present your own citations.

Peace.

OK, so let's pull in a little more information and think about this some more.

There are roughly . At 12'x12' spacing, you can grow 303 trees per acre, or 750 trees per hectare. So your 6 million trees per year is only a net gain of 8,000 hectares. Yes, this is a pretty reasonable goal. Mind, you've got to keep it up, each year, every year, that we're pumping this much CO2 into the atmosphere.

There's a catch, or two, or more, of course. We're not adding 8,000 hectares of forest annually. We're losing 13 million hectares , for a net loss (you do the math) of 9,750,000,000 trees. Wups, that's 1,625 times the number of trees we're supposed to be adding. "New growths without human intervention" most certainly isn't "covering it".

Note too that what we're concerned with isn't merely growing another 6 million trees, but sequestering the equivalent carbon from the atmosphere. Given any unit of arable land may support trees, shrubs, perennials, or some mix thereof, at various stages of their life cycle, it's not enough to simply plant these trees. After they die, you've got to put them somewhere the sun don't shine, or at the very least, where the wind don't blow. That carbon needs to be removed from the short-term carbon cycle. Say, by burying it in an anaerobic environment for a hundred million years or so ... replenishing the current stock of hydrocarbon resources we've been depleting for the past 150 years. The natural cycle of trees is to die, fall, degrade, and release their carbon back into the atmosphere, on a cycle of a few tens to thousands of years. Perennials and shrubs do so on a much shorter scale. Simple plantings aren't going to resolve this issue, you've also got an ag material disposal problem on a fairly significant scale.

Your back-of-the envelope calculations are interesting, but hardly sufficient. They're also strongly contradicted by widely accepted current knowledge. If you dispute any of the stats presented here (granted, the results of a few minutes' Googling), present your own citations.

Peace.

None of the countries you listed are in the top 50 most arable countries in the world. Of the ones you did list, here are the figures: for the amount of arable land per country:
United States - 19.13 %
Russia - 7.33 %
Australia - 6.55%
Canada - 4.96 %

Here is some leftist scare-mongering "propaganda" about the population vs arable land scarcity documentation, but it does seem to have a list of credible references and appears to be written by a sane organisation/peoples.

Here's some juicy bits:


The combination of FAO data on arable land with UN population estimates for 125 countries with populations of more than 1 million illustrates the decline in per capita arable land between 1960 and 1990. Incorporating UN medium population projections for 2025 suggests an even more rapid decline over the next 30 years, and the acceleration is projected to continue through at least the middle of the next century. The decline can be seen more clearly through the lens of the scarcity benchmark. ...

Until now, arable land scarcity has not been much of a problem. Four countries were experiencing arable land scarcity in the early 1960s: Kuwait, Singapore, Oman and Japan.

Now it's more than 125, with more to come.

I actually come from a farming family. I'm an Australian. We were forced off our farm in the 80s. Google for "salinity", perhaps "pyramid salt" , a government scheme where they turned a previously productive farming area that become a wasteland due to rising watertables, into a fucking SALT MINE. If that doesn't scare the living shit out of you, then you're a moron. As an Australian who lives in one of those "big wide open spaces just waiting to be farmed", I invite you to just try and come here and try and grow any crop at all anywhere in the least-arable half of Australia's land mass. You will find a significant proportion of Australia will not even let you grow so much as a blade of grass.

I am by no means a "greeny leftist", god forbid they actually they actually have the "foresight" to protest about something I actually care about (which would in effect trivialise the issue "oh look, protesters, it must be pointless").

Jesus christwagons. I cannot believe your utter blissfull, utopian ignorance of the shrinking amounts of fertile farmland on this earth. You justify our hilariously unsustainable resource consumption on the premise that Star Trek writers are going to invent an actual protein resequencer?. You've really made me so angry; I've used bold type like 5 times now!! ARRGH!

OPEN LAND IS NOT EQUAL TO FOOD. There are in fact VERY FEW areas in the countries that you mention that are good for farming, for christ's sake. China? It's rapdily turning into a desert. 1.5 million square kilometers is classified as desert, growing at a rate of 1000 sq. km per year. They physically do not have enough farmland to feed themselves and are importing more and more significant amounts of their staple foods just to live.

God... I can't believe you could be so BLIND... just travel somewhere, OK? Have you ever even seen a desert? Or even a farm, in your own country? At all? Christ... imagine trying to grow sorghum in Sibria... I'm going to be angry for hours...

In the real world more the 70 percent of farms are "online"

With all due respect I'd beg to differ. This may be true of the "North" (USA, Europe, Australia, NZ), but if you mean '70% of the total number of farms / farmers in the world' , I'd guess to disagree. Sub-Saharan Africa, India, China...

Indeed many have problems gaining regular and guaranteed access to water.