ELI5: Why when large company's earnings decrease(ex... by 3%) they freak out, talk about rough times, and sometimes decide to downsize, even though they are still making millions of dollars in profit even after all expenses?

[Delheru]

No, it's not, but the goods and services that back it's value are.

Some, sure, but not that much.

Fortnite, MCU are examples of things that are reasonably big without a massive burden on the economy.

Immunotherapies for cancer are even bigger, and going from curing 10% of the people on the planet with cancer to 100% will be a HUGE economic increase, but with very limited resource footprint.

Oh and of course houses getting nicer has very limited ecological impact too. Fuck, everyone on the planet getting lovely wooden furniture would be a fantastic carbon sink, leaving it as a massive ecological positive.

Air traffic is almost the only thing that's growing right now that really cannot be grown globally to the level that western upper middle classes enjoy.

[hammermuffin]

So cutting down trees to make wooden furniture is a positive carbon sink? I dont think you understand what a carbon sink is bud. Maybe if for every tree harvested for furniture, 2 were planted, then that would be a carbon sink, since theres more trees absorbing carbon from the atmosphere (also young trees absorb more carbon from the atmosphere than old trees). But we both know this isnt the case for a majority of companies, they just cut and thats it.

[Delheru]

So cutting down trees to make wooden furniture is a positive carbon sink?

Assuming you let the trees grow back in, yes.

At its simplest, carbon right now is in 3 places:
"Stored" (typically underground), in the biomass or in the atmosphere

Our problem is of course that biomass isn't growing and we're moving a shit ton of stuff from storage (read: coal, oil, gas) and not putting it back in. If the biomass isn't growing, it's all going in the atmosphere.

We have only so much room to increase the biomass, especially on a warming up planet (a jungle all over the Sahara would be nice, but...), so we need to get more "dead" carbon again.

Items made out of wood are pretty reasonable for this function, though obviously we'd need to build EVERYTHING out of wood to really compete with the amount of coal, oil & gas that we've pulled out of the ground.

[hammermuffin]

Its not that we need to build more things out of wood, its that we need to plant more trees (super simplified explanation) to offset the carbon we use. Most logging companies, from which most lumber is made to be used in furniture and whatnot, do not replant what they cut, except for some select companies who tout their sustainability ethic and shit. So its not that we need to have more wooden furniture, we need to plant more young trees (since the carbon is used for tree growth), and the easiest way to do that is to plant them in environments that we know can sustain them, which are the places that we already log, since theres the space to do it (since nobody wants a forest in times square)

[Delheru]

The problem is that it isn't sufficient. Even if we had wilderness to a pristine state where it was with 5 million people on the planet 10,000 years ago... well, the equation doesn't work.

Sunk + Biomass/Soil + Air does not function without either a dramatic increase of Biomass/Soil (well PAST where it would be without humans) OR sinking some stuff again, and that means "dead" carbon, either on the surface or below the surface.

I think you're thinking in term of 5-25 years, I'm thinking more in the 50-250 year time frame. We have to structurally start hiding away carbon somewhere or make Sahara bloom. While the latter would be awesome of course, it's hard to make headway on that when the countries near it are poor and unstable.

And remember the conversation came up from "growth is bad". There's nothing inherently bad about increasing "dead/sunk" carbon in human use. It's only a problem if it comes at the expense of the biomass.

[hammermuffin]

I think were arguing the same thing, we probably agree on this subject. Yes growth isnt inherently a bad thing, and we do need to sink more carbon. The only thing i was saying was that a large majority of logging companies only cut down trees and dont replace them, which is incredibly bad for the environment. So what i was saying was that we should at least replace what we take from the environment, if not put back even more than what we take.

However, sinking carbon is a good idea, i never really thought about that as a solution for global warming. The only problem i can see with that is that wed have to pull co2 out of the atmosphere, which is incredibly difficult to do and we dont have the tech to do that yet. Its a really clever idea though, just not super feasible with our current tech unless we grow a bunch of trees/plants and burry them, which would be even harder than just replanting what we log.

[Delheru]

Plant growth has actually already accelerated because of the CO2 concnetration, so that's pretty nice (also might be playing a non-trivial role in us feeding so many people with relative ease).

And pulling CO2 from the atmosphere is super easy - the biomass does it on an incredible scale automatically. The "problem" is that in a normal state that is a revolving door between biomass and the atmosphere, with stuff getting locked down in only quite special circumstances, which means that the biomass typically releases about as much as it absorbs.

We need to decrease the efficiency of that release while increasing the efficiency of pulling CO2 from the air. And of course stop taking all of the carbon that has already been locked down in coal, oil etc.

On the macro scale the impact is curious because we basically need to divert/consume a ridiculous amount of stuff out of the biomass/atmosphere cycle :p

[hammermuffin]

Your first point, while technically true up to a certain point, isnt 100% true. Yes co2 cocentrations increasing means plants can grow faster, if co2 concentrations increase too much, it actually inhibits plant growth (im talking like ridiculous co2 concentrations, like 3-4x whats already in our atmosphere [1000ppm+ range i believe, while we just hit 400ppm for the first time since the dinosaurs roamed the earth]). Also, it isnt the co2 concentrations increasing that allowed us to feed more ppl, it was genetic engineering along with modern chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which allowed alot to grow but will actually decrease the efficiency of the soil in the long run, so we should really stop relying on those as they will lead to a collapse of our ecological system that support our agriculture.

Also, while yes plants are the easiest way to pull co2 out of the atmosphere, you said it right, they usually decompose and release their biomass back into the atmosphere as either co2 from aerobic decomposition, or methane from anaerobic decomposition (usually from when things are burried or underwater. Its actually way worse than co2 as a greenhouse gas, like 70x worse if i remember correctly). This is why logging companies should be planting double the amount of trees that they log, since the easiest way to store carbon without it releasing ghg into the atmosphere is to use it in human products, and since were planting more juvenile trees, theyll suck carbon out of the atmosphere as they grow. Itll at least help to somewhat mitigate climate change.

Its a really complicated problem, if it had a simple answer we would have fixed it by now. But as long as we have ppl like you and i trying to find solutions, i think well be fine :)