Plants pretty consistently are ~40-50% carbon by mass, so the amount of biomass on the ground is a fairly solid indicator of the amount of carbon sequestered. Unless the ranchers have a truly massive amount of hay at all times I don't see how a ranch can approach a forest.
Don’t forget the soil. Old prairie has immensely thick soil, with a high carbon content. Think deep plant roots. With the right management, ranchers could mimic the prairie ecosystem, restore and build soil, and sequester carbon into the soil. It’s not easy, but the most successful farmers have been astoundingly successful.
Not that any of this is a valid excuse for burning down the Amazon.
I mean sure, but that’s not why it’s not recyclable. I mean we don’t rust iron to recycle it!
Plastics are hard to recycle because their melts don’t mix. As a result, when cast, you end up with an interface inside your part where the plastic can delaminate and fail.
Therefore, to recycle plastic you have to classify it according to type (plastic things usually have little numbers stamped on them indicating type) and you have to be right over 99% of the time.
Yep, plastics can be wildly incompatible. Growing up my dad had a fishing tackle store with bulk plastic fishing worms. Customers, being customers would occasionally pick them up and leave them at other places in the store, like in another bin of plastic worms or some other plastic object. If not noticed quickly this could lead to a big clump of plastic goo as they reacted and melted each other down.
Right, my point is that plastic items originally were meant to replace heavier/bulkier items, but with a comparable longevity. Not to be used as single-use throw-away items. The need to recycle comes from the fact plastic stopped being used for durability, and it hence thrown away in humongous quantities.
How do you train a neurosurgeon? That level of specialization comes from maybe a few hundred in the U.S. With that level of scarcity (and demand), their time is going to be priced accordingly.
But s/he needn’t have a B.Arts in management to apply to med school first.
I don’t know what you mean by “Maybe a few hundred”. Do you mean schools or neurosurgeons?
If 1., there are only 150 med school for all Dr. in the US, contributing to a very low number of Dr. Per capita.
If 2. They study medicine. Do residency. And train on the job for the rest of their lives... just like today [0]
[0] actually one of the reasons for medical errors, a top three killer in the US, is that most Dr. don’t update their knowledge one thy finish their residency. :S
Yes, but consider that the US taxpayer pays per capita more or less what the Canadian taxpayer does on health care, while covering only Medicaid and Medicare.
The Canadian, on the other hand, doesn’t have insurance premiums or deductibles.
(For the record, I hate the CND health care system. It’s just that, knowing both systems, the US’ is worse :)
That’s not obvious to me. Most plants are C2 plants, but grass is a C4 so it captures sunlight more efficiently.
Not to say burning the Amazon isn’t a terrible idea.