Hey readers,

Happy Friday from the Future Perfect team. This week, we explained mind-reading technology, covered the GOP's push for Medicaid work requirements, and examined emerging technology that could prevent the suffering of billions of chicks. And today we have a new Q&A for you, this time all about trees, and the potential and limitations of paying to protect forests.

As always, feel free to tell us what’s on your mind: futureperfect@vox.com.

—Kelsey Piper, senior writer

What's missing in forestry carbon markets

Elliot Webb

Forests make up nearly half the area of the Northeastern US, and these trees are now in their prime for sequestering carbon. We get to breathe in clean oxygen, the trees store the extra glucose in their trunks, branches, roots, and leaves to feed themselves and grow, and CO2 is removed from the atmosphere.

Companies from Delta Air Lines to Disney buy carbon credits to offset their emissions in bulk (7.8 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent, and 2.5 million, respectively). These businesses purchase carbon credits from brokers working with landowners, who are paid to not clear-cut forests. It’s supposed to cancel out the emissions from industries that want to achieve a net zero impact on the environment, but this rarely works out as planned.

The problem — according to Charles Canham, forest ecologist at the Cary Institute, a non-profit research center in Millbrook, New York — is that these credits overestimate how much additional carbon would be stored by forests protected through the credit system. Prevent logging in one area, and trees elsewhere may be cut down in response, while companies can’t easily be sure that the trees they pay to protect wouldn’t have been kept standing anyway.

While planting new trees will help create “carbon sinks” in 20 years or more — sites where more carbon is stored than released — young trees do not sequester nearly as much carbon as old growth forests. Canham argues we do not have the time to wait for the benefits of new trees to offset emissions from present-day activities, so it's better to leave old forests alone and look for more effective solutions to industrial emissions.

I spoke with Canham on what makes the temperate forests of the Northeast valuable from an ecological perspective, and worth taking a long walk through. —Julieta Cardenas, Future Perfect Fellow

In your book Forests Adrift, you mention the resilience of Northeast forests. How are forests in the Northeast going to be able to adapt to climate change in the next couple of centuries?

When I look out my window at the trees around me, the climate they're going to experience in the next 48 hours is going to vary by more than 30 degrees Fahrenheit.

So the defining evolutionary adaptation for temperate trees — not the farthest north and not the tropics — is their ability to tolerate temperature extremes. All the trees here around me and in the temperate regions of the world are descendants of lineages of tropical trees, but they were only able to move into temperate climates because they can tolerate freezing temperatures.

When I talk about resilience, I'm really talking about the forests of the eastern half of the country, which represent about half of the forests in the country. The Eastern US is about 50 percent forest now and it turns out, that's a rebound from 120 years ago, when it would have been about 20 percent forest. The abandonment of farmland has led to lots of forests. This is where most of the carbon sequestration in the US is happening. Eighty-five percent of the carbon sequestration in US forests is here in the East. That, and we don't have the fires that are devastating the West.

Northeastern forests sequester 11 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions. Will they continue to be so effective in a changing climate?

The data is showing that the average forest in the Eastern US is at sort of peak productivity right now, and there's no evidence that it's declining within the range that we observe. And it has to decline eventually. The question is, at what point? We easily have at least 50 more years where Eastern forests will be working at sort of maximum benefit in terms of the climate.

Can carbon credit offsets increase the amount of carbon sequestered by forests?

Not the way that any of the voluntary market registries or even the California compliance market is currently working. The structural flaws in the protocols used in all of those markets allow a gross exaggeration of what would be a truly additional credit.

And right now if they were honest about assessing what could be truly additional, they wouldn't be generating enough revenue to even cover the compliance costs. And so the only way for these markets to be economically viable is for the protocols to allow them to grossly exaggerate what's truly being added.

The fundamental point is that everybody in this marketplace agrees that to claim an offset credit you have to be doing something that's additional — that you don't pay people for what they would do anyway.

What would you tell landowners who are approached by carbon credit brokers to do?

Family forests are the best-managed lands in the country, and in many cases, that simply means that they don't log them at all. They value them for other reasons: wildlife habitat, hiking, aesthetics — they just love forests.

But you know, they're sort of caught in the middle. All of a sudden they're being told, “Do this and you'll benefit the Earth, you'll benefit the environment, and you'll get a lot of money.” It's really important that they understand that the money is real. The benefit to the climate is not.

Save the male chicks

mericsso/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Each year, the egg industry grinds up or gasses billions of day-old male chicks — they can’t lay eggs so they’re of no use to egg producers, and they aren’t the kind of breed that’s efficient to raise for meat. According to Vox’s Kenny Torrella, new technology can detect the sex of the chick while it’s still in the egg (“in ovo”), and destroy it before it’s hatched, which has already spared tens of millions of animals from the gruesome fate that meets most day-old male chicks. The technology is off to a promising but shaky start, accelerated by several European countries that have banned male chick culling.

“Emerging in-ovo sexing technology is one of the few bright spots in the farm animal welfare movement, and a great example of how tech can reduce animal suffering,” said Torrella. “The sector is in an awkward phase where it’s demonstrated the ability to end male chick culling at a medium scale, but it’ll take further technological advances, and government policy, to scale up and prevent the suffering of 6.5 billion male chicks each year.”

More on this topic from Vox:

Mind-reading technology has arrived

Nolan Zunk/The University of Texas at Austin

For years, mind-reading technology was a far-flung, sci-fi dream, but now it’s here. Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin put subjects into an fMRI machine and measured the blood flow in their brains while they listened to hours of podcasts. Using AI, they were able to associate a phrase with how the subject’s brain looked when they heard that phrase, and then predict which words might follow. The result is a brain decoder that can read the gist of people’s thoughts, even though it doesn’t nail every single word. “This represents a breakthrough that goes well beyond what previous brain-reading tech could do — and one that raises serious ethical questions,” wrote Vox’s Sigal Samuel.

“This study jumped out at me because it shows what happens when two of the rapidly advancing fields I’ve been tracking — generative AI and neurotechnology — come together. They turbocharge each other. Intellectually, that’s fascinating because it illustrates the power of viewing human language or thought computationally (as something that can be broken down into algorithmic terms). But pragmatically, it’s scary. Brain-reading tech poses threats to our cognitive liberty and mental privacy, and our laws are not ready to protect us.”

More on this topic from Vox:

WHAT WE'RE THINKING ABOUT

Maddie Meyer/Getty Images

When Philadelphia 76ers center and Cameroon native Joel Embiid won the NBA Most Valuable Player award earlier this week — deservedly so, as he is a basketball god — it marked the fifth-straight year that a foreign-born player took home the league’s highest-profile prize. It’s a sign of just how global the NBA has become, with around a quarter of opening-night rosters made up of players born outside the US, which has made the league better and richer. As this smart piece from Reason argues, just think what it could mean if the same efforts were made to ease immigration for the Joel Embiids and Nikola Jokićs of AI or biotechnology. —Bryan Walsh, editor

As meat, especially beef, has come under fire from climate scientists as unsustainable in recent years, the beef industry has responded with an “all-out public relations war.” Part of the war effort includes the Masters of Beef Advocacy program (no real degree awarded upon completion), in which more than 21,000 students are given “multiple misleading – but scientific sounding – narratives about beef industry sustainability” to deploy IRL and in offline conversations about what’s for dinner. —Kenny Torrella, staff writer

The White House just put out the most serious policy statement I’ve seen from them on potential risks from AI, including a pretty unusual commitment they brokered between major AI labs (OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Stability AI, Anthropic, etc.). The companies will participate in "a public evaluation of AI systems" done by another company, Scale AI, at DEFCON 31. If you know the hacking world a little bit, you know that DEFCON is one of the leading cybersecurity conferences, and while it’s not unusual for law enforcement to show up, it’s also not exactly a suit-and-tie affair. This year’s event is in August and I am more than a little curious to see how this White House-sponsored evaluation goes. —Dylan Matthews, senior correspondent and lead writer

Meditation lore is full of wild claims that may strike us non-adepts as impossible. Recently, a group of neuroscientists caught one in the lab, and it seems to hold up. Nirodha samāpatti (Pāli, language of the Theravada Buddhism canon), or “cessation attainment,” describes an advanced meditator's ability to intentionally switch off their consciousness, replicating the effects of general anesthesia. But instead of emerging woozy and disoriented, meditators emerge crisp, clear, and refreshed. In their paper, the researchers valiantly attempt to figure out what the heck is going on. —Oshan Jarow, Future Perfect fellow

Fentanyl overdoses are the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 45. As a result of this public health crisis a "contest between 'drug war' ideas and 'harm reduction'" has emerged in American politics, Brian Mann writes in this NPR story. This piece dives into recent local legislation on harm reduction centers and discusses American lawmakers conflicting opinions on the centers. —Rachel DuRose, Future Perfect fellow

I recommend this new episode of the Ezra Klein Show, which makes many rich and beautiful observations on how AI makes us think about animality (our own, as well as that of nonhuman animals), a subject I’ll be thinking about a lot in the next few months. —Marina Bolotnikova, staff editor

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