Berlin is a great place to observe policies with good intentions, yet negative second-order effects.
Distributing free potatoes will likely cause waste somewhere else, as e.g. people will buy less potatoes in supermarkets. The waste just becomes less visible as supermarkets dispose of food every day.
Another current exhibit is the prohibition of using salt for removing snow and ice from the pavements because it's "bad for plants and the ground water". While that is true to some degree, the Berlin policy conveniently ignores all second-order effects: Sidewalks are more slippery, more people get hurt. I see people slipping on snow-compacted ice almost every day. How many trees have to be saved to make it worthwhile for more people breaking their bones?
You can apply for an exemption though, e.g. if you plan to use salt on a driveway to a hospital. Processing fees for such an exemption are up to 1.4k€ [1].
The rent cap is another one. But let's go there another day..
[1] https://www.berlin.de/umwelt/themen/natur-pflanzen-artenschu...
Distributing (trucking, rent and employees at grocery stores, etc) the potatoes costs more than growing them. Even if they are available for free at the farm, the market price in the city cannot go below the cost of distribution without grocery stores and shipping companies working for free, which they have no reason to do. These are already some of the lowest-margin businesses out there.
In this case, it seems that Berliner Morgenpost and Ecosia are doing shipping and distribution for free, for PR reasons or maybe as some kind of charitable volunteering project. It's nice of them to volunteer their time, but it seems strange to talk about “a story about the absurdities of our food system”. Are they saying that it is absurd that a newspaper doesn't permanently turn into a money-losing grocery distributor?
The story from Morgenpost:
https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article410886475/gruene-woc...
Hopefully it’s real this time: https://www.vice.com/en/article/viral-free-potatoes-post-cos...
This is an interesting example of what happens when the supply and demand curve goes into the extreme ends of the chart: The price of "selling" your product goes negative. It costs money to get rid of it.
Negative prices occur from time to time in the electricity market because some types of power plants are slow to ramp up and down. So if demand falls too rapidly, spot electricity prices can negative.
When I worked at a Coke bottler in Japan, we had similar issues with product.
Stuff that didn't sell was called "Flush Out" and had to be disposed of.
You couldn't legally just dump the contents without paying money so I made an app that let employees get cases for shipping costs. It was popular, even though we were usually talking about weird flavours that no one liked (stuff akin to Apple Ginger ale)
They eventually got rid of it, but I was already out of the company so I didn't know the reason.
> It was popular, even though we were usually talking about weird flavours that no one liked (stuff akin to Apple Ginger ale)
I know this is beside the point, but Apple Ginger Ale sounds legitimately awesome. I’ve never seen that flavor before, but now I really want to try it haha.
I remember liking it too; it was actually a Schweppes product but as my boss said, it was straight to flush out. The Japan market just doesn't like sweet drinks. The top drink was green tea, which probably caused consternation as it was so expensive to manufacture.
In retrospect I miss the teas from Japan more than any of the weird flavours we had. Thankfully one can make them oneself but there is something special about going to a corner store and having relatively healthy options instead of a hundred flavours of sugar water.
Sometimes employee benefits like that have weird tax obligations that the company would rather not deal with.
Oil briefly went negative a couple years ago too which was shocking. I thought about “buying” some, but then realized I’d have to set up for the oil to be picked up (or try to sell the contract before it expired).
> a couple years ago
It was near the beginning of the pandemic, due to the demand shock of everything shutting down.
There were probably practical ways to profit off the low prices (assuming the risk of them not recovering), but I never did figure out something that would work for a retail investor.
The only way to profit was too have a large storage tank.
Barrels are over $50 each even in bulk. The oil is often less than the barrel, "1 barrel" of oil is a unit of volume equal to 42 US gallons. The price/barrel is the price of bulk oil, not oil literally transported in barrels.
Lol, no. When you buy "barrels" of oil on a commodity market, the barrel is a unit of volume (42 US gallons).
I've recently seen potatoes for 26ct a kilo in a supermarket and wondered how people made money on that, farming, transportation, supermarket margin, &c.
> The price of "selling" your product goes negative. It costs money to get rid of it.
But there also has to be a cost (or other liability) to keeping it, or you could just wait for demand to arise. (There generally is some kind of inventory/warehousing cost. But just saying.)
Unless there’s some funny unit issue going on (I know there are short and long tons…), it looks like Germany consumed around 5000KT of potatoes in 2022.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/potato-co...
> A farm in Saxony has been left with 4,000 tons of potatoes in what Berliner Morgenpost is calling “a story about the absurdities of our food system”.
I dunno; it doesn’t seem too absurd, better to have too many than too few potatoes.
I'm having hard time to visualize it, can you convert them in adult elephants and TV Tower height? Bear in mind I only saw asian elephants in zoo.
A ton is a big bag (yes, they get delivered in bags and that’s the name for them), which is pretty exactly a cubic meter. 4000 tons is hence a 2x2meter tower, 1km high. Or 20mx20m, 10m high.not sure how high you can stack TV towers or Asian elephants. The conversion is left as an exercise to the reader.
> which is pretty exactly a cubic meter
That would be if we were talking about water (and at 4ºC if we want to be "exact"), but potatoes have a different density and cannot fill the space entirely due to their irregular shapes. Are you saying that those two things cancel themselves out and the result is that 1 cubic meter of potatoes is "exactly" 1 tone?
Pretty much. See the FAQ here https://4000-tonnen.de/faq.html
> Wie werden die Kartoffeln geliefert? Die Kartoffeln werden per LKW direkt an Ihre angegebene Adresse geliefert. Die Lieferung erfolgt in einem Big Bag, in das ca. 1000 Kilogramm Kartoffeln passen.
Standard Big bags are roughly 1x1x1m
They are not as volumetrically efficient, but it's probably not too far from the approximation plus 10-15% I think. Potatoes are mostly water.
>4,000 tons is almost four million kilograms
It is exactly four million kilograms. (Germany uses the SI metric ton)
TIL there are two units of measurement that are both called ton but confusingly are not the same as a ton. One is a tiny bit more than a ton (1.016 tons) and one is a bit less (0.907 tons). Apparently people use the prefixes long and short to differentiate them, at least that part is intuitive.
Well, three, the two you mentioned and the metric ton (1000 kg)
A farm on the western side of Canada has been doing something similar for years:
https://langleyadvancetimes.com/2025/08/09/record-breaking-u...
Good on them for going through the trouble to make sure they’re not wasted
Potatoes have low caloric density (80 kcal/100 g), so the ideal would be to dry them and store them in a sustainable form like ready-to-use mash.
At 2000 kcal/day average caloric expenditure, you could feed 1.6 million people for a day. Or 3.2 if it was only half the diet. That's a lot of food indeed!
The problem is most of the volume/weight is water; that's not very convenient. In comparison, an equivalent volume of cereals would feed 7 million people and are much easier to store long term, they are very efficient !
That could be a big potato battery bank?
According to google a 200g potato give off about half a volt (0.5v) and 0.2mah
4000 tonnes = 4,000,000 kg = 4,000,000,000 g
num potatoes = 4,000,000,000 / 200 = 20,000,000 potatoes
volts = 20,000,000 x 0.5v = 10,000,000 volts (10megavolts)
I am not an electrical engineer, what could we do with this?
The energy comes from the metal electrodes not the potato. Potato is just an electrolyte carrying current between the cathode and anode.
I think it might better to produce alcohols from it and then burn the liquids and gasses.
Thinking about wattage is more useful. We'd get about 2MW so you could run 20k-ish homes (1kW average across a day) for a short time until the potato energy is depleted.
You'll also need to buy the metal electrodes.
3 days ago I paid €0.79/kg in Slovakia.
I've seen 26ct in a lidl in Kosice. For reference an empty potatoe mesh bag costs like 15ct each if you buy them as a private person in a store
When life give you potatoes, make vodka… or?
Boil them, mash them, stick'em in a stew.
New daft punk song:
Boil them, mash them, stick'em, stew them...
Make fries and freeze them.
Vodka is generally made from grains.
Vodka can be made from anything with fermentable sugars. You’re right that grain vodka is more common but potato vodka is definitely a thing.
Akvavit
Fries
These particular potatoes won't be wasted.
But other potatoes likely will be.
It's not like people are suddenly going to want more potatoes.
There is some elasticity of demand. Some people will eat more potatoes and less bread or rice. Other people will fill up their cupboards; just because the farmer doesn't want to store these for later doesn't mean that individual consumers won't.
A lot of people will have a few more potato-heavy meals if they happen to have more potatoes. This means they'll (presumably) buy a little less of other ingredients for a spell, and maybe we'll end up with more of those going to waste, but it's definitely possible for that not to happen. Seems like a ripple of delayed food purchases of dry goods can be absorbed by reduced production far, far down the line.
Lots of people are price-sensitive to groceries, and will eat more potatoes if some of them are free.
Joke’s on you, got an air fryer for Christmas and I’m roasting potatoes every day, never bought so many potatoes in my life. They’re absolutely delicious.
If only they were genetically modified to contain more protein
This would be really cool! Extra points if you can add a more varied nutritional profile.
> 4,000 tons
I did some math out of curiosity to better visualize this amount in my head. If we assume that a typical serving of potatoes in a meal where potatoes are an important part is 200g, then with 4 million kg of potatoes you can make 20 million of such meals (1/4 of Germany's population).
Or ~1600k small sacks of potatoes. About one sack per two people in Berlin, which is probably around roughly one per household.
That’s fun! The distribution points are too far from me, and getting the free potatoes would be completely impractical, but I am sure some people will benefit.
They should take them to France so they can become… you know the rest, but now I wonder how much weight the oil would add to 4k tons of potatoes.
I know some people call them "French fries", but history is arguing between France and Belgium for their origin.
And nowadays, Belgians eat way more of them per capita than they do!
Ultimately this may just move the wastage somehwere else: people may get those for free instead of buying them, leading to waste in supermarkets/shops. Or they might take more than they need because it's free and end up throwing them away.
It seems that they acknowledge that they are doing thus because there is a supply glut so potatoes will go to waste in any case...
Ultimately this give away is a waste of efforts, too. Sometimes there is just nothing to be done...
To be honest it sounds like you (and some other commenters) are just rationalizing because the concept of giving stuff away for free is too much at odds with your world view. Maybe some is going to waste but surely less than would go to waste if they destroyed all of these.
Can we not start with the personal attacks and the assumptions about other's "worldviews"?
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
It might be a lossy savings, but I would think at least some percentage of people who take the free potatoes weren't going to buy them and will eat some of them. So maybe you get 5-10 percent less total waste for the labor time, pessimistically? And hopefully more.
I prefer to think of it as 4 kilotons.
4 gigagrams
In America, we just let people go hungry while grinding the excess crop back into fertilizer.
We let people go hungry? This is really not a problem today.
Just google for Household Food Security in the US. You might get surprised.
Still a problem in the US. School lunch is the only meal of the day for a surprising number of kids.
According to non profits, 1 in 7 Americans, 1 in 5 American children:
In the site says “FACT - 100% of Counties - Hunger exists in everywhere – no community is untouched”
What I pretty much suspected. But that in USA 20% of children don’t get enough? That is a big TIL for my ignorance. A sister comment states some child eat only at school. Boy I thought (in 2 figure percentage) was only 3rd world.
Thank you. I have to admit I did not take time to real all. I was just shocked by the 1 in 5. I kinda suspected is not the same definition of poverty and malnutrition in the 1st and 3rd world (I lived in both and know there are big differences) but is still was shocking high. But as you point out, is little more nuanced, and I will not keep the 20% figure in my head.
Yeah, not great... I often skip meals on days that I don't work, to save on food and money, though I don't save much, since I mostly just eat rice and tuna, but I get by.
EDIT: I live in Portugal.
yes, it very much is. plenty of school age children go hungry, and the school district I used to work for had a major program to make sure poor kids and "Children in transition" (i.e. homeless) were fed at least a good breakfast and lunch.
Given the direction of public school funding, and the sentiment of MAGA shitheels, I expect the problem to worsen.
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I’ve wondered if something like this would drive down inflation in the US food supply.
I would want at least a ton of ketchup with that.
Oh, wow--what if Big Ketchup is behind this? Huge, if true.
This is Germany. We might also need mayo, depending on preference.
Is this what life in Europe has come to?
4000 tons or 4096 tons of potatoes?
This is great news to me.
Some farmer probably lost a lot of money over this. Our farmers feed us, and generally have thin margins. I see headlines like this and I generally see it as reason for concern as the market not working like it should, and could be a signal of a larger problem down the road.
> Some farmer probably lost a lot of money over this.
The farmer got their money (it was purchased in advance). The company purchasing it didn't pick it up tho, because demand is not there, and they'd likely lose more money on transport and distribution. Which is where the two companies doing this campaign come in - they pay for distribution costs, so the farmer doesn't throw them away.
No, the farmer got paid when the commodities trader bought their harvest on the futures market months ago. The trader lost it all though and ended up giving the potatoes away to the newspaper for free.
This is about the yield of a few hundred acres of potato. It's inconsequential in terms of the "market".
"4,000 tons is almost four million kilograms"
Maybe targeted at Americans and using US customary short tons (which is 907 kg)
As an American, I'm going to need this as a volume, either in terms of Olympic-sized swimming pools or the height of a pile in an [American] football stadium. Maybe I'd accept weight as a quantity of Ford F-150s, but you'd be pushing it.
4,000 tonnes is almost exactly 4 tonne. Could be 4,0004 tonne.
That's not how the comma separator works in English.
I guess you're quoting it because it is EXACTLY four million kilograms?
Probably for our freedom unit loving friends, they have a different ton (because why not).
Our freedom tons are built for our particularly large trucks.
Believe it or not the Europeans run heavier trucks than Americans. Ours just get to be longer.
I also like to take potshots at Americans, but come on. It's unlikely that a newspaper called "the berliner" in a article about Berlin included this line specifically thinking about citizens of a far-away foreign country who don't use metric units that often.
Occam's razor says that it's actually one of our noble and enlightened European journalists who made that sloppy remark without realising it.
They only reported one significant figure, could be as little as 3500. kg or as much as 4499.99999... kg
"4k tons" is 4 gigagrams (Gg).
LLMs couldn't've written that!
sigh Why am I never where the excitement is?
Sam..? Is that you?
this is awesome, potatoes are so good for you
this might cause major financial damage to "traditional local markets"(1) and similar in Berlin and Brandenburg close to it (depending on what kind of potatoes this are, like quality, taste, how the cook (hard, soft), etc.)
(1): Kinda a bit like local farmer markets, but also very different.
the problem isn't the giving away stuff for free part
but the scale of it
I mean giving free stuff to people in need is always grate, irrelevant of scale.
Giving it to people which can easily afford it on small scale is just fine too.
Giving it to people which can easily afford it on gigantic scale and it's only slightly hurting the bottom line of some huge cooperation, then who cares.
But giving away a product people might have bought from smaller local businesses in very larger amounts (more then what such small 1-2 person businesses sell in multiple month), that is where your "charitable" action might cost people their job and you might do far more harm then good.
now Germans are picky about their potato and the chance that 4k Tons of free potato are the kind of potato you find in "local traditional markets" is pretty slim. So this might all just be very hypothetical.
They are giving this away in portions of 1t, which isn't practical for normal consumers (unless they manage to pool somehow), so this won't have much of an effect on the normal consumer market. It's mostly directed at aid organizations, social stuff etc.
From the original pages FAQ:
> Wie viele Kartoffeln bekomme ich?
> Jede Abnahmestelle erhält ca. 1 Tonne (1.000 kg) Kartoffeln.
That FAQ is directed at organizations willing to act as a _distribution point_. So mostly charities who think they can spare the time and effort. I guess a better written FAQ would put it "Wie viele Kartoffeln bekommen _wir_?", making it more visible that it's directed at organizations. I just sampled a few of the distribution points already acknowledged and those do look like they will be passing them on to individual consumers.
thanks
Ich bin ein Berliner
This is so sad. I'm sure there is some way to turn them into biofuel. Instead they are just a snack to people that will not even appreciate it
While this give-away sounds cool...
> Another current exhibit is the prohibition of using salt for removing snow and ice from the pavements because it's "bad for plants and the ground water". While that is true to some degree, the Berlin policy conveniently ignores all second-order effects: Sidewalks are more slippery, more people get hurt.
Rigorously considering second-order (and greater) effects is a massive undertaking, though. Like: how do you even know how many more people will slip and get hurt without salting sidewalks and how much the damage the salt does to "plants and ground water," without many careful and expensive research projects? And then there's the challenge of weighing such completely disparate things: how many injuries are healthier plants worth?
Basically is seems easier said than done.
The problem is not salting or not - the problem is that the house owners are liable for cleaning the sidewalk and they all outsourced it to the same companies. And the companies unsurprisingly all fail to deliver on their obligations because they take on way more customers they could possibly handle. The result is as expected - nothing gets done. A shovel and broom, maybe some grit would have been enough.
But there’s no shred of enforcement and instead of calling for enforcement, politicians now call for relaxing the rules on salting.
Or maybe don't make everyone responsible for the public roadway/sidewalk in front of their house and instead have the people that are responsible for all other things public roadway/sidewalk be responsible?
Works elsewhere, why not in Germany, where taxes should actually be even better able to cover it? [yes I know people in Germany, even specifically in Berlin and no this is not a Berlin specific thing]
Like where I live, the city also says not to use salt whenever you can and use alternatives and they themselves do not salt the roads in our town either, except for the major in and out ones. This is Canada btw. so we do get a load of snow and ice. They use grit and in spring the city sends through a grit cleaning crew (for reuse next winter). Except for the parts that make it onto lawns from snow plows pushing it onto your property. There it's your job i.e. some people put down mats in fall or they use brushes to get it out of the lawn and back onto the street where it can be picked up. Just yesterday, it was above freezing and the city snow plows went and used the warmer weather to scrape lots of ice off the road!
I believe enforcement would solve the problem for Berlin as well. Just hand out substantial fines to change the calculus for the home owner. At the moment, the risk/reward is favoring doing nothing, so that's what a lot of people do.
Funny indeed. Now that you mention it, I can "hear" the complaining voices in my mind, yes :) So very German of them too!
Funny you mention cost. This year our town actually did not contract out the snow clearing of the roadways to a contractor like they've done for decades past, because it became too expensive (or rather the percentage increase I believe was the trigger). So instead the city is now doing the snow clearing themselves! I would call this very good stewardship of our property tax payments, which is what pays for that. Just now instead of going to greedy contractors (let's face it, most of that money isn't going to the people actually doing the snow clearing) and instead it will go towards paying the salaries of actual city employees (not sure how many temporary) and I guess equipment cost.
Most people here also get a local contractor or in our case it's usually one of the farms around the area, that offer snow clearing of your driveway. Both the actual driveway, which around here can be quite large, and for clearing the large amounts of snow and ice left across your driveway by the city plows clearing the roads. Essentially tractors with snow blower attachments on the back PTO. Like this: https://www.deere.ca/assets/images/region-4/products/attachm...
My recollection--from Ohio, Colorado, Maryland, and Washington, DC--is that in the US the property owner is generally responsible for the sidewalk.
We are wary of salt, having damaged a stretch of sidewalk in a rowhouse development by heavily salting it one winter. Others, and the city of Washington, will put down salt at the least probability of snow.
The same liability issue exists in Belgium, with very similar results. Some people will clear the pavement in front of their homes, others won't. Some don't have the time, some don't have the ability. Some try but make it worse, by brushing aside the snow without salting a thin leftover layer can easily turn into black ice.
Our tax rate is insane. This is a responsibility/liability that should rest with the governments, but they'd never get it done.
My hot take is that the govt ought to facillitate the process, e.g. by providing salt/grit/shovels/salt spreaders, so that people at least have a realistic chance of getting it done.
The ban on salt isn’t silly, for a long time pebbles were good enough to prevent black ice, and perhaps even more effective than ice.
Donating potatoes that were about to go to waste might cause waste elsewhere, but what you propose is that we never give food away unless we can be absolutely sure it won’t cause waste in another sub-system. That’s a tall order. These potatoes were going to be waste anyway.
Surely if you can consider the second order effects of giving away these extra potatoes for free, then you can also consider the second order effects of not giving them away? And maybe even thinking more about it, consider that they may be going to different markets/people/causes?
Given this example is about 1T batches of potatoes, it could be used by a business that depends on cheap potatoes like a food kitchen, or a business that can absorb the input surge and convert it into a product that can be stored longer term like frozen foods.
> While that is true to some degree, the Berlin policy conveniently ignores all second-order effects: Sidewalks are more slippery, more people get hurt
I seriously doubt they did not know that. The whole point of salt is to prevent people from falling. Of course they knew more people will fall.
Is the concept of someone who usually doesn't eat potatoes getting a bag and spending the next week making some potato dishes really that inconceivable? I don't doubt that this will lead to some waste - I've thrown out more half empty potato bags than I would like to admit - but that's a very negative outlook.
Also how do you choose between negative second order effects? Salting roads creates negative effects for groundwater and plants which are really hard to mitigate. On the other hand the second order effect of people slipping could at least be dealt with on an individual level by putting spikes on your shoes.
> how do you choose between negative second order effects?
First off you have to identify them. Until you frame the costs and benefits of salting, it isn't clear that the real question is how can we improve pedestrian and vehicular traction without poisoning our plants and water supply. (I'd argue it's frequent ploughing, gravelling and dynamic signs for signalling when chains/snowies/AWD are required.)
Salting your ground water is also a second-order effect. The way you put that statement into quotes shows that you value human well being over everything else. Personally I don't. Life on earth is a co-op and we don't win by being the last ones standing, as we are desperately trying right now.
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When I hear people like you, I pray that natural selection will remove people like you from the population faster than mutations create them.
Wouldn't natural selection rewrd that behavior more?
It isn’t genetic, it’s moral programming.
> How many trees have to be saved to make it worthwhile for more people breaking their bones?
That has a specific answer, like "twenty". But calculating it would be a hopeless task.
As someone who just went outside to buy groceries in Berlin and watched them salt the road on my way to Kaufland, I am confused. Is it just for sidewalks?
Roads are salted, everything else is not.
Are you sure they weren't using sand or gravel instead?
Hmm, I mean it was a lot of white stuff coming out. Again, on the street, so maybe it's different rules compared to sidewalks. Possibly sand, but I'm pretty sure it's salt.
EDIT: Seems that some roads are allowed to be salted! It's a pretty main thoroughfare, so likely the case. https://www.bsr.de/bsr-winterdienst-gut-geruestet-fuer-die-k...
Good point on the second order concern, but I'd get potatoes and keep non-perishable food for later. Assuming the exact same weight or available caloric intake will be wasted is too simplistic.
I mean it sounds sort of if you know what the second order effect of damage to plants and ground water will be if people salt their driveways? I would think you sort of need to run the test in production to see which way is more beneficial.
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You could always just clean the snow instead of salting it. It's not rocket science.
Most Berlin sidewalks are uneven cobblestone, not a flat uniform concrete, so the cleaning is probably a lot more difficult than you're envisioning :)
The neighbors snow response contractor had an electric brush on a broom handle, that looked pretty nifty and took like 15 minutes for the whole front to be spotless clean. Then they added a bit of grit, done. The contractor for our block didn’t even show up. Not sure allowing salt would have changed anything.
It's not about the snow, snow is easy. It's about black ice of which we seem to have more in the last few years. Gravel doesn't cut it here - I broke my wrist last year and this year I salted the paved path to the front gate, I don't want to repeat 8 hours waiting in the ER, 2 surgeries and 3 months more or less out of commission.
That very rarely happens if the snow was cleared, since you'd need all that water to come from somewhere.
Yeah I suppose it does depend a lot on the weather
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> are you suggesting to use a mop when it rains to clean the water before it freezes
Wyoming here. We don't generally salt our roads. Instead, a combination of ploughs (to clear it) and gravel (to increase traction) are used.
More broadly: if you're "astonished with some people not having a grasp," consider that astonishment signals encountering something new.
The gall to complain about "not having a grasp on reality" while writing hypersimplistic reactionary comments. The evidence for Dead Internet Theory grows by the day.
With properly graded streets and sidewalks, liquid water runs off. When the bulk of snow is cleared, the small bits that remain melt, flow off, and/or evaporate during melting days. I can't comment on the specific climate of Berlin, but it certainly doesn't seem poised to be an arctic encampment.
>How many trees have to be saved to make it worthwhile for more people breaking their bones?
The **** is a death cult. They are very very happy to see you become an invalid if it avoids the death of a sapling. I know that this sounds hyperbolic to the point of being derisive, but it's the observable truth.
Who specifically are you talking about?