Is it possible Joe Biden used my previous post on this site to prepare for his address this week at the 2023 Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate?

“Today we have to do more than recognize the climate challenges we face. It seems to me we have to recommit ourselves to action while still — while we still have the time.”

“Forests are key to our future. In the United States alone, our forests absorb more than 10 percent of our annual greenhouse gas emissions. And as we all know, if we lose this natural resource, we can’t easily get it back.

In my own country, I’ve flown over more land that has been burned to the ground because of forest fires of late than the entire size of the state of Maryland, which is about the size of Belgium.

That’s why, almost exactly one year ago, I signed an executive order to help prevent wildfires, preserve our forests, and protect our local economies that so often they support.”

From the Washington Post’s World Cup blog today…

Belgium has long hovered around the top tier of the world’s biggest sport — an impressive feat for a country roughly the size of Maryland.

An article in the Wall Street Journal (Oct 5) and republished in Bangkok Post discussed the creation of biofuel from algae.

Unfortunately large-scale algae production requires enormous amounts of land, water and fertilizer, making it prohibitively expensive. Professor Kevin Flynn, who has researched algae biofuel for years was quoted as saying “Meeting just 10% of Europe’s fuel demand with unmodified algae would require flooding three Belgiums in more than 7 inches of water while using 50% of the fertilizer used for European agriculture”

Thank you to @PeterLuxy on Twitter for spotting this one.

According to a BBC report the Belgian farmer moved the stone dating from 1819 that marked the France-Belgium border because it was in the path of his tractor. He relocated it 2.29 metres (7.5 feet) into French territory, thus making Belgium larger and France smaller.

Local authorities will request that the farmer replaces the stone to its original location to avoid the reconvening of a Franco-Belgian border commission that has been dormant since 1930.

The BBC report can be found here.

What is Belgebra? It is a sub-branch of algebra where one of the variables represents the size of Belgium. I’ve spotted a couple of examples in the news this week.

The first example is fairly simple. It comes from seafoodsource.com on Chinese aquaculture (May 14, 2020)

“It also prioritizes further mitigation of mudflat and earthenware aquaculture, a primary source of production of low-value species, but also the cause of significant environmental damage across a land footprint spanning the size of Belgium and the Netherlands combined.”

A much more complex and bizarre example appeared in The CEO Magazine – May 18, 2020 in a piece about Covid-19 in the state of Western Australia.

“Western Australia has recorded 557 cases of COVID-19, five of which remain active. The state is the size of Belgium, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, Monaco, the Netherlands and the UK combined. The UK alone has had more than 243,000 confirmed cases of infection, Belgium more than 52,000 and the Netherlands almost 44,000.“

This “Belgebra” is weird on several levels:

Firstly, it is wildly inaccurate. The seven countries listed add up to 1.03 million sq km. Western Australia covers more than 2.65 million sq km (which by coincidence is almost the same as its population). In fact you could add Germany, Italy and Spain to the equation and still reach only 80% of the size of WA.

Secondly, the inclusion of Monaco is laughable. It is only 2 sq km – the second smallest nation on earth after the Vatican.

Thirdly, if Belgium had not been listed first I would never have spotted this in my search for size of Belgium!

In January several news outlets (for example Phys.Org) reported that “In 2019, major fires in Australia, Russia and California burned over 13.5 million hectares of land—an area four times greater than the size of Belgium.”

This was an opportunity to bring out the rarely seen comparison “an area the size of North Korea”. Unfortunately none of these publishers grasped it.

In February in South America the Columbia Reports article had the headline “How to steal land the size of a small country“. It went on to reveal that “Medellin‘s elite and friends of Colombia’s former President Alvaro Uribe were among the main beneficiaries of the dispossession of more than 3 million hectares of land, an area the size of Belgium.”

Some convoluted arithmetic appeared in an AFP UK report which was published on Yahoo News (and others).

Chile is one of the world’s main glacier reserves, with gigantic ice blocks covering almost three percent of the national territory. That’s more than 20,000km², which is about two thirds the size of Belgium.