Comment by SketchySeaBeast
5 days ago
I don't know that getting more trees than you lost is a useful or effective measure against climate change. It's a good thing, certainly, but I imagine the amount of carbon we're pumping into the atmosphere requires more than a steady state of trees. I wonder how much of the world we'd need to cover with trees in order to offset our carbon production, certainly more than we've had during modern civilization.
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-many-new-trees-would-we-... says a new forest the size of New Mexico might offset the US's emissions. Or not. It depends. But first thing to do would be not to cut down the existing ones.
They say it would take a forest the size of New Mexico "to account for one year of American emissions" - given that trees both process CO2 during respiration and act as sinks when they grow, I can't tell if they'd be able to offset those emissions the next year as well or if we'd need a new forest.
Trees produce CO2 during respiration and intake it during photosynthesis. The carbon captured during photosynthesis will be offset to some degree by the tree's own need to consume glucose.
Basically we need to grow trees as fast as possible, cut them down and bury them deep, exactly the opposite of what we’re doing when mining fossil fuels. No wonder there’s exactly zero people doing that.
There's been a proposal to bury them not-so-deep, but saturated with salt to prevent decomposition. It's not necessary to sequester the carbon forever, just on a time scale for natural absorption of the CO2 into oceans and then into carbonates (which is something like 100,000 years, IIRC).
So that someone in the future can discover these reserves and use it as fuel?!?!!?!
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Biochar is exactly doing that and is an active area of research in many places. There is several ongoing projects also showing that biochar can improve soil quality and crop yields.
https://charmindustrial.com
Why are they focusing on making bio-oil to throw away instead of biochar that has many known non-fuel uses? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar#Applications
Nice!
https://www.livingcarbon.com - they actually genetically engineered trees to grow faster.
We need to be building a mountain range out of diamonds.
The nice thing about making diamonds as opposed to coal or bio-oil is that it's quite hard to burn the diamond, so less chance of someone getting tempted into using these enormous reserves that are just sitting there, depreciating, to fuel the helicopter of their bitcoin-mining luxury cruise ship or create an ultra-fast pizza delivery service using rocket launchers
Can you imagine the extraterrestrial archaeologist trying to explain that?
No - stupid slow speed of light stops so many interesting science fiction imaginations.
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Depends on where the carbon goes. Into a home? Locked up for a long time. Under a cooking stove? Released.
But does it help worrying about where we're putting logs while we're burning fossil fuels? We need to plant enough trees to offset all the trees we're burning, but also all the gasoline, oil, and natural gas we're burning as well as all the concrete we're producing. The math seems like it'll never balance.
I did the back of the napkin math below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42697255
Barring mistakes, it balances if we had avoided reducing the planet's vegetation by 20% since 1900. So much for that.
That's obviously not "the" solution, but it seems like reducing fuel burn while increasing forestation would benefit us beyond what is commonly expected.
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