A good way to take part in increasing the number of trees, if you own your own home, is to improve the state of your shade trees. The trees absorb atmospheric carbon while also reducing home temperatures in summer, which in turn reduces the electricity people use for cooling. (And you save money!!) So a shade tree is a particularly effective way to reduce both atmospheric CO2 and electric bills. You might think of shade trees as cheap, biological solar panels.
Also, one can plant fruit trees in their yard. I put in 6 last fall and plan to put in another dozen in the next 2-3 weeks. Over the winter I added about 6 truck loads of wood chips to the yard to reduce water usage. (My general feeling at this point from working with the soil is that the wood chips reduce watering needs by at least 80% here. This is a form of xeriscaping, if you're interested.) With all this food growing in the coming years we'll be taking fewer trips to the grocery store while eating better. And probably giving away and trading a lot of food - we're already starting to trade for eggs from a friend, for example.
I'm fortunate enough to have a pond and some marshy area bordering my house.
My neighbors sometimes wondered why I don't trim it up and make it look "nice" right up to the water like some folks do.
I like it wild, lots of trees and wildlife. I even let the wildness take a bit more of the yard than when i moved in. A few big trees quickly sprung up, no maintenance (compared to a yard) it looks great wild.
Perhaps if only out of laziness (yard work is kinda a pain). A few other neighbors who were maliciously caring for their lawn right up to the marsh (well the area you can do that to legally) have done the same as I have and we've got a much larger wild area now. It's full of blue jays, finches, cardinals, rabbits, owl visitors. We even get visited by some beautiful red foxes from time to time (i suspect quite often but they are very sneaky).
The kids mostly play in the front yard anyway where I actually bother to do more yard work to make it looks nice so a big lawn in the back makes no sense if nobody is really enjoying it.
> We even get visited by some beautiful red foxes from time to time
It's funny how urban adaptation affects perceptions of rarity. I live in fairly-central London and you can hardly set foot outside after dark without tripping over a red fox or three. Out in the countryside they're still pretty wary (with reason, since farmers will shoot them).
Are urban foxes a thing in the US too, or is this still a UK phenomenon?
Saw some urban foxes in Montreal - a tourist left a backpack with his dinner (rotisserie chicken) on the ground while the group went to take photos, upon their return they discovered that the foxes were already splitting the “catch”.
California has some raccoons and coyotes. Haven’t seen foxes in cities, but we do have them in the countryside.
There are some suburban ones but they tend to be pretty skittish - you generally see them through windows or cameras. I had one funny experience where they apparently moved stealthily enough that the motion activation mode on a security camera had them appear to teleport - it showed up for a few frames, appeared elsewhere in frame and then disappeared.
Really it is tameness that does it as they don't scatter before we even see them. The woods being quiet is because we scare the hell out of nearly everything, constantly walking on two legs like a bear ready to fight. Leave cameras behind and it gets noiser and more active.
I routinely come across coyotes in my neighborhood. Just this past week, I was out walking my dogs at 11AM and had one emerge from the bushes in the middle of a residential neighborhood. It was being harassed by a Blue Jay. It came within about 5 meters of my dogs and I, while we stood off the to the side to let it get past us and head towards the dry creek bed that they use to navigate the area. They're in our neighborhood for the rabbits.
I'm on the edge of the urban and rural suburban world so most wildlife is still a bit more wary, but yeah the urban foxes a few miles from me are far far less shy.
I live in Minneapolis Minnesota. We have raccoons, opossums, squirrels, rabbits. That's all I have seen for small ground critters that aren't living in parks.
Reminda me of flying into Georgia as part of a trip leg. Much of the surrounding area looked like it was a suburban area overlaid on a forest or what modernn fantasy elves or something as houses were trqnsplanted to modern America - it was so filled with trees - given the heat and history it makes sense and was even oddly beautiful from the sky.
Really I think part of the cultural problem with home design environmentally - aside from the density issues is that so many don't even try to adapt to the environment and do daft things like trying to grow lush water thirsty grasses in the desert or cut away trees in areas that really need the drainage. They often do the equivalent of going around with a brazier of burning coals at 50F instead of putting on a jacket.
I think that's a side effect of the modern expectation that everyone move cross country on a dime if it makes sense economically. Kinda hard to figure out ecological best practices when families can barely stick around for a generation and people constantly move into areas they're just not familiar or comfortable with.
It takes a long time for best practices to become accepted and normal, and there just isn't the geneological inertia to develop that anymore
I think it predated that in that it occured with even slow "colonization" (regardless of it being occupied or not) but that is a good point. Expectations shape it first.
Cuts into my solar power generation through. So its a trade-off. Interestingly enough, from an energy production perspective the solar panels on the roof result in more reduction in CO2 than the trees do.
Trees come with a whole bunch of other issues. I have something like 40 trees ranging up to 20m tall. Cleaning up the leaves and branches is a year-round job. Collecting and removing the waste involves time, money and CO2 producing trucks. If not removed promptly, waste left up on my flat roof causes water damage after rains. Heavy storms make me nervous because I've once seen a set of healthy branches large enough to kill me snap right off (this was some time after the storm).
Some of the trees also attract rats, which drives my dogs nuts at night and is then a source of anxiety given the high crime rate in our country. Trees along the perimeter of the property have damaged the boundary walls, and other trees have ruined sewerage lines. If you want to plant trees, make sure you understand the potential future costs associated with them.
In addition, while planting a tree costs only a few dollars, cutting down a 100 ft high tree in an urban space can easily set you back thousands of dollars.
I've had several trees fall this year, on or around my house. Wet year, and windy too. If they're near your house, you need to invest in making sure they're healthy trees! I'm thinking of planting new trees further back from the house, near the creek.
So, uh, generate the power somewhere other than on shady roofs?
Seriously, I don't get the weird obsession with rooftop PV as if it's the only way to be green. PV is great, but, it doesn't work for every house. Personally, I have big oaks out front helping block passive solar windows in the summer, and the peak of my roof runs north-south so cell mounting would be tricky. That doesn't mean I can't get clean energy, it just means I buy it from a utility company, who are buying it from my neighbor's house where the orientation and canopy placement makes sense to do PV.
Shading your house will also cause the growth of moss and dump leaf litter everywhere, which will take off a significant chunk of your roof's lifespan (easily 5 years or more). So yeah you save $10/mo on your a/c bill and you spend that $20k to roof your house every 15 years instead of every 20 years. Let alone if you get a big storm and have some branches or a trunk come down and damage your house.
Regardless of the environmental angle, having trees near your house is not worth it financially.
According to many sources, but I will cite this one[1] a single tree converts about 50 lbs of CO2 in a year. There are three trees on my property, a city tree (planted by the city) and two Birch trees planed by the original developer. All are deciduous so lose leaves in the winter but we'll give them full credit anyway, so call it 150 lbs of CO2 a year.
My rooftop solar system nominally puts out 5.2 kW of power under full sunlight, although efficiencies cut that down to around 4.8 kW net into the grid. I have over 10 years of data from the system, drilled down though it averages out to about 4.5 "solar hours" per day with an average daily output of about 22 kWH per day or about 8 MWH per year.
The US Energy Information Association (EIA) tracks a number of statistics, but the one that is most relevant is the number of metric tons of CO2 per MWH per state. You can see California's number in this report : https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/california/ is 474 lbs per MWH.
Using that number, my rooftop solar system "saves" (which is to say doesn't generate) about 3,792 lbs of CO2 a year. Which, is way more than the 150 lbs a year the trees are taking out of the air. This is why the 1.2T trees, or 160 per person, is such a large number. A family of four would need to plan 640 trees on their lot, which would remove 32,000 lbs of CO2, which is a lot. To match my solar panels I would need to plant an additional 76 trees.
What you can take away from that is that solar panels in places where you can't put trees are a solid alternative. And planting trees rather than letting unused land sit idle as a field of grass is also a good plan. As a home owner, solar, even in places where it won't generate all your energy needs, will help cut CO2 emissions.
Good reasoning! I agree with the basic premise - but I don't think you can ignore the CO2 cost to make a solar panel, vs to use one. A tree reduces CO2 as it's being 'built'. A solar panel requires many materials that are refined through various industrial processes - likely some of which produce CO2 - not withstanding the transportation CO2 cost. That all being said, I don't mean to disparage anyone who uses solar panels - and if you already have them (sunk cost) - less trees seems about right, to reduce carbon footprint.
Depends on whether or not you believe NREL, to wit:
An average U.S. household uses 830 kilowatt-hours of electricity per month. On average,producing 1000 kWh of electricity with solar power reduces emissions by nearly 8 pounds ofsulfur dioxide, 5 pounds of nitrogen oxides, and more than 1,400 pounds of carbon dioxide.During its projected 28 years of clean energy production, a rooftop system with 2-year paybackand meeting half of a household’s electricity use would avoid conventional electrical plantemissions of more than half a ton of sulfur dioxide, one-third a ton of nitrogen oxides, and 100tons of carbon dioxide. PV is clearly a wise energy investment with great environmental benefits! -- https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy99osti/24619.pdf
The CO2 cost to make a panel has to be much less than the amount saved by using the panel for a shortish while, because making CO2 isn't free, and would figure into the price of the panel.
Of course, this reasoning is limited to carbon effects only. There are other important ecological concerns that trees might address that solar would not.
That’s pretty trivial to prove. Grid tied systems sell excess electricity back at bulk rates, at least in some states, which means that the solar panels are producing more electricity than the home needs for cooling. Thus such a house is actually spending negative carbon on cooling, since they’re providing green energy for their neighbors.
A shade tree can reduce your need for electricity, but it can’t turn you into a net producer.
Depending on the tree(s), it could be consuming CO2 24 hours a day, year round, solar is just part of the day and only reaches capacity for a brief moment. I don't know the numbers to show the difference. That is why I asked for some facts which the OP seems to know.
A single average fully grown tree can sequester about 88lbs of CO2 per year according to the Center for Urban Forest Research, which is part of the US Forest Service. The average electricity service in the US produces about 1lb of CO2 per kWh, meaning that your solar panel needs to reduce your consumption by only 88 kWh per year below what your shaded house cost would be to be a net positive over a shade tree.
Don't quote me on this but from memory a tree is able to sequester a lot more in the first couple of years than as a fully grown tree. Intuitively that makes sense.
Yes, that is true. The carbon sequestration is greatest when the tree is turning CO2 into more tree (e.g. when it’s growing). This process largely stops as a tree hits maturity, and the CO2 is mostly returned when the tree burns or rots.
I’m making the explicit assumption that a shade tree will probably be fully grown.
Trees don't really continuously "consume" CO2 in this manner. The only CO2 removed by a tree is the carbon that ends up permanently Incorporated in the wood itself.
And if you burn that wood, it's all released back into the air. Even if it just dies and decays, some of it ends up being released.
Rather than sequestering all this carbon into wood and then trying to figure out what to do with the wood so that it doesn't decompose over time and release the CO2 back into the air, it'd make more sense to stop digging up lots of carbon from underground (where it's been stable for hundreds of millions of years in the form of coal and oil) and burning it to release the CO2 into the air.
We already have amazing reserves of CO2, and we're digging them up and releasing them by burning them! Trees are just a tiny band-aid on top of this massive harm we're self-inflicting.
We can and should, but there's more impact to be had from ceasing to dig up the buried carbon and burning it. That's the equivalent of not punching holes in the hull, whereas planting trees is like bailing out the boat -- you'd rather it just didn't leak!
Trees consume CO2 because it's part of photosynthesis, so that's actually on the same schedule as a solar panel's electricity production. At night they're actually continuing to release some of that CO2.
...an individual leaf might be peak out at 3% efficient, but it is operating just a portion of the year (maybe about a third to a half at full performance) and also much light gets reflected, absorbed by branches, or misses the leaves entirely.
Additionally, photovoltaics peak at 40% efficiency but get about 15-20% efficiency typically and can function the entire year (unless fully covered by snow). And they're displacing electricity produced primarily from fossil fuels which are burned at 30-40% efficiency.
Now from a top-down perspective: forests (in this case calculated by replacing cropland with forests) are estimated to sequester about 2 to 10 tons of CO2 per acre per year. https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R40562.pdf
In principle, an acre of about 40% solar photovoltaic system with a 25% capacity factor could produce about 3.5GWh per year. But typically, about exactly one tenth that is done in practice: 0.35GWh/year/acre.
Since you'd be displacing electricity from the US grid, which is currently about 420 grams of CO2 per kWh (based on my calculations of the most recent eia.gov figures, but you can find similar figures by Googling), that's equivalent to 147 metric tons of CO2 per acre per year for typical photovoltaics (and over 1000 metric tons per acre per year in the idealized case).
So absolutely, it's better to use solar panels than trees, at least until the grid is fully or nearly-fully saturated by solar.
...BUT once we fully clean the grid, trees have some advantages:
1) they efficiently suck CO2 out of the air and store it, not just produce the energy. That means you can actually draw-down CO2, producing negative emissions.
2) They're scalable. A tree is like a solar farm, CO2 direct air absorption system, and a chemical factory but can be planted as just a seed. It may not be "efficient", but being self-replicating and scalable is pretty powerful.
That's awesome, this definitely helps. And if you don't own a house you can also take part on this by offsetting your emissions buying Forest Carbon Credits. At Pachama (YC W19) (Pachama.com) we're working to make it easier, cheaper and more reliable to certify and monitor carbon credits from Forest Projects, and then to make it easier for anyone to buy those credits.
We're also hiring!
In my native Sweden (where it can be quite sunny in summer but not so much in winter) there is a concept of a "care tree", living up close to the manor of a yard of farm. [0] (link in Swedish, sorry, perhaps try Translate)
I am now living in Monrovia, Liberia, where you will often find large trees for shade, often mango, sometimes moringa or coconut. There's also a bougainvillea shading a bench in every village between Monrovia and Yekepa. :-)
Edit: I also want to mention the concept of agroforestry [1], a part of permaculture agricultural design principles, where trees (often fruit bearing) are used with lower vegetation, shrubbery and crops, creating a food forest. Incidentally, this is what farms often look like in West Africa, with coconut, banana, cocoa, papaya, cassava, etc growing intermingled on the farmland.
Anywhere but super extreme latitudes? I'd never heard the concept spelled out like that, but I've seen / heard many instances. Basically any non-fruit tree which isn't kept at shrub / hedge size is at least in part intended for shade. Hell, it's also not uncommon for some fruit trees (I usually see walnuts and chestnuts as shade trees with the useful side-effect of nuts).
Where do you live where shade trees are not a thing? Genuinely curious. I've never known someone that didn't know what they were.
I live in Michigan and have four large trees surrounding the house, although we let their branches hang over the house, so 3 or so hours around noon, the house gets no shade.
There are essentially none where I live in SoCal (which actually bothers me a lot, because of how short-sighted it is but also because I grew up in the midwest and I genuinely miss having trees around). Most of the newer developments that I see and giant sections of LA and Orange county where I spend some time are little more than a sea of asphalt. There are trees in parks, of course, but they're more like decorations than something that serves a function.
Semi-arid region here, it can be 95 degrees out and you fry in the sun like an egg, but under a shady tree it can be comfy & breezy. Shade trees are extremely valuable here.
Although not everyone is onboard. To be sure, there are still drab boxy houses with nothing but lawn that run their sprinklers every morning and the A/C all day. Preferable to spending two hours a year raking up leaves in fall, I'm told.
This is total non-sense. There are so many deserted areas in the US and all over the planet -where radiance is actually a lot higher- where to install solar panels.
Transmission losses are not negligible, so power generation generally needs to be near people.
If the power could be used to create and concentrate ammonia, much of needed generation could be shifted to farms. Of course farms have other uses for sunlight, so wind is a better choice there.
Generating ammonia with wind power eliminates the problem of intermittent availability. You only produce ammonia when there is power for it.
Making your transmission line a lot longer doesn't scale your losses by that much surprisingly. The main transmission losses are at the conversion points and in the utility voltage cabling at the end, having long distance interconnects really only loses a percent or two over having short ones.
That's just a very naive simplification of a huge branch of electrical engineering.
To have low power losses in long distances, you use high voltage. The higher the voltage, the bigger (and more expensive) the "conversion points" need to be. Power losses will also be bigger.
To simplify greatly, having low-loss transmission lines costs more money, more equipment, more investment, more time. That's why it makes more sense to build the power source closer instead.
>That's just a very naive simplification of a huge branch of electrical engineering.
Anything I am going to squeeze into a comment on hacker news regarding the subject is likely to be. So are you against the concept of continent wide grids and transmitting power long distance from sparsely populated equatorial desert regions to the more populous temperate ones?
Your objection has merit, but this discussion seems to be focused on "what should we do going forward". While we currently suck at good & economical long distance transmission, this hardly seems to be based on physical limitations. Thus, if it is a worthy goal, we can & should guide our economies towards mastering that tech and driving prices down, kind of like we did with e.g. solar panels.
Regarding RI, your article is by no means the full picture nor clear support for your over-claim.
1) The biggest solar farm we're vying for here in RI is going to be in a disused industrial zone, not in a forest.
2) The article you linked is mostly about protecting forests proactively, not about a specific project and how it cleared the forests.
3) Speaking as one who drives the state constantly, there is actually very little utility scale solar. It's mostly turbines, there is solar here and there but it's usually adjacent to roads or structures or on rooftops, we have very few large solar farms due to our higher focus on wind and energy efficiency.
Overall, you're over-reaching with the RI claim that we're clearing forest for solar farms, as I've been local for decades and seen no evidence of that.
Except for those two huge externalities that are never priced in and always overlooked by people who say nuclear is 'clean': the waste that will remain toxic for a very long time, and the risk of accidents (slim, but the consequences are really, really, really bad).
The waste that is very toxic is short-lived. The waste that is very long-lived isn't very toxic. That's how half-life works.
As for risk of accidents - nuclear is responsible for less deaths per MWh produced than coal, including all the accidents (Chernobyl and Fukushima too).
Coal powerplants also put more radioactive elements in the air than nuclear powerplants (including all accidents). And it's not "risk" in coal powerplants, it's their normal operation as designed.
Nuclear powerplants is the easiest way to replace baseload, and by insisting on not using it we increase the amount of radioactive elements in air, the deaths, and the CO2 emissions (because you can't replace most baseload with solar/wind - so if not nuclear it's coal/gas).
“Using historical electricity production data and mortality and emission factors from the peer-reviewed scientific literature, we found that despite the three major nuclear accidents the world has experienced, nuclear power prevented an average of over 1.8 million net deaths worldwide between 1971-2009 (see Fig. 1). This amounts to at least hundreds and more likely thousands of times more deaths than it caused. An average of 76,000 deaths per year were avoided annually between 2000-2009 (see Fig. 2), with a range of 19,000-300,000 per year.”
That's just comparing them with coal to sound great.
The three major nuclear accidents do not represent the worst which nuclear plants are capable of. For example we have yet to see what can happen if a nuclear plant is sabotaged - that's not FUD its a real vulnerably of the technology and is a reason why they incur constant exceptional security as well as safety costs. They consume alot of water resource as well, for cooling.
Thankfully its an academic debate now anyway, because solar and wind prices are already much cheaper with no end to their continued improvement in sight.
> For example we have yet to see what can happen if a nuclear plant is sabotaged - that's not FUD
That's FUD. What are you proposing is going to happen that would be worse? You can't get a nuclear explosion; the fuel isn't weapons grade. You can get a meltdown and a hydrogen explosion, but that is what happened at Chernobyl. It leaves behind a hot mess and a large cleanup bill but hardly anybody dies. Especially if you're not an obtuse Soviet bureaucracy that dispatches ordinary firefighters to deal with it without adequate training or equipment.
> They consume alot of water resource as well, for cooling.
Water isn't "consumed", it starts off as H2O and ends up that way. It evaporates and then condenses again somewhere downwind.
The soviet response to Chernobyl was in many respects phenomenal. They mobilized hundreds of thousands of people to risk their lives to mitigate it.
One effort that stands out as "preventing something much worse" is that there was a risk of a potentially larger secondary explosion from steam buildup. They tunneled under the reactor and injected ~25 tons of liquid nitrogen a day (the tunnel started 6 days after the explosion, and was functional 8 days after the explosion). They had people risk/give their lives swimming in to close valves and pumping water out. Dates from here: http://www.chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/timeline/
There were personal heroics but the Soviet response was a catastrophe, it was Sweden that sounded the alarm and the Soviets allowed a May Day parade of children to march through the cloud in Kiev...
"For 36 hours after the explosion, people were given no reliable information about it and left virtually on their own. They never received instructions on how to protect themselves and their children. Radiation levels that according to Soviet laws were supposed to trigger an automatic public warning about the dangers of radiation exposure had already been recorded in the early hours of April 26—but were ignored by one official after another. Finally, people were asked to gather their belongings and wait on the street..."
https://www.history.com/news/chernobyl-disaster-coverup
> One effort that stands out as "preventing something much worse" is that there was a risk of a potentially larger secondary explosion from steam buildup.
A larger conventional explosion would have been linearly worse, not worse rising to a separate category of problem.
> Also, you can absolutely get a nuclear explosion from a reactor, there is some suggestion that Chernobyl might have been a small one in fact (paper)
This is not what I'm referring to. It's one thing to have a "nuclear explosion" in the sense that the reaction generates enough heat to cause the rapid expansion of gasses which is technically an "explosion".
What I'm referring to is the sort of exponential chain reaction that happens in a nuclear weapon, resulting in something on that scale. You have to design for that on purpose to get it. The density and geometry has to be exactly right.
"What are you proposing is going to happen that would be worse?"
No offense but if you can't see how Chernobyl or Fukushima could have turned out worse, or that unexpected accidents in other locations could happen and could be worse, you don't understand nuclear power. Its problematic because I expect you have read plenty on it in order to want to defend it in a topic about aforestation.
"Water isn't consumed"
Water resource is consumed, sure it rains again - often far away and into the sea. Fresh water resources are scarce and under pressure in many places, ancient aquifers are drying out, particularly in the US.
> No offense but if you can't see how Chernobyl or Fukushima could have turned out worse, or that unexpected accidents in other locations could happen and could be worse, you don't understand nuclear power.
I can't help but notice the lack of specific examples or explanations of any kind.
> Water resource is consumed, sure it rains again - often far away and into the sea. Fresh water resources are scarce and under pressure in many places, ancient aquifers are drying out, particularly in the US.
Ancient aquifers are drying out as a result of unsustainable resource management and climate change. Nuclear power helps with both of these, the first by providing power for desalination and the second by reducing carbon emissions. The amount of water it evaporates for cooling by comparison is a drop in the bucket. Also, the cooling can be done with seawater to begin with.
"I can't help but notice the lack of specific examples or explanations of any kind"
Because its so simple as saying, "the wind COULD have blown the fukushima fallout southwards over Tokyo instead of relatively promptly into the Pacific." A nuclear accident COULD deliver fallout to a highly populated area that cant be evacuated in time. A nuclear accident COULD generate much more fallout than Fukushima or Chernobyl. How can one understand the technology, and challenge the reality of such risks of nuclear power plants? Pretending that its been as bad as it might have been and as it could be - like a dangerous driver saying "its fine - I've only ever hit a tree!"
re: desalination - fine then, add the cost of desalinating salt water to replace the increasingly scarce resource that nuclear plants evaporate, to their already uncompetitive cost.
To add to your examples, there was the very real possibility with Fukushima that Tokyo would have had to be evacuated. This was seriously considered at the highest levels of the Japanese government (i.e. the PM and cabinet):
> The 400-page report, due to be released later this week, also describes a darkening mood at the prime minister’s residence as a series of hydrogen explosions rocked the plant on March 14 and 15. It says Mr. Kan and other officials began discussing a worst-case outcome if workers at the Fukushima Daiichi plant were evacuated. This would have allowed the plant to spiral out of control, releasing even larger amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere that would in turn force the evacuation of other nearby nuclear plants, causing further meltdowns.
> The report quotes the chief cabinet secretary at the time, Yukio Edano, as having warned that such a “demonic chain reaction” of plant meltdowns could result in the evacuation of Tokyo, 150 miles to the south.
> “We would lose Fukushima Daini, then we would lose Tokai,” Mr. Edano is quoted as saying, naming two other nuclear plants. “If that happened, it was only logical to conclude that we would also lose Tokyo itself.”
> Because its so simple as saying, "the wind COULD have blown the fukushima fallout southwards over Tokyo instead of relatively promptly into the Pacific." A nuclear accident COULD deliver fallout to a highly populated area that cant be evacuated in time.
So the thing that actually happened with Chernobyl then, not something significantly worse than that.
> re: desalination - fine then, add the cost of desalinating salt water to replace the increasingly scarce resource that nuclear plants evaporate, to their already uncompetitive cost.
Evaporating the water is how you desalinate it. It starts as seawater, it evaporates, you recondense it as fresh water. The equipment needed to do that costs less than the value of the water; the major expense is generating the heat which you're already doing for power generation. So I guess we could subtract the net profits from producing that valuable side product from the cost of the power generation, sure.
Do we then get to add the costs of climate change to the cost of burning coal, or are we only attempting accurate accounting for nuclear and not anything else?
Normal operation of coal powerplants is more dangerous than the worst accidents we had with nuclear powerplants.
Modern nuclear powerplants are much safer than these that had accidents.
Yes you have to include the possibility of new accidents - being sabotaged or not. But that possibility needs to be weighed with the probability of it. And it's very low.
Meanwhile we completely ignore the 100% sure deaths and radiation caused by coal powerplants. Because we're used to it.
BTW sabotaging hydro powerplants can kill hundreds of thousands of people at once. And it's much easier than sabotaging a nuclear powerplant. Get one diver with a swimsuit and give him some TNT.
Somehow I haven't seen this used as a counterargument to renewable energy :)
For all the stretched comparisons about how safe nuclear can be, the technology is a liability which requires great care and expense to keep secure and safe.
Its promotion was competing with and obstructing the promotion of renewables for over a decade past, but its moot now that in the past couple of years the price performance of renewables has become unassailable. There's no point promoting nuclear anymore and arguing about how safe nuclear has been or could be - its more expensive already than wind and solar, materially, environmentally, security-wise and economically. Wind and solar are still on a rapid improvement curve. Nuclear powered heat plants are not futuristic generation options, they're relics from the nuclear arms race.
Yes you have to include the possibility of new accidents - being sabotaged or not. But that possibility needs to be weighed with the probability of it. And it's very low.
This is not a case of of risk but uncertainty - very different strategies apply here.
Thankfully its an academic debate now anyway, because solar and wind prices are already much cheaper with no end to their continued improvement in sight.
Has large scale energy storage been solved? I know there are a number of ways to do grid-scale storage, but are any of them scalable enough to power the entire country from solar and wind? Especially if another "storm of the century" (which seem to be happening more frequently now) reduces solar/wind output from a significant portion of the country so you need to draw deep into storage reserves.
There are numerous technologies which can currently provide large scale energy storage at cost which is currently competitive in many situations and due to drop rapidly once they are actually required and built in quantity. To mention a few: flow batteries, hydrogen production and generation, carbon neutral biomass fuel, heat storage and conversion batteries including molten salt, enhancement of existing hydro schemes, online EV fleet, active geothermal... besides you know if pushed, even the occasional emergency fossil fuel burn if unprepared. Nuclear plants are not known for their uptime during storms either.
>As for risk of accidents - nuclear is responsible for less deaths per MWh produced than coal, including all the accidents (Chernobyl and Fukushima too).
Even if it's true, it's like using "there are more deaths by vending machine per year by shark" to justify everyone swimming with sharks. Not saying that nuclear is inherently unsafe, but if 100% of our power came from nuclear, then so would 100% of the deaths per MWh.
Installing solar panels kills more people than nuclear ever has by orders of magnitude.
We have the tech to deal with nuclear waste, we’ve just never spent the money to productionalize it. Look into “sub-critical nuclear reactors”, which “burn” nuclear waste for even more electricity!
If you reprocess waste for potentially usable fuel, the amount of stuff that needs to be discarded is quite small. Like, we could probably put everything we've ever accumulated in the US in fly ash pond of an average coal plant, easily. Obviously that is a bad idea but just to give you an idea of the size of what's needed.
Also yes, I'm sure waste disposal is factored into nuclear plants. It's usually coal plants that get the free pass to spew radiation into the air, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths annually.
(note that there is a fair amount of low-level waste generated that tends to inflate the waste output figures... you need to do something with the wrenches and shoe covers and stuff that get some neutron activation, and there's a large volume of that stuff but it's nowhere near as dangerous as spent fuel.)
I’m pro nuclear power, but I also understand that politically and economically it’s a non starter. At this point in time it’s either solar (or wind) or natural gas. I’ll take the known local maximum over a global maximum that’s not feasible.
Studies on this are very valuable. The IPCC's AR5 advises this kind of action to be funded and analyzes different policy approaches to enable action.
There is no justification at skepticism and entertaining back-of-the-envelope gotchas about the climactic and environmental value of tree planting and enhanced forestry at this late stage. It needs to be supported !
" Reducing emissions from deforestation; reducing emissions from forest degradation; conservation of forest carbon stocks; sustainable management of forests; and enhancement of forest carbon stocks (REDD) consists of forest-related activities implemented voluntarily by developing countries that may, in isolation or jointly lead to significant climate change mitigation. REDD was introduced in the agenda of the UNFCCC in 2005, and has since evolved to an improved understanding of the potential positive and negative impacts, methodological issues, safeguards, and financial aspects associated with REDD implementation. " (page 865)
Not to be too snarky, but my first reaction to the headline was, “only 1.2 trillion? What are we waiting for!”
More seriously, though: the article claims there’s “ample acreage” for such an endeavor but I didn’t see where exactly they’re referring to. Are we supposed to imagine these are sprinkled here and there around the earth, and that there’s plenty of space just waiting for a tree to be planted, or is this something where we need to create or re-create vast forest lands for it to work?
The great plains have little vegetation on them, and take well to having trees planted on them. The trees in Kansas, for example, were planted by early settlers to break the wind, and have thrived.
(The historical reason trees were absent from the great plains was periodic fire.)
It seems incredibly practical to me. I've seen a quote for 40 dollars to plant a thousand trees. That's something like 50 billion to offset a decade of global warming? Doesn't sound so bad. Spread the cost out worldwide, 5 billion a year, split between a few big countries?
I don't think planting trees is the biggest issue. Access to water is. More practical solution would be to fill some desert with sea water and grow plankton, kelp etc.
I recently saw a video about doing this - apparently the desert is actually a really bad option if we want to combat climate change - the core problem is that the desert currently reflects a lot of light from the sun. If we cover it with forest or whatever, then suddenly we adjust the albedo of the earth and absorb more heat, negating some of the impact. Combined with the energy need to pump (and desalinate for trees - your suggestion of kelp would presumably help there) water, etc... make it not really work.
I assume trees are good at trapping the energy from sunlight + combining it with c02 and water to produce carbon, oxygen and more water.
So planting trees in deserts with somewhat decent access to underground water tables should help cool the planet and create a great renewable resource right?
I don't think planting trees is considered to be the unquestionably most practical solution. But it's a simple solution that people can do on their own, and it has a lot of other side benefits like habitat, shade, & proven health benefits in humans.
That’s the price of the seeds though. The cost of finding the land, digging holes, planting seeds and watering them to sustainable growth would be much higher.
Honestly if HN knows any charities focused on tree planting, let me know. Happy to donate 1k-ish if it puts 10k trees to our family’s name.
Presumably these would be some of the cheapest trees to plant. When that space is used up but the first few billion trees, where will the next billion go? How much will that cost?
The cost of global warming and the benefits we've reaped from its cause (cheap power) are both a significant fraction of world GDP. Planting 160 trees per person would be cheap, and even easily do-able by an individual in a few weekends (though it's obviously way more efficient to hire specialists to do it en mass).
The total suitable land area needed (more than the area of the USA, by my estimate) is much more likely to be the limiting factor than the per-person difficulty.
I dislike the US prison system but perhaps we could use prisoners to do it. They could plant hundreds If not thousands within a sentence and one day return to visit the forest they planted.
Inmates already volunteer to do forestry work including firefighting. This has been going on for decades and isn't all that controversial. Expanding to planting trees shouldn't be too difficult.
Well, we have better means for automation now. But I'm just fascinated how quickly that solution pops up in such discussions as soon as it's convenient.
I like how we instinctively characterize prisoners as slaves. Seems like it trivializes actual slavery, but I have been out of school for awhile, so the conventional wisdom is probably different now.
Traditionally, prison labor is considered distinct from slavery for the same reason that prison is considered distinct from kidnapping and forced confinement: that it reflects just punishment for which someone is duly convicted. Whether that actually applies to most people in prison today is certainly up for debate, but to tell you'd mostly need to look at the judicial system (or society at large), not at the work camp.
One could plant that many pine saplings in a weekend with good hand tools. Mechanize it, spread the cost amongst many, I believe it wouldn’t cost, relative to what it offsetting, all that much. Land acquisition would probably be the larger obstacle.
I once worked for a short spell in a tree-planting squad in the highlands of Scotland. The seasoned planters were olympically fit and each planted around 100 saplings an hour across rough mountainside.
How hard is it to plant a tree? Especially if it's young and there is very clear guidance as to which native trees should be planted in which contexts you have available to you locally (account for full size growth and sunlight / water needs).
If over one year everyone planted 3 trees per week, and we employed a work force of people to cultivate them further, we would make a huge dent in our catastrophic risk exposure? Sure, it's seemingly impractical alongside the status quo of land distribution and use ( $$$ into develop all the land and farm humans for rent!!), but... more green will be good for the health of nearly all the living things on Earth, and at the very least give us more time to find even better solutions.
It is not difficult but doing it without the right machinery requires back-breaking labor. It looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUzeruQT8xE I did it one full weekend and I was totally exhausted. Of course, there exists machines to do that, but then you can't have every person in the world chipping in.
But planting is just the first step. If you own a growing forest it needs to be culled periodically, meaning that you cut down the worst performing 10-20% of all trees.
That video is what you consider back-breaking? I planted ten trees on my property with a mattock & shovel over the course of two weeks, removing maybe fifty gallons of clay for each hole, and while it was hard I wouldn't describe it as back-breaking. You'd also adapt to it as you got stronger...
For comparison, in Sweden, Finland etc there is 5-10000 trees per capita already. Adding a 1000 more per head would be easy in terms of space. So that would cover say 100M people.
How many trees has been removed in total by deforestation?
Planting trees is a good thing, but at the same time there is deforestation. The deforestation must also stop.
"Scientific research has shown that there were once six trillion trees on our planet, and now there are around three trillion left.[1] Human activity was the main driving force for this decrease and humans can, therefore, be the main driving force in increasing it again!"
source: Trillion Trees Three major international conservation organizations – the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the World Wide Fund for Nature - UK (WWF-UK) and BirdLife International (BLI)
We probably also need to remake the economic system what parameters it optimise's for, so that it does not focus on exponential economic output growth as that will drive exponential energy consumption. Reasoning, the planet is already literally on fire due to global warming, why put more fuel on the fire?
Under a business-as-usual climate scenario our model suggests that warming would drive the loss of ~55 gigatons of carbon from the upper soil horizons by 2050. This value is around 12–17 per cent of the expected anthropogenic emissions over this period.
You have wildly mistaken the plain meaning of that statement. They declare their model suggests global warming will drive the loss of carbon from soils - not Trees, or aforestation programs.
That’s a really good point also where water and irrigation is concerned hopefully that would be done in the most sustainable way possible. The idea of “offsets” unfortunately has been given a bad name politically due to unscrupulous actors. Really it could work if the public oversight was there in real time and all the facts on the table. Still, we are living in an age where efforts done “in everyone’s best interest” are a hard sell. We wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t easier to sell a pair of new shoes than clean air and water.
That’s a really good point also where water and irrigation is concerned hopefully that would be done in the most sustainable way possible.
I wonder how many of those 1.2T trees could be accomplished without starting huge new forests or in places that require irrigation.
There are cities in places with ample rain that already have 1,000's of vacant lots. Ten trees per vacant lot could start to make a big difference, if only regionally.
Maybe Americans should stop thinking of Arbor Day and the Arbor Day Foundation as quaint square leftovers from a past generation, and start thinking of them as a framework to save the planet.
Nor the emissions when those trees burn because they were planted in a place where waterbed can't support their density. This is happening in CA nearly every year.
Right, but if the point of planting the trees is carbon amelioration, than carbon neutral would somewhat defeat the point.
I've seen this argument before, and I think the real place it falls down is that there just isn't that much space. For mature growth forest, you have something like 40-ish big hardwood trees per acre [1]. Those are, to my understanding, the only ones that are really relevant because they make up most of the biomass. Other types of trees are just a rounding error. `1.2e12 / 40 acres -> square miles` (frink) is 4.7e7 square miles. That is more than the whole land area of Earth [2]. There is certainly not enough land that would support mature forests available to plant so many trees, unless I have made a serious calculation error.
That only holds true if you assume that every tree ever planted burns down within ten years. Many, possibly even most, of them will be harvested for wood, becoming a permanent carbon sink, or will be left alone to grow to maturity.
That in turn only works if you assume that wood never rots, burns, etc. I don't have any solid information on the annual growth in processed wood in existence, but I suspect that, to the extent it is increasing, this will gradually taper off as population growth slows. Now if you're saying we could bury the wood somewhere where it won't rot, well enough. That does seem feasible. But normally when I read stuff like this, people think just planting and leaving the trees will be sufficient. And it won't.
At any rate, if that's what the research is getting at, they probably need to title it differently, or explain early on that merely planting the trees is a necessary but not sufficient condition to achieve the wins they envision.
Planting is something we know really well how to automate, though. Planting is the most tractable problem in this (hypothetical) solution.
Also, more rain means more clouds, and this is something the current climate models can't really model accurately, believe it or not. There's not even "consensus" on whether clouds are beneficial or detrimental.
We'd probably have to sequester them somewhere anaerobic. Bottom of a deep-sea trench or underground. Which also reduces the net carbon footprint of the activity.
Not all of it, that's the point. Some pure carbon (charcoal) is left that makes good soil amendment. That carbon doesn't make it back to the atmosphere unless somehow burned.
I wonder if the eventual fate of most lumber is to be burned, on the scale of tens of decades (as buildings deteriorate, are remodeled and older bits thrown out). In which case you're just postponing the need to sequester anyway.
I think you have to consider what you're comparing against. Are we comparing to just not cutting trees down? Trees fall and decompose, while wood buildings can last for centuries. Admittedly building 300-year houses seems like a pretty different idea of construction than what we're doing now. So it comes down to how long you expect the building to last, but it's important to remember the carbon in trees will eventually be released into the atmosphere in any case.
But! It's also important to consider what timber houses would replace - concrete. Concrete is not very climate friendly. Throwing that into the equation, I'd be surprised if wood construction wasn't better for the environment than what we're doing now.
It doesn't need to be sequestered eternally, it just needs to be captured and sequestered at a faster rate than it's being produced (from fossil fuels and decay/burning of wood).
Where I live (Kitchener-Waterloo), there are a lot of old factories with heavy timber frames and solid hardwood floors. These factories have since been converted into nice condos and commercial properties, with all of that wood preserved intact. The old timber beams and hardwood floors are actually very nice now.
This makes me wonder - could trees be modified genetically to handle more CO2 in order to make this number lower? Could we, instead of trees, have huge walls made of plants that would consume our CO2?
I believe the Californian Redwoods are very good at this but one of their main disadvantages is they take forever to grow in their native climate.
Ironically, they grow much faster on the other side of the world (New Zealand) due to its wetter climate but the wood is not as hard due to this so they aren't useful in construction. Basically the ultimate carbon sync and useless for humans.
Would be trivial to put a hothouse over it for the first years to mimick the humid forest environment. Could act also as water collectors and a sort of fire barriers for stopping flying embers also. Metallic mesh dissipates hot.
An incredibly short sighted solution to an incredibly complex problem.
Trees have been around for a very, very long time; much longer than we have. Complex evolutionary forces have shaped trees and forests into their current robust configurations.
Trees are intimately connected with their ecosystems, and interact with their surroundings in both known and unknown ways. For example, it has been discovered recently that trees communicate with one another through chemical, hormonal and slow-pulsing electrical signals, including through the air, using pheromones and other scent signals [1][2]
Mother nature is complex. We do not have enough understanding of her complexity, and neither enough computational power to reliably model and subsequently change diverse ecosystems.
Plants try to minimize CO2 utilization becase it’s energy intensive. We could design something that stores more carbon, but with real tradeoffs as it would have less energy for other things.
And lots of land. Suppose you can plant them in say 4m rows with 4m separation, it would be approx 60K trees per 1km2 or 20million km2 in total. Twice of the size of the US?
Also when they are grown (30 years?) you could chop them, stack the wood or use it in some way that doesn't release the carbon and then grow another lot.
Indeed, we don't talk about the absolute numbers a lot but reportedly more than half of all CO2 emitted by human industrial activity has been released since 1988. So our current per-decade pace of emissions is truly colossal, historic, unprecedented, pick your term.
Y Combinator funded https://www.pachama.com/ in the batch of YC. They're building a marketplace of carbon credit to enable exactly this. They're hiring for engineering and operations in San Francisco right now https://angel.co/pachama/jobs
Just an aside, if you see campaigns such as "we have planted 2 trees for each widget you buy" you should understand that this is often in a forestry program where the new trees often get pruned or removed to make room. So a claim like "we planted 10k trees last year" doesnt mean much at all. the majority of trees planted in forestry do not survive. In terms of carbon a forestry program is neutral at best just replacing fallen trees and negative most of the time.
It's not the planting that counts, it's the leaving the trees alone.
I wonder if desert soil can be gradually converted to make the land fertile. That would definitely be helpful to convert a lot of land to plant trees which is currently of no particular use.
The soil is generally fine, the limiting factor is water. In Central Oregon's "Lake County" near where I live, 10-20k years ago was dense forest and thousands of deep clear water lakes. It's all desert now except for the "Lost Forest" near Christmas Valley. A fascinating enclave of ancient trees that somehow survive in the middle of the desert due to what is suspected to be an unusually shallow ground water system.
I’ve heard that a critical mass of trees can effectively generate their own moisture and counter desertification. No idea how this works or if it is true, but I’d love to be corrected and/or learn more.
You need light, water, micro and macronutrients in right amounts.
Desert greening is essentially question of water availability and reversing soil erosion but you may also need the nutrients.
There have been many attempts in desert greening and oasification but they are expensive and have not been very successful in large scale. It's much easier to create a desert than do the opposite.
The Sahara desert is already being reclaimed at a remarkable rate by the people living at its edge, just to get more farmland for themselves. The more trees you have, the more precipition is collected.
Many places we think of as ancient deserts were climax forests in historical times, such as Petra. It became desert when too many trees were cut.
You'll have to account for driving water to the desert. Desert soil is fine (for desert-aware trees), but trees like water, and large trees like lots of water. In my country, Australia-native Eucalyptus is doing well.
The Romans built aqueducts that spanned hundreds of miles and they did it thousands of years ago. Why do you assume that today water has to be 'driven' with trucks or something?
Whatever you do, if the target is reducing CO2 emission, you'll have to account for the CO2 investment. All I am saying is it may be more cost-effective to leave the desert alone and put our Trillion trees where conditions are already great for large trees (Alaska, NZ), instead of pipe-dreaming about Roman aqueducts delivering water to a green Sahara or Gobi.
If the US share is 10%, that amounts to planting 40,000 trees per square mile over 3 million square miles. That is a square grid of trees, every 26 feet in X and Y, over 80% of the US landmass. Say what?
One tree every 26 feet is barely anything. Every suburban yard could support that instead of grass, and more rural environments would simply have actual forests.
The should probably say 'most effective'. Yes not creating the problem in the first place would be the most powerful approach, but it's just not going to happen at least in the short to medium term. It would hit our standards of living (everybody's, including the poorest people on the planet) too much to be politically viable. The things we can do to reduce carbon emissions immediately are somewhat limited, but planting trees right now is comparatively easy.
It's a difficult endeavor. It involves greatly reducing human population, and both quick (war, massive deaths) and slow (fewer births than deaths) come each with their own set of issues.
My gut reaction to suggestions like this one is that it seems so hard to do stuff that is as geographically distributed as this. I mean, to plant a billion trees we need to find suitable locations that have an enormous area (twice the US per some comment here). The odds, I'm guessing, are that this will be spread among many/all the continents over multiple countries, involving so many local stakeholders and potential nimby/yimby-disputes.
In my mind a solution needs to be implementable in a meaningful way by single actors. I'm not sure about the state of the art of direct air carbon capture, but for me it seems like a much easier solution. "Just" push X billion/trillion USD into an enormous plant somewhere in a dessert with access to solar/nuclear power and suck it up.
Maybe negative emission solutions will turn out to be not feasible anyways, and the best we can do is to focus our efforts on reaching close to zero new emissions.
The problem with a push-button solution like you describe is that anyone trying it would be fighting an exponential growth curve. Economic growth remains closely correlated with increased demand for energy. Any solution that doesn't address the consumption side of the equation will run into a brick wall sooner or later.
At the current rate of growth, we're not that far from directly producing more heat than the earth can radiate into space.
At this scale I think is where you must use distributed actors, which in turn implies you should be using economics. Name a price for each tree, establish quality control (inspection, approved list of species, etc) and let the billions of people on the planet figure the rest out.
While I certainly wish your view becomes the reality, in my mind, this problem is far too large for any single actor to ameliorate. I also worry that we are holding out for the best solution while ignoring decent solutions that could reduce the issue (perfect is the enemy of the good).
If there are seven times more trees than previously thought, as per the article, and 1.2 trillion would have this effect, then what effect does that have on climate models which counted sequestration by trees?
After reading a ton about genetics I wonder if it’s possible to modify one of our existing tree species to make them a better store of carbon without destroying wildlife habitats.
Entertain my thoughts: Suppose you could have a tree X. It grows fast, is very water efficient and better at trapping sunlight and C02 than existing specifies. It’s wood grows straight and makes a great building material. We could plant billions of it in semi-deserts and it would terraform the land into a livable habitat.
Basically the promise is rather than planting trillions of trees, can we plant billions of 1000x efficient trees in places where current trees don’t exist.
Until those trees die, then its all back again. Trees are just a buffer, and how much co2 would be produced mobilizing the planet to plant 1.2 trillion trees?
Not necessarily. As other posters in this discussion point out, you can for instance create biochar from trees, which can be permanently planted in the ground, thus finally returning in the place of origin the carbon we earlier dug out in the form of oil and natural gas.
but biochar requieres high temperatures, which usually produces co2...
The problem with all this CO2 Storage is that we have a perfect storage for co2: Oil.
Since we burn this storage, we release more and more of that CO2 without anyway to put it back to storage.
The tree idea can maybe slow down the climate change, but it is in no way a solution, merely a short stopgap.
Biochar can be produced (and is) by burning off the hydrogen. This is done by restricting oxygen availability, which the hydrogen preferentially bonds with. When the hydrogen is used up, you are left with charcoal, which powdered and mixed into the soil improves it wonderfully.
Look up "terra nigra", invented in the Amazon basin.
Or they seed out (or are replaced by humans). A forest can hold carbon for as long as it is allowed to propagate. There is no permanent carbon sink, see peat bog fires.
There used to be this series about "guerilla gardening" where people would throw all kinds of seeds in an urban area and weeks later it would be over-run with beautiful flowers. You could do the same thing to plant trees with a drone and even water them. Throw in some IOT sensors and incentives, and you've got yourself a crap coin for tree drones that might actually help the environment.
anyone got any other suggestions for organizations to donate to to get trees planted fast ? Because I love trees regardless of whether they going to help save our home planet
One analysis I read some time back claimed that Trees are net positive when they are closer to equator, IIRC 30deg each way. fortunately for this topic, the areas close to equator are also significantly poorer countries thereby maximizing the roi of a fixed dollar expense.
Overall I believe that if a functioning carbon credit marketplace is established we can fund the whole green movement with a fraction of world GDP and might even end up creating a whole bunch of jobs doing it.
Why do you suppose that is the case? Is the cost per tree too great? Are you pessimistic about lowering that cost via automation? I read recently about drones that can drop large numbers of pods containing fertilizer and seeds over a huge area in little time; it doesn’t seem infeasible to iterate on a concept like that and drive down the costs considerably.
An interesting idea I had. Obviously it’s destructive but maybe still a net win?
Go through every forest on earth and cut down every third tree and sequester it so it won’t decompose and release the carbon. Then the forest rengerates itself and pulls all that carbon out of the atmosphere.
Or an idea for a billionaire. Buy out the entire worlds annual output of lumber and sequester it.
The tree grows anyway, plausibly at a faster rate than a small one (slower proportionally,but more in absolute volume) while keeping the existing volume sequestered, so cutting it down does not seem effective.
You could dump vegetables or corn in a hole though, but I've read that's not a cost effective solution either.
The great thing about a million nay-sayers is they tend to drown by each other out. Almost all unintended consequences or downsides will play out, but in a Darwinian sense what remains will be the tractable part. Trillions of plantings will only leave behind hundreds of billions of trees but also millions of jobs and effective enriched lives and for every damaged water table depleted another will be renewed and remediated. The downside of inaction is staying depressed about a solvable problem. The downside of acting is dying on your feet not on your knees. The far more likely upside is succeeding in some places and learning everywhere.
I'm tired of the jeremiad of gloom from Eeyore. Boastful optimism is tiring too, but somewhere in-between is a nice place. Can we have some realism tempered optimism in our kids ability to un-fuck-up the last 100 years? Please?
Even though planting trees seems like an overall good idea (and I certainly believe so), I recall a recent article where scientists debated whether planting trees will have any impact.
> Several analyses in the past few years suggest that these warming effects from forests could partially or fully offset their cooling ability.
What's consoling is that at least planting trees is unlikely to harm (although rapid tree plantation will certainly send ripples in the complex, inter-connected ecological chains).
In Brazil the deforestation in mostly for agricultural active and live stock. I'm curious to know how much the land would have to cost so the country made as much tax with the planted land as with other activities.
An easy way to contribute to tree planting is ecosia.org (more info at info.ecosia.org). We've already planted more than 55 million trees and won't be stopping there.
I guess it depends on the location. Some have cattle and deforestation. Natural reseeding can be slow. Though in England if you leave a bit of land alone it'll pretty much be woodland in 30 years or so.
If anyone fancies donating to plant a few 100 or 1000 trees https://donate.trees.org/campaign/trees-for-the-futures-eart... does good stuff for about 15c/tree. It doesn't take very much to cancel out your personal CO2 load that way. I donated I think $100 for 1000 trees a while back.
I made some rough calculations yesterday and user strainer corrected me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19701879 It would seem that even with his corrections and this article's data capturing carbon isn't feasible. 1.2T trees increases earth's forestation by 40% but only nets us 10 years of emissions. It seems very inefficient in relation to trying to reduce emissions.
Then we have Teslas saving us:
( (250,000-50,000) miles * 1 gallon per 25 miles * 20 lbs per gallon)/$15,000 = 10 pounds of CO2 saved per dollar spent on Teslas, compared to 4,000 pounds of CO2 saved per dollar spent on planting trees.
This is why I associate myself with climate skeptics despite their negative reputation. An economic analysis of climate change seems to suggest that the world will be worse off with climate change mitigation, as it's currently being practiced, than with climate change itself.
Edit: It's actually quite interesting to see that your username resembles the name of Bjorne Lomborg, a famous scientist who often makes arguments about the economics of climate change and comes to similar conclusions as I do.
There could be an even cheaper scheme for climate change mitigation that we haven't thought of (like stimulating plankton growth with iron, for instance).
And it's actually possible that the total cost of allowing climate change to progress unmitigated may actually be cheaper than 50 cents per ton of CO2; creating more fertilizer for farmland and building seawalls may become cheaper 100 years from now than the future growth-adjusted value of the proposed carbon-based tax credits.
Another way to know your number is wrong is to consider the fact that the US emits ~5.5 gigatons of CO2 per year. If it cost only $1 a ton to sequester that then the total cost would only be only 5.5 billion dollars a year.
That's....not very much at all. Global warming wouldn't be a problem if Jeff Bezos could fix it by himself.
Feel free to point out where my math is wrong, or what any of the numbers should be. I show my math work in the blog article I linked to. I would be happy to make any corrections.
I hope this is the American version of a trillion and not the British.. googles how many billions are in a trillion and got back
“In the American system one billion is 1,000,000,000 and a trillion is 1,000,000,000,000 so one trillion is one thousand times one billion. In the British system one billion is 1,000,000,000,000 and one trillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 so one trillion is one million times one billion.”
“In British English, a billion used to be equivalent to a million million (i.e. 1,000,000,000,000), while in American English it has always equated to a thousand million (i.e. 1,000,000,000). British English has now adopted the American figure, though, so that a billion equals a thousand million in both varieties of English.
The same sort of change has taken place with the meaning of trillion. In British English, a trillion used to mean a million million million (i.e. 1,000,000,000,000,000,000). Nowadays, it's generally held to be equivalent to a million million (1,000,000,000,000), as it is in American English.”
So, to plant this many trees, you need Gene modification. The tree sapplings have to be toxic to sheep, heat & dry resistant, and they need to be non harvest able. You need to engieer a plant that is economically uninteresting for humans. Then distribute it via drones to the post human desolation.
You can't engineer anything to be immune to exploitation except for laws. Genetic modification is absolutely the wrong message to send for this purpose anyway, if you want to get it done fast. We only have a decade or two in which to do this. We go to war with the trees we have. Genetic modification for this purpose will make clonal populations that are more susceptible to disease, requires much more research and regulation, and makes many more problems than it solves.
Planting ecologically native trees back into their native land is the best way to minimize unintended consequences and just get this done.
Bad news the native lands are gone. Gone is the little layer of topsoil, gone the biome. And your laws fix it only where poverty is not so bad it constantly subverts all laws. In other words your approach is a reality blind first world approach, destined to fail the moment it runs out of money support fashion and sb pulls the ic-plug on the project. Mine is about rolling with the punshes, fast forwarding inevitable evolution. Bamboo comes to mind. Now that is a forrest which will survive us.
They are 0.35% of the world population, and that's 0.08% of the 1.2 trillion trees, so they're actually within an order of magnitude. And in their defense they have no water.
You don't cure cancer taking painkillers. You should both go after the symptoms (if they are bad enough at least, that they are now) and the root cause, because if you don't solve the real disease the symptom mitigations will be shortlived, as the patient.
a little extra runway on solving the problem is sorely needed. i agree that we shouldn't get addicted to this short term solution, but if it buys us a few extra decades, that would be a huge accomplishment.
For reference, there’s about 500 trillion square meters of land area on the planet; so even if trees are crowded together one per square meter, this is talking about a 500th of that.
But perhaps we can find a way to make the Sahara into a forest? That’s about what it would take.
I wish the government gives money or tax credit to home owners for planting trees, like X amount for first year and a little bit more every year for the next 5 years, instead of the punitive approach some cities taking now.
This is one global-scale geoengineering project I can rally get behind. It has the smallest chance of catastrophic second-order effects of any of the several methods I've heard of.
I wonder how increasing the forestation of the planet by 40% would affect the planet's average albedo, and by extension the solar thermal energy retention.
To put the number in perspective, that's a 40% increase in the estimated number of trees worldwide. That's a positively enormous increase, and would--by necessity--in large part be planted on and around existing agricultural land. That comes with a host of significant opportunity costs; just to start, population increases are projected to require a ~70% increase in food production from 2005 to 2050[0]. While there's a great deal of progress being made in improved agricultural efficiency and food waste reduction that will help lessen the environmental impacts of that increase, land for food production is still likely to directly compete with biomass plantations for carbon removal.
There are also recent studies that highlight some of the potential environmental impacts of large-scale terrestrial carbon removal as a primary mechanism for reversing the effects of climate change. Optimizing for sequestration means converting the most productive agricultural land or using even more natural land, devastating either food production or natural ecosystems,[1] in addition to drawing heavily on water resources and fertilizers on a massive scale, risking other planetary boundaries.[2] The more realistic scenarios risk both, albeit to less catastrophic degrees, but do so by decreasing potential sequestration and limiting its effects on global temperatures. Put a bit glibly, it's jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.
That's not to say that it isn't part of the solution. It is, as the first paper explicitly states in its conclusion, and "can significantly contribute as a “supporting actor” of the mitigation protagonist, if it gets started and deployed immediately." But it won't be a primary mechanism, nor will it reach anywhere near 1.2 trillion trees. Even the more limited "pertinent options available now, which include reforestation of degraded land and the protection of degraded forests to allow them to recover naturally and increase their carbon storage" need to be priorities.
Other geoengineering proposals, such as possible solar radiation management techniques, might extend the period during which we can use tCDR and other carbon removal mechanisms to mitigate past emissions beyond just slowing the rate of temperature increase. But without drastic emissions reductions in the immediate future, all of those possible options become more difficult, with even more deleterious consequences. Not to mention more expensive.
In other words, there's no easy or even optimal answer. Assuming, of course, that 1.2 trillion trees can be considered "easy."
> More pressingly, when it comes to plant life RIGHT NOW, we're still dangerously close to CO₂ starvation levels.
This is the most provocative claim you make and coincidentally the one you don't back up with any evidence. The one article you post from phys.org (1) does not use the colorful and misleading language of CO2 'starvation' and (2) actually concludes the opposite of the less dramatic point (plants will be better off with more CO2):
> But, as we know, C3 plants waste a lot more resources at higher temperatures, so any increase in photosynthesis from rising CO₂ levels seems likely to be at least cancelled out by the effects of the global warming it will cause. And that's without factoring in changes to rainfall patterns such as more frequent droughts. Solutions that seem to be too good to be true generally are – and, for the moment, that still seems to be the case for the idea that CO₂ enhanced crop yields will feed the world.
However the idea of being in a CO2 'famine' was recently brought up by the head of the Presidential Committee on Climate Security, William Harper, and also does not seem to be backed by any evidence or the scientific community:
> "It's a silly argument," added Britton Stephens, a senior scientist in the Earth Observing Laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in an interview.
> Both independent academic institutions and government agencies around disparate parts of the globe have concluded more carbon dioxide will "bring many negative impacts" to plant environments, Stephens emphasized. "If someone is going to claim it's good, it's incumbent upon them to show evidence." [0]
I mean just using common sense plants can and clearly have thrived with lower levels of CO2, before the far bigger threat of human deforestation decimated forests and plant life. The issue isn't whether plant life will be slightly better off with more CO2 or not, but what negative effects changing climate will have on crops, which could be catastrophic and is the point the phys.org concludes with.
This seems like just another flavor of a very similar climate change denialist argument that there was higher CO2 levels during previous glacial periods, also debunked [1].
The current vegetation is adapted well to the CO2 levels before industrialisation, that is about 300ppm CO2. The change in CO2-content is actually detrimental to some plants. Furthermore, the quick temperature change is going to wipe out large eco systems. The question isn't, what is the optimal CO2 concentration for single species, but about the health of the eco systems we are living in. We are about to wipe out large eco systems and as a consequence, the environment we are living in.
Perhaps the confusion stems from my too-vague use of "we". Your "we" (understandably) refers to humans, who indeed stand much to lose by dramatic CO₂ swings. At least on a suitably mayfly time scale.
My "we" meant more "life on this planet", without as much anthropomorphic bias. Periods of increased warmth and easy access to carbon — the two are historically highly correlated, though not synonymous — are an overall boon to life, referred to as "warm periods", "climatic optimums", "life explosions", etc. This despite the ecosystem upheavals that accompany such large-scale climatic changes being detrimental to incumbent organisms. No argument there.
Coupled with the polarized political nature of the topic, I suspect this difference in "we" resulted in people reading too much into my comment, if you take the time to re-read it. My stance on short-term human-centric status-quo-preserving actions is probably not that different from yours, although I do find broader perspectives and facts helpful in framing rational discourse.
The topic of the article discussed is an approach reducing the CO2 in the atmosphere, to fight the current and ongoing climate change. This sets the context for the discussion. Yes, in geological times, we had much higher CO2-content and some of the plants are still rather optimized for that. This is interesting information, but is an entirely different topic - though it is an argument often used to deny the harmful impact of CO2 onto the climate.
Also, the sole concern of the human species is the survival of the species. Of course we should try to ensure this survival in the most ethical way. Protecting the environment comes from those concerns. Climate change is a very big danger to our civilisation right now.
Op provided a clear explanation of their argument. I don't think they argued that we need more CO2 just provided an interesting perspective on a different time scale. No need for ad hominem attacks.
I think you need to read the comment you're responding to again. OP is not arguing for anything, rather pointing out that different plants evolved to more effectively handle low CO2 environments.
Also, one can plant fruit trees in their yard. I put in 6 last fall and plan to put in another dozen in the next 2-3 weeks. Over the winter I added about 6 truck loads of wood chips to the yard to reduce water usage. (My general feeling at this point from working with the soil is that the wood chips reduce watering needs by at least 80% here. This is a form of xeriscaping, if you're interested.) With all this food growing in the coming years we'll be taking fewer trips to the grocery store while eating better. And probably giving away and trading a lot of food - we're already starting to trade for eggs from a friend, for example.