[HN Gopher] Show HN: Make continuous reforestation part of your ...
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Show HN: Make continuous reforestation part of your daily workflow
Author : protontypes
Score : 133 points
Date : 2021-03-21 12:34 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| IngvarLynn wrote:
| Can people for once stop virtue signalling like plastic bags bans
| or estimating carbon footprint of bitcoin transactions and
| finally get to the root of the problem: fixing failed states?
| Because in the course of you planting a single tree some corrupt
| government destroys a whole ecosystem.
| dheera wrote:
| I'm not sure when "virtue signalling" became the new buzzword
| to attack people with. It seems these days that if you don't
| like someone you accuse them of virtue signalling, and if I
| understand the term correcty, accusing anyone of virtue
| signalling is itself a form of virtue signalling. Yes, I
| realize, this is an ironic paragraph, because I'm virtue
| signalling by accusing you of accusing someone else of virtue
| signalling.
|
| Now onto the actual topic -- While I agree with you that fixing
| failed states should be of utmost concern I don't think it's a
| bad thing to be banning plastic items now, one at a time,
| because we don't currently have a good way to truly recycle
| plastic, and the material should be avoided at all costs for
| anything not intended to be reused for years.
|
| Plastic is an immediate environmental problem and the bans are
| actionable.
|
| However, my opinion is that the bans are suboptimally directed.
| I frequently get served drinks in plastic non-compostable cups
| with bamboo straws now, and see supermarket vegetables on
| goddamn styrofoam trays wrapped in plastic wrap, and "harmless"
| coconut water sold in plastic drink bottles. I'm cool with
| plastic bag bans but they need to extend beyond plastic bags.
| Ban the cup, then the straw. Ban the foam trays and plastic
| wrap on vegetables, then the bag.
| jarenmf wrote:
| Biggest carbon emitters are industrialized western democracies.
| Unless you are considering them as failed states, your argument
| is not correct
| jk7tarYZAQNpTQa wrote:
| Carbon emission is only one of all our ecological concerns. I
| don't know why people only think about carbon.
|
| You can look for example at River plastic emissions to the
| world's oceans [1].
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15611
| IngvarLynn wrote:
| First this is absolutely can not be true from purely logical
| reasoning. And You can check up yourself by hitting the very
| first search result.
|
| But most importantly You're completely missing the point
| which was not about carbon footprint or forests or plastic.
| billytetrud wrote:
| Yes please. Better representation in democracies, and real
| democracies where fake ones currently exist.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Does representation fix environmental issues? I know lots of
| people who don't give a second thought about the environment.
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| This argument is never productive. I can use fewer plastic
| bags. I can plant trees (or pay to plant trees, whatever). I
| can't fix a failed state.
|
| Offer _actionable_ and _measurable_ alternatives.
| IngvarLynn wrote:
| You can plant a tree but You can't plant a forest.
|
| You can't fix a failed state. But You can educate yourself
| (and others) on what the hell is happening with this world
| and vote for representative that cares.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| One man did plant a forest!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jadav_Payeng
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/12/26/572421590
| /...
|
| I agree with what you are saying but I think it can also
| extend to planting trees, use the power you do have and
| vote which can make big change beyond ourselves.
| jk7tarYZAQNpTQa wrote:
| > You can plant a tree but You can't plant a forest.
|
| Of course you can plant a forest. But there's no need to.
| If each one of us plant 1 tree per month, we would be
| planting thousands of forests as a result of our team
| effort.
|
| We need an international Tree Planting Day. And we need to
| celebrate the fuck out of it.
| azornathogron wrote:
| Many people don't own suitable land on which they could
| do such a thing (certainly I don't), and if you're
| talking about going and planting a tree somewhere as part
| of a larger project run by some organization that has
| acquired the land for the purpose then... sure, ok, but
| it'll be far more efficient to pay a bunch of people to
| work full time planting many trees every day, rather than
| each one of us individually driving out to a planting
| site once a month to plant one tree (assuming there's
| even a site within a day's drive).
|
| I'm all for reforestation projects (and many other
| projects that could potentially have _some_ kind of
| impact in reducing the rate atmospheric CO2 levels are
| rising), but the idea of everyone individually planting
| trees is not really practical. If you personally are in a
| situation that makes it feasible for you, then I hope you
| go for it and I wish you all the best.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| > I can't fix a failed state
|
| No, but you can get involved politically, and support
| policies and legislation that will make a difference.
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| We can also think of using less CIs and automated jobs as
| beneficial for environment (less energy used, ..)
| Trasmatta wrote:
| This would likely be an insignificant blip in terms of the
| world's total energy and CO2 output. I think focusing on those
| types of micro-optimizations is unhelpful as they don't make
| any meaningful difference, and take up way too much attention.
| It's like making people feel guilty for taking a shower in a
| drought, when residential water use is less than 1%. Every
| person could go the rest of their lives never again taking a
| shower, and it wouldn't make a difference.
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| Your way of thinking is very common, not wrong, but terrible,
| why?
|
| The world's total energy and CO2 output is simply the
| addition of each human footprint, all industries, transports
| are more or less directly related to the human end-consumer.
| So if everyone decide like you that their own behavior is
| insignificant, which is true, nothing is changing, and as you
| know the current trend on environment is not sustainable. I
| don't use a car, I don't use air-conditioning, I find natural
| methods and alternatives for most things, and product to
| reduce my footprint, and I hope everyone at some point will
| do that, because it'd change everything if everyone cut by a
| half their footprint, it's like twice less humans.
|
| My comment on CI is half-serious, but I still avoid to put
| many OS/enviroment targets (for example just Linux/nodejs-14
| is enough) and just running in on the main git branch
| Trasmatta wrote:
| My point is that we should focus on actually effective
| changes. Human nature is such that focusing on the
| individual and the small changes that each person can make
| will not be effective at the pushing the needle as far as
| we need it to go. We need effective legislative,
| technological, and infrastructural changes.
|
| It's good if people reduce their personal carbon footprint,
| I just think we focus too much on the micro optimizations.
|
| Game theory and human nature are such that we won't ever
| get where we need to be unless the we have effective top
| down solutions.
| smearth wrote:
| I'm interested in what people with greater
| knowledge/insight/intellect than myself think of the following.
|
| I think total reforestation is implausible but the native
| reforestation of most of the earths fresh waterways is plausible
| using the Miyawaki forest establishment method ( that achieves
| 10x growth rates and natural strata levels) and localised
| cuttings. By staggering the establishment of native plantings 20
| meters either sides of creek and river beds so there is
| effectively a 50m wide native forest over most waterways you can
| delay the capital outlay which causes a positive net present
| value for existing landholders to finance the planting and
| enhance their balance sheet. By setting aside the planting
| corridor to regenerate while the miyawaki plots are gradually
| planted the soil regenerates so the the forest establishment can
| be sped up over a period of time.
|
| Because there is a positive ROI with carbon credits at current
| prices and the work is fairly interesting and healthy the
| planting projects work economically and ecologically.
|
| The ecological benefits are that native forests have a five
| degree celsius cooling effect. Cooler streams mean higher
| oxygenisation levels which means higher nitrogen utilisation
| levels and a healthier pH. Cooler streams also means cooler
| rivers which means cooler estuaries with more sealife means and
| sea grasses and colder coastal sea surface temperatures and less
| algal blooms. Native flora corridors along fresh waterways allows
| native fauna highways so that biodiversity is more resilient.
|
| The economic benefits are improved hydro-logical flow through
| pasture and cropland so less phosphates and nitrogen flow through
| the soil and the soil retains moisture better as the 20 m rich
| native humus barrier either side of the fresh waterway slows the
| hydro-logical water flow into the creek. Native forests
| negatively ionise the air so the growth rate of the pastures and
| crops along the waterways should be higher with less fertiliser
| applied. Also rural employment opportunities are retreating
| globally as wealth accumulates with knowledge into cities and the
| localised forest design and planting employment funded via carbon
| credits would provide interesting educative yet non-stressful
| employment opportunities and achieve a higher return on
| investment for most landholders than commodity production. We
| have 10 billion people coming on board to feed, population growth
| slows with great nutrition so great nutrition is the anti-dote to
| long-term pollution. People won't go backwards so planting fresh
| waterways in locally designed fast growing native forestry using
| the Miyawaki method or better wherever there is a positive ROI at
| current carbon credits prices makes intuitive sense to me.
| fireattack wrote:
| It looks a lot of overheads for something that is supposed to be
| helpful for the environment.
|
| Why not just donate the equivalent of 1-year amount of your
| [whatever event-triggered actions] directly to one of these
| Reforestation projects? It saves your time, the cost of running
| server (albeit not much) while doing the same amount of help.
| underdeserver wrote:
| It is _less_ overhead.
|
| Sign up once, then just add a single REST call to your billing
| flow.
| tgv wrote:
| Except there is now a middleman that also wants part of the
| cash. The only advantage I see is that it's impossible for
| one of the CFO's bootlickers to kill the payment without
| anyone else knowing.
|
| Edit: apparently digitalhumani doesn't cream off.
| DigitalHumani wrote:
| Hi, Jonathan here, founder of the RaaS (Reforestation as a
| Service) at DigitalHumani.com
|
| Our solution is 100% free. We are a group of IT-oriented
| volunteers concerned about climate change, and we pay
| ourselves for the costs of the solution (which is quite
| cheap though).
|
| Our RaaS (Reforestation as a Service) API was built because
| most reforestation organizations do not have APIs. These
| organizations know lot about trees, climate and
| reforestation, less so about IT. We help them get the money
| they need to plant the trees (1$ per tree) by providing the
| API for free.
|
| The API is used in lots of ways right now by our clients:
| Planting a tree when someone subscribes to a newsletter,
| buys something, refer a friend for a mobile app, fills a
| survey, charge their electric car, etc.
|
| It is much easier for our clients to just choose a
| reforestation project they want to donate to and add the
| call to the API in their code.
| protontypes wrote:
| It depends on how you implement the measure. In the future, we
| want to determine reforestation based on the carbon emissions
| of products. With the help of projects like
| https://gitter.im/hubblo-org/scaphandre or
| https://www.electricitymap.org/map, this would be easy to do
| for energy consumption. In this way, digital services can be
| transparently and recurrently compensated for emissions in the
| long term.
| exdsq wrote:
| I wonder if it'd be better to not try and prevent global warming,
| but instead spend money and research on preparing for it. Can
| someone tell me why this is a terrible idea?
| akudha wrote:
| Shouldn't we do both?
| wkrsz wrote:
| That's large part of what Bjorn Lomborg is advocating:
| https://www.lomborg.com
| atleta wrote:
| Because all the climate models say that it's a terrible idea to
| let it completely loose. They even predict that it's a pretty
| bad idea not to do a lot more than what we are doing now.
|
| Given the current state of matters, whatever we do it will be
| at least in part preparation for the changed climate and in
| part preventing getting things worse.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Adaptation is definitely the better idea.
|
| One good reason that it's superior to prevention is that it
| doesn't suffer from the externality problem. Me reducing my
| carbon output is a cost to me and a benefit to everyone else.
| On the other hand, me preparing for climate change is a cost to
| me but the benefits are also to me.
|
| To effectively prevent climate change, we have to get every
| country on board with reducing emissions. 1/3 or 1/2 of the
| countries is good, but won't prevent it. Add in the additional
| fact that some countries such as Russia _benefit_ from a
| warming climate and any plans for prevention quickly
| deteriorate.
|
| There is just no good way to ensure long term (100+ year)
| global coordination.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| _An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure._
|
| Benjamin Franklin
| marcinzm wrote:
| Civilization is build around the existing climate and the cost
| of re-building around a new climate will be very very large.
| For example, most cities are near bodies of water and rising
| sea water will threaten them. So we have to either move a lot
| of cities (to now scarcer land) or build massive walls around
| them (that need to survive hurricanes in many areas). There's
| also thing we don't fully control like the ecosystem (fishing,
| pollinating insects, etc.) that would be very hard (read:
| expensive) to rebuild if it collapses and would probably have
| second order effects we'd also need to adjust for. Then there's
| any health issues from things like high CO2 which would
| probably require mass scale genetic engineering to really deal
| with.
| missedthecue wrote:
| _" Civilization is build around the existing climate and the
| cost of re-building around a new climate will be very very
| large_"
|
| But the climate will change over decades and centuries.
| People move, nation's build and rebuild, and crops change
| over centuries, climate change or not. Think how different
| the world and human diet was in 1900 compared to today.
|
| I think a lot of people look at climate change as a war,
| where bullets start flying and suddenly there are 20 million
| refugees at your door. Climate change is slow and
| incremental, at least as currently predicted.
| a_humean wrote:
| Its too late to "prevent" global warming. We had our chance in
| the 80s and 90s. We are now at stage of mitigation and trying
| to curve the trend away from the worst case scenario ("just" 2C
| warming instead of 4C). If we don't change track then its
| projected by end of the century large parts of the world will
| be simply uninhabitable for human populations (wet bulb
| temperature too high, desertification, and flooding) leading to
| the displacement of billions of people.
|
| The cost of fighting global warming is orders of magnitude less
| than letting to go completely out of control.
| atleta wrote:
| I don't get the point. Why not just send monthly payments to a
| programme like Ecologi (https://ecologi.com/)? Of course, if you
| can convince people who you can't convince otherwise, this is
| helpful too.
| DigitalHumani wrote:
| Hi, Jonathan here, founder of the RaaS (Reforestation as a
| Service) at DigitalHumani.com
|
| https://ecologi.com/ is great! Whatever works for you. Montly
| payments, Continuous Reforestation, donation to reforestation
| organizations, etc. Let's plant billions of trees.
| tdoering wrote:
| Good point. I think for many a monthly payment is totally
| enough and maybe even less trouble.
|
| With this workflow though, you can get an extra incentive to do
| something. Depending on how you implement it, your actions get
| the extra weight of a planted tree (with each push for
| example). For me personally, it gives me extra motivation to
| work on a project and remembers me that I can do something.
| atleta wrote:
| Interesting. So your interpretation is the reverse of what I
| thought: the goal is not to somehow make people spend on
| reforestation (who otherwise wouldn't) but make people do
| more work, provide those with extra motivation, who do think
| reforestation is important.
| rosstex wrote:
| Just enrolled, thanks!
| p0nce wrote:
| Sounds like a neat idea to leverage in b2c.
| [deleted]
| doitLP wrote:
| One thing I don't see talked about with reforestation, is that
| it's not enough to just plants _trees_. They are merely the most
| visible part of a forest, and alone die much quicker than when
| they are surrounded by all the constituents of a thriving forest:
| undergrowth, bushes, other types of trees, good soil, animals,
| bugs, etc.
|
| Perhaps trees are just handy shorthand for "forest", but I think
| all the marketing pictures I've seen of reforestation projects
| are monoculture trees in rows, planted like a Christmas tree
| farm.
| 4wsn wrote:
| Yeah, but it's not really about how effective it is, it's about
| feeling like you're saving the world. I'm not denying there is
| some sort of impact, but the main goal with things like this is
| to get on the bandwagon rather than actually have a meaningful
| impact.
| protontypes wrote:
| Reforestation actually means the restoration of the natural
| forest. If this consists of one type of tree, it can look like
| a monoculture. Reforestation organizations usually try to re-
| establish a diverse forest, as this is sustainably resistant to
| parasites and other environmental influences.
| sul_tasto wrote:
| A simple way to help plant trees is to use the ecosia search
| engine: https://www.ecosia.org/
| bttrfl wrote:
| searches turn into trees only if you click ads:
|
| "Clicking on ads generates revenue for Ecosia, which is paid by
| the advertiser. Ecosia then uses at least 80% of its monthly
| profits to plant trees where they are needed most"
|
| https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201657341-How-d...
| BJBBB wrote:
| For North America, tree preservation may be just as important as
| tree planting. But fire and conservation regulations can be at
| odds.
|
| Per my CFP insurance carrier, I can no longer plant trees on my
| property. And the CDF and local fire marshal is encouraging most
| owners to cut down _all_ vegetation. I routinely see bobcats,
| coyotes, deer, hawks, falcons, rabbits, squirrels, roadrunners,
| quail, many species of snakes, many species of butterflies, etc
| (also saw a mountain lion in the area last year). Last week, a Ca
| biologist pleaded with me to do nothing to a 5 acre stand of old
| oak trees (was going to do some tree trimmming), while the fire
| authorities routinely threaten me with fines.
| ralusek wrote:
| Interestingly enough, a side effect of CO2 emissions IS
| reforestation. Earth is getting greener because of increased CO2
| in the air.
|
| What is not obvious though, is if this is going to make the
| problem worse. For one, the green albedo is often darker than
| what was previously in place, and retains more heat. However,
| obviously a fair amount of that energy presumably goes towards
| photosynthesis. Trees also tend to bring a fair amount of water
| into the atmosphere, however, and water is actually one of the
| most aggressive greenhouse gasses in terms of its capability to
| retain heat.
|
| TL;DR, carbon capture is very important, and planting trees is
| probably a good thing, but there's a fair amount of debate.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Yes that's something I don't see brought up often. Carbon is an
| input to photosynthesis.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I was under the impression that grass is actually much more
| efficient at turning CO2 + sunlight into biomass than trees.
|
| But I am not completely sure, too much misinformation
| circulates.
| fireeyed wrote:
| Someone should work on "YC21 Guilt shedding as a service" These
| "guilt shedding" projects rarely serve any good purpose. There is
| no way to track the end result. Same goes for donating wads of
| money to social justice projects. You still see homeless
| defecating and shooting needles despite "guilt shedding" by SV
| denizens. Meanwhile the grifters who run these guilt shedding
| projects get rich.
| ac29 wrote:
| Thats overly cynical, especially for this project which is run
| by volunteers (100% of funds go through to charities). "Lets
| not bother to plant any trees, because there are still homeless
| people" is a great example of letting perfect be the enemy of
| good.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Before I sign up for this feel good thing, does anyone know
| whether it makes any meaningful difference/is enough to make any
| kind of impact? From looking at CO2 levels, we will be reaching
| 1000 ug/m^3 in my lifetime (threshold for headaches and other
| health problems). At 2000 it becomes a serious health hazard.
| Would money be better spent lobbying for abolishing coal burning
| power plants and making agriculture more carbon friendly (from
| what I gather, the biggest contributors to atmospheric CO2)?
| NoOneNew wrote:
| TLDR, you're right. Here's the math to prove it.
|
| I did some research into this a few years ago. Here's what I
| remember. Most of it is easy to search for to verify, just
| slightly time consuming. Broad brush strokes here to get you
| started.
|
| Your average "big" tree (oak, pine, maple) will absorb about
| 10-20 pounds of CO2 every year once it's about 10 years old, on
| average. Lots of variables obviously. From what I saw, and
| there's debate, but the rate of CO2 absorption doesn't seem to
| speed up as much as we'd expect as they get older. I don't know
| how true that is, but at the same time, I could never find hard
| numbers to disagree. I have to work with what I got.
|
| According to the US Forestry, per acre, you can have 100 really
| big trees or 500 really small trees. The problem with higher
| density is the increased wildfire hazard. It was something like
| 150-250 trees is the most they like to manage an area. This
| allows enough space to slow fires and ability to easily clean
| debris (if it's a managed forest) to choke out the fire.
|
| For this, let's say we want 150 big trees per acre and on the
| best case scenario, once these trees are 10 years old, they're
| sucking up 20 pounds of CO2. That's about 3,000 pounds of CO2
| being absorbed from the air with the hopes and prayers that a
| wide fire doesn't come through and undo that work.
|
| Back in the day, I did this to figure out how bad Bitcoin was
| to the environment. Let's do Ethereum since NFTs are so hot
| right now: https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-
| consumption. Every Ethereum transaction puts out roughly 29
| kgCO2 (63lbs). That's an energy usage that truly never has to
| happen, but does out of vanity for the idea of saving the world
| from the 1% so it can create a different, new set of 1%ers.
| I'll get off my soap box now. That's 3, 10 year old trees
| needed to be carbon neutral for the average Ethereum
| transaction. Bitcoin is far worse, 367kg(800 pounds) per
| transaction. That's 40 trees needed per bitcoin transaction for
| carbon neutral. According to
| https://bitinfocharts.com/ethereum/, there were 49,000 Ethereum
| transactions yesterday, 250,000 for bitcoin (same site). So
| that's 147,000 trees or 980 acres of 10 year old trees needed
| to be planted _every day_ to offset Ethereum. 66,666 acres, per
| day, to offset Bitcoin. Hopefully a wildfire doesn 't come by
| and fuck up everything. Forcing you to replant to catch up on
| an amount of space that's incredibly unrealistic. Not to
| mention the CO2 of the logistics to move that many personnel
| around to plant that many trees.
|
| Moral of the story, you're right. The impact of planting a
| handful of trees is shit. And don't get me wrong, I think we
| should be planting trees and trying to bring back forests.
| Rehabilitate destroyed and distressed ecosystems is a fantastic
| idea. But let's not suck each other's dicks that we're going to
| save the planet with YET ANOTHER PIECE OF DIGITAL TECH that is
| "going to solve the world's problems". Go buy a fucking tree,
| some seeds and a shovel. Get off the computer and go get your
| hands dirty. Anyways, it's far better to just cut the bullshit
| out of the planet instead. I just focused on the 2 largest
| cryptocoins. They're a drop in the bucket compared to
| everything else, coal, gas, etc. Cutting the CO2 producers will
| do more than you can realistically replant.
| sooheon wrote:
| > From looking at CO2 levels, we will be reaching 1000 ug/m^3
| in my lifetime
|
| How did you arrive at this number? climate.gov article from
| last year estimates 900ppm by the end of the century if energy
| demand continues to increase at same rate and it is all met by
| fossil fuels.
|
| https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 900ppm by volume is about 1000micrograms per cubic meter. The
| density of air at sea level is 1.2 kilograms/m^3.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| I think there's been some misleading discussion of
| agriculture's contributions to global emission. For a while,
| agriculture was ignored, but now that has been over-compensated
| for, and many people have the mistaken impression it's most of
| the problem. Agriculture and forestry is still just 18.2% of
| emissions.
|
| Energy is still 73.2%.
|
| If you want to change the course of emissions, you need to
| change Energy. Luckily, we have the technology and
| understanding to decarbonize all energy. (The challenge is just
| to do it quickly and cost-effectively.)
|
| You're right about coal being the biggest emitter for energy.
| But... Energy is not just coal but oil and natural gas.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/09/Emissions-by-sect...
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
|
| Oil is nearly as big of an emitter as coal, and gas plus oil is
| now bigger than coal itself.
| https://ourworldindata.org/exports/CO2-by-source_v16_850x600...
|
| Based on that data, oil is a much higher emitter than
| agriculture and gas emissions are about the same as agriculture
| emissions (but will soon be higher).
|
| So as of 2021 it's likely primarily coal and then oil that are
| the biggest emitter, followed by gas and then agriculture.
| gdubs wrote:
| While the separation can be helpful, it also minimizes the
| _actual_ carbon footprint of our food system. Petrochemical
| production, for instance, is a different category according
| to the epa. But one of the biggest uses of petrochemicals is
| fertilizer production. Trucking and shipping is its own
| category. Guess what relies on a lot of trucking and
| shipping? And so on.
|
| Typically what counts as agricultural emissions are literally
| tilling, tractor fuel, cow emissions, etc. we really need to
| look at the whole system, together, for a clear picture. When
| we do that it obvious that our industrial food production is
| deeply tied to every aspect of fossil fuel use, land use, and
| atmospheric c02 in general.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| But I think this is worth considering from this perspective
| as it focuses us on the most broadest solutions. If we
| decarbonize all uses of fossil fuels, we're 73% of the way
| to utterly decarbonizing.
|
| Petrochemical production, nitrogen fertilizer production in
| particular, is simply energy. And, in fact, nitrogen
| fertilizer just needs hydrogen, not hydrocarbons (which is
| a sort of misconception... many think hydrocarbons as a
| fundamental component of fertilizers when the actual Haber
| Process uses straight hydrogen), so should be much easier
| than hydrogen cars. And transport is relatively easy to
| decarbonize. Road and rail transport, in particular.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Oil is nearly as big of an emitter as coal, and gas plus
| oil is now bigger than coal itself.
|
| That's correct and everything, but I do think that for a
| while the best strategy is to focus on coal. Yeah, some
| electrifying of transportation won't harm either, but the
| largest short term gains and the largest long term
| opportunities all start on replacing coal.
|
| If replacing coal leads to lots of peaking natgas plants, so
| be it. It is still a gain on the short term, and it creates
| clear target for storage on the long term.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Yup, absolutely true. And I think people underestimate how
| good electric cars are. They have about half the emissions
| of conventional cars even if all their electricity comes
| from gas (but about 40% of electricity in the US is
| carbonfree--about half nuclear and the rest wind, hydro,
| solar, and geothermal).
|
| Each new conventional car sold is a locked-in 100 tons of
| CO2 (lower if we we crush them sooner). Electric cars are
| much smaller (half to start with), and depending on how
| fast we transition the electric grid could be only like
| 10-25 tons and then next to nothing (as even manufacture
| becomes decarbonized).
| hyko wrote:
| _in my lifetime_
|
| How long are you expecting to live? Just wondering as we're not
| really expected to breach 950ppm by 2100:
| https://skepticalscience.com/rcp.php?t=3#concentrations
|
| Edited to add: ignore me, looking at ppm and not ug/m^3
| protontypes wrote:
| Avoiding greenhouse gases from the outset is certainly the
| better alternative. However, it is unavoidable that we will
| continue to emit massive amounts of greenhouse gases for the
| next few years. Reforestation is the simplest and most cost-
| effective "carbon capture technology". At the same time, this
| restores lost habitat and thus averts another catastrophe: The
| loss of biodiversity.
| lstodd wrote:
| No. It's just lining up the pockets of some shady
| "reforestation" orgs that has zero to do with actual
| reforestation except maybe the name.
|
| Plant and ocean response to rising CO2 is unknown at this time.
| The only mostly certain thing is that it is highly non-linear.
|
| Any world-ending projections of CO2 content in thousands of ppm
| are wild guesses and scaremongering.
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| Things are so dire that even if we use all "guns" in our
| disposal it will be difficult. There is no single solutions
| that can help, amount of CO2 is so huge that if we would turn
| CO2 we need to sequester into graphite bricks we could build a
| wall 10 meters high and 5 meters wide encircling the Earth
| around Equator 32 times.
|
| So, we need all we can think at same time, now. :/
|
| Simply, current amount of carbon in the atmosphere has been
| released from sources that were not there, and we are still
| cutting trees more than we plant. Some calculation say we need
| between 1-2 trillion trees. But even then trees need a quite
| some time to grow and become effective.
| hedora wrote:
| Also, the carbon those trees sequester needs to be somehow
| captured permanently.
|
| I imagine a solution where people grow stands of fast growing
| trees, clear cut every $optimal years, use (magic?) chemistry
| to separate the harvest into carbon and not carbon, then dump
| the not carbon back onto the soil, and replant.
|
| Even with that, I'm not convinced there are enough acres of
| land on earth. I haven't seen anyone do the math, and suspect
| direct carbon capture plants and olivine reactions will scale
| better.
| Panino wrote:
| You'll be happy to know that what you describe exists and
| it has a name: pyrolysis. Pyrolysis is the thermal
| anaerobic decomposition of biomass. Basically, you heat up
| organic material without oxygen at temperatures attainable
| from a relatively small fire. During this process,
| volatiles such as hydrogen and oxygen separate from the
| carbon in the biomass feedstock (dry untreated wood, bones,
| old cotton tshirts, whatever) and get released as syngas,
| leaving more or less pure fixed carbon that is very stable,
| safely sequestered in soil for thousands of years.
|
| The resulting carbon, called biochar, can be co-composted
| to prepare it for use in soil, where it protects the soil
| from drought and flood alike. Plants grown in soil with
| higher carbon content are bigger and healthier, and these
| soils can produce _more_ of whatever you 're growing.
|
| I make biochar at home but there are companies that do it
| on an industrial scale.
|
| Humanity has been pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at an
| epic scale for decades. In addition to going carbon neutral
| with more wind, solar and nuclear, we need to draw CO2 back
| out of the atmosphere on an epic scale. And biochar
| resulting from pyrolysis is one of the major tools since it
| has synergistic effects with other tools, like mass tree
| plantings. Biochar production can also offset other energy
| uses, for example by either directly burning the syngas on-
| site for heating purposes, or for capturing it and using it
| later as a fuel in an application that would otherwise use
| fossil fuel.
| gambiting wrote:
| Isn't this basically how charcoal is made?
| Panino wrote:
| Sort of but not really. Grill charcoal is made at a lower
| temperature, preserving more volatiles, and then an
| accelerant is often added (basically lighter fluid) to
| help it ignite and burn. It's similar at a glance but the
| differences are important.
| zamalek wrote:
| I wonder if dumping the biochar into a subduction
| zone/trench would permanently remove the carbon from the
| system at any reasonable rate. Or possibly back-fill
| mines with it.
|
| Either way, I completely agree. Planting trees doesn't
| solve the problem if those trees are allowed to naturally
| decompose. Trees are just really efficient carbon fixing
| machinery, we need to store the solid carbon somewhere.
| ubuwaits wrote:
| Bill Gates wrote about the impact of planting trees recently:
|
| > It sounds like a simple fix and it has obvious appeal for all
| of us who love trees, but its impact on climate change is
| overblown. Although trees absorb some carbon, they can never
| take in enough to offset the damage from our modern lifestyle.
| To absorb the lifetime emissions that will be produced by every
| American alive today -- just 4 per cent of the global
| population -- you'd need to plant and permanently maintain
| trees on more than 16bn acres, roughly half the landmass of the
| world.
|
| From:
| https://www.ft.com/content/c11bb885-1274-4677-ba05-fcbac67dc...
| mumblemumble wrote:
| For the sake of bringing it into more immediate (for this
| context) perspective, I'm curious if anyone is able to do the
| analysis on ecological impact from technology decisions?
|
| For example, choosing fancier, JavaScript-heavy ways of
| building webpages probably results in clients consuming extra
| electricity. One could hypothetically estimate the impact,
| and then come up with an analysis to the effect of, "For a
| site generating X amount of traffic, you'd need to plant Y
| trees to offset the decision to use Google Tag Manager."
| frongpik wrote:
| Ads, basically. But I doubt web makes any impact here.
| Let's say every web user spends 2 hours every day waiting
| for ads to finish loading. 2 hr x 100 watt x 360 days x 5
| billion users = 1 TWh. The US alone produces 4000 TWh per
| year.
| atleta wrote:
| Sounds logical. We're burning fossils of past creatures that
| have lived over a period of hundreds of millions of years on
| the surface of the Earth.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Well fuck. Anyone know of a lobby as a service project?
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| The Coalition for Rainforest Nations might be good. This is
| recommended by this report:
| https://founderspledge.com/research/fp-climate-change
| sterlind wrote:
| Any APIs hosted by major cloud providers are LaaS, if you
| think about it.
| darkerside wrote:
| Thought about it, still not getting it. I like the idea.
| adflux wrote:
| A very misleading calculation.
|
| You don't need to absorb ALL co2 currently being output by
| Americans. A large percentage of that is already being
| converted/stored by algae / trees
|
| So the baseline isn't "we need to store all CO2". The
| baseline is, we need to convert the part that is currently
| "overcapacity" for our environment. And for that, planting
| trees IS a good solution. But don't take my word (or Bills)
| for it.
|
| https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6448/76
|
| ... Ecosystems could support an additional 0.9 billion
| hectares of continuous forest. This would represent a greater
| than 25% increase in forested area, including more than 200
| gigatonnes of additional carbon at maturity.Such a change has
| the potential to store an equivalent of 25% of the current
| atmospheric carbon pool.
| dheera wrote:
| s/Americans/world/, and also
|
| - Trees are being cut down at record rate for meat
| production. Meat production is one of the bigger culprits
| in deforestation (and particularly of the Amazon and other
| tropical rainforests). If the world were willing to eat
| _less_ meat (we don 't have to be all-out vegan, we just
| need to eat much _less_ of it) we 'd be a lot better off in
| terms of how much arable land we need to feed everyone
| instead of feeding a bunch of cows and then feeding
| everyone
|
| - The world population is much bigger now. All
| environmental problems are essentially only an issue
| because we have too many people in the world right now. If
| we had the population of the 1800's, none of our modern
| lifestyle habits would be a serious problem.
| dangoor wrote:
| I recently listened to the audiobook of How to Avoid a Climate
| Disaster by Bill Gates. It was a fine tour of the landscape of
| solutions. My main takeaway is that we're going to need to do a
| wide variety of things in a wide variety of sectors. He gets
| into stuff like concrete, which is very important in growth but
| also big on emissions.
|
| With respect to reforestation: Gates says it would help, but
| possibly not as much as you'd think and he's a bigger proponent
| of stopping the deforestation.
|
| Yishan Wong thinks that growing _forests_ (as opposed to just
| planting trees) is an important tool for carbon sequestration:
| https://www.terraformation.com/about
| DigitalHumani wrote:
| Hi, Jonathan here, founder of the RaaS (Reforestation as a
| Service) at DigitalHumani.com
|
| I totally agree that we need to do a wide variety of things.
| Stopping deforestation, reforestation, less meat, electric
| cars, etc. We need to do it all.
| mdoms wrote:
| If you want to plant a tree, plant a tree. I have no faith that
| these jokers will ever actually plant the ordered number of
| trees.
| DigitalHumani wrote:
| Hi, Jonathan here, founder of the RaaS (Reforestation as a
| Service) at DigitalHumani.com
|
| We only work with trusted reforestation organizations (6 so
| far) and you can choose which one to work with.
|
| Planting a tree is not that complicated, I agree, but for lots
| of us working in cities, it is not that easy. Finding the right
| species, buying the shovel and the tree, taking care of it,
| etc. More complicated to have tens of them planted though.
|
| I'd rather send 1$ to a farmer in Belize (as an example) that
| will be very happy to get that dollar to plant a tree that will
| give him and his family fruits.
| C06aka wrote:
| As a point of confusion, what is the obsession with planting
| trees? With little human intervention, outside of climate change,
| the earth is experiencing mass afforestation. There's been
| something like a 20% increase in plant matter in the past 50
| years, an area double the size of the continental united states,
| due to warmer, wetter climate and a longer growing season. Is it
| the forest fires that have people concerned? That's largely due
| to this explosive growth and poor forest management. It's been a
| few years since I looked at the numbers but if I remember
| correctly, creating a 10-100x increase in wood product
| consumption (different wood products sequester different amounts
| of carbon) while preventing all forest fires globally would
| offset all human carbon emissions.
| parhamn wrote:
| This is really really cool. Congrats on the launch!
|
| We're working on something similar as our non-profit project [1]
| built on the integration system for our browser. It will be a
| free service that lets you connect a few SaaS providers to start
| (Jira, Github, Gitlab, etc) and automatically plant trees (with
| some multiple). Stripe is also doing something similar at the
| payments level. [2]
|
| Two things:
|
| 1. These threads always go to a "trees are just virtue signaling"
| conversation. I think focusing on the trees misses the forrest.
| Passive allocation of $$ towards good causes through these
| systems will help teams get involved and associate it directly
| with their work. This sort of thing is good and feels good. We
| can focus on better allocation and give people options in the
| future.
|
| 2. There are millions of issues/tasks/sales/PRs/etc closed every
| day and all of them have a real monetary value for orgs. Im sure
| we can capture a real % of that. It also moves social
| responsibility out of closed departments to having everyone in
| teams involved and contributing frequently and effortlessly. Its
| exciting!
|
| P.S. I wouldn't normally share this sort of thing on another Show
| HN but I think we're probably 100% aligned in our goals of
| getting donations to projects that need it. If I can help in
| anyway or you'd like to get involved with any of this please
| email me parham@cloudsynth.com :)
|
| [1] https://cloudsynth.com/social-impact/trees [2]
| https://stripe.com/climate
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Ok but your two arguments over how this isn't just a feel good
| thing come down to (1) is ok that it's a feel good thing and
| (2) it can be a popular feel good thing. How many net acres of
| forest can we gain and how much CO2 can we remove with this per
| year, based on your best projections?
|
| I am not saying it's bad to do this. I would be happy to be a
| customer. But how do we know this does anything meaningful?
| parhamn wrote:
| Key points are: this mechanism of collection can be much more
| effective for non-profits. And importantly once the automated
| passive payments are in place, it is easy to give users other
| options for what to do with the money (it doesn't have to be
| trees but its probably the most marketable start outside the
| HN community).
|
| The napkin math on trees has been done quite a bit here
| already. I'm on mobile but I would look at the Stripe Climate
| thread for some references.
| vcdimension wrote:
| Many of these tree planting schemes are a bit dubious; can you
| really be sure that they are planting new trees that wouldn't
| have grown in that area anyway, and will they still be around in
| 40 years time to make sure the trees grow to maturity and are not
| cut down and burned? The only tree planting scheme that I really
| trust is the Green Belt Movement:
| http://www.greenbeltmovement.org/ started over 40 years ago by
| Professor Wangari Maathai.
| tima101 wrote:
| You can also plant trees by yourself. Last year I planted 10
| Siberian and Korean pines in one day. 7 trees survived, 3 trees
| died because I over watered them. So those 7 trees don't
| actually need any extra care from me.
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| Are those trees native (local on your area)? Also just
| curious, why not planting fruit trees? That's what I'd do
| right away if I had land
| protontypes wrote:
| A lot of work is being done to make reforestation as
| transparent and sustainable as possible. In itself, it is no
| problem to record a world coordinate when planting the tree and
| later see if this tree is still there. The involved
| organizations are already working with such and similar
| solutions to avoid misuse. If you want to be 100% sure, you
| need to do it yourself: buy land, plant trees.
| sixothree wrote:
| Maybe NFTs are the solution. I kid but.
| marton78 wrote:
| This problem can clearly only be solved by AI.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Treecoin!
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Yeah, but how do I know 9 other people also paid for it?
|
| How do I know it's not replaced by a new tree 30 years from
| now.
|
| And so on.
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