[HN Gopher] The growing market of not cutting down trees
___________________________________________________________________
The growing market of not cutting down trees
Author : carride
Score : 72 points
Date : 2021-08-24 13:31 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| robto wrote:
| I once worked as a data analyst in the EM&V industry (Evaluation,
| Measurement, and Verification). I worked for a small group of
| consultants and our primary customer would be energy utilities
| across the United States. You see, an energy company, all things
| equal, would prefer to sell more energy rather than less. More
| energy sold == more profit, for the most part - coops and other,
| smaller scale operations aside.
|
| Now, society has decided that incentivizing growth in energy
| consumption isn't a winning strategy in the long run. Or, at
| least, politicians have signed into law various incentive
| programs to change the business calculus of energy companies,
| wherein an energy company can get reimbursed for energy
| efficiency campaigns that it runs and, if total energy
| consumption is less than a certain rate year over year, the
| energy company can claim a prize to offset the profit forgone by
| promoting energy efficiency.
|
| However, it is not so straightforward to account for how much
| energy _isn't_ being used on account of a specific intervention.
| Enter here the entire EM&V industry! We would run studies to
| account for this missing energy, and it was a very thorough
| business - comparing lists of equipment replaced under industrial
| efficiency programs, measuring Watt-hours offset, surveying
| households to figure out how many of them actually installed
| those complementary LED lightbulbs. Every year we would run
| through the same process with the same energy companies and then
| they'd find out how much energy they saved.
|
| At times it felt surreal to be a part of this giant industry
| competing for a chance to count how much of something wasn't
| used, but it looks like that industry is only going to grow as
| carbon caps and offsets become a bigger deal.
|
| I don't think it's a bad thing, just a profoundly weird one. In
| 50 years I wonder how many people will derive their income from
| counting things that don't exist :)
| Gustomaximus wrote:
| Wouldn't a better solution be to encourage more things built of
| wood? Cut the trees down and use them, while replacing with more.
|
| E.g. Encourage more wooden houses and your not only capturing
| carbon but storing it separately so more can be captured in that
| same place.
|
| While there are probably many better solutions, you would think
| whatever they are we need something that can continue to capture
| carbon ongoing. A forest, as great as they are for a plethora of
| reasons, is fairly finite in terms of carbon capture.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Reforestation is an extremely time-consuming affair with many,
| many possible ecological and economic downfalls and/or
| environmental harms. As a sidebar to your suggestion of using
| more wood, perhaps a partial step in that direction is greater
| recycling of unfinished wood products into chips and dust for
| use in engineered wood outputs. Similarly, a change in the
| chemistry of wood finishing products (stains, coatings, paints,
| adhesives) to 100% removable or neutralized state would permit
| discarded finished wood products to be recycled rather than
| dumped. So, to directly reply to your question, cutting down
| trees and replacing them with more is not a quick or
| necessarily successful strategy.
| wodow wrote:
| One group working on this is the Natural Material Innovation
| group at Cambridge:
| https://www.natmat.group.cam.ac.uk/research/natmat
|
| "Timber Towers" London proposal:
| https://www.natmat.group.cam.ac.uk/news/timber-towers-could-...
| (2019)
|
| (encountered via the easy-listening of BBC Radio 4's 39 Ways to
| Save the Planet: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000qy43 )
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Similarly, see the University of British Columbia's Wood
| Building Design & Construction Centre:
|
| https://wbdc.ubc.ca/
|
| and the Province Of British Columbia's Wood First Initiative:
|
| https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/industry/forestry/support.
| ..
| entangledqubit wrote:
| For those familiar with American building practices, it's
| interesting to see some stark contrasts. This video
| discusses solid timber walls (among other interesting
| features) in a Swiss building project:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlplalGNfFM
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I don't think we need that much construction built, for one
| thing.
|
| I have an even simpler idea: Cut the trees down and store the
| wood permanently.
|
| Left in the wild, the wood will eventually break down, and the
| carbon return to the atmosphere. But there must be some low
| tech way to preserve the wood for a century at least.
|
| That's easily long enough!
| Cycl0ps wrote:
| I've had this on my mind for a bit, but carbon capture seems to
| be oversold from my understanding. The way I see it, additional
| trees would reduce atmospheric carbon at that moment in time,
| but as they burn or decay it releases CO2 back to the
| atmosphere and the problem continues. If the issue is that
| we've pumped so many tons of carbon out of the Earth, the
| solution is to pump so many tons of carbon back in. Remove it
| from the cycle so that the net amount of surface carbon is
| reduced.
|
| Personally, my solution is to start chucking trees down a
| mineshaft and backfill the shaft when it's full. It's crude but
| it gets the idea across.
|
| Edit: happened to be listening to a podcast writing this and
| right as I finish they start talking about olivine, which is a
| mineral that can absorb it's weight in CO2 and prices around $7
| USD/ton. Maybe a better option for carbon removal
| rory wrote:
| The mineshaft-chucking idea could actually work decently.
| You'd probably want to turn it into charcoal first though.
| notatoad wrote:
| wouldn't turning it into charcoal release a lot of the
| carbon?
| waterhouse wrote:
| Someone has written a paper on "Carbon sequestration via
| wood burial". Estimates $14 per ton of CO2.
|
| https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-
| 0...
| javman wrote:
| Logging and converting the trees into lumber for building isn't
| free from a carbon perspective. A modern logging operation
| typically has several large diesel-powered heavy machines to
| cut down and move the trees. Then the logs are transported by
| diesel-powered semi trucks to a mill. The mill has many
| machines to move logs, cut them, and remove some moisture
| (kilns). Once they are cut, they are loaded onto more diesel
| powered trucks and delivered somewhere to sell. Back at the
| site of the cut, piles of slash (all of the branches) are left
| on the ground to rot, or sometimes piled up and burned. How
| long will the buildings made of wood last? Eventually they are
| bulldozed and hauled away to a landfill.
| Gustomaximus wrote:
| I considers the logging/lumber issue as initially I thought
| much better to mulch the trees to increase soil levels and
| replant but not sure how that would net out carbon wise.
|
| But in the case of houses, you have these costs, but you also
| offsetting bricks and concrete etc. This also has a huge
| carbon production but without the offset. Also increasingly
| the logging and transport will be cleaner as EVs advance.
|
| And yes buildings will be hauled to landfill, but that's
| timber in landfill and burying carbon for some time too.
|
| Would be interesting for someone to run the numbers on actual
| impact.
| slang800 wrote:
| In the event of a forest fire, does the land owner have to pay
| back the carbon-offset buyers?
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| Ryan and Kate have no apparent interest in that subject.
| sytse wrote:
| See
| https://twitter.com/bodiecabiyo/status/1427683107788845056?s...
|
| TLDR; there is a percentage set aside for fires but it seems
| way too little.
| elihu wrote:
| > "There are companies out there that are endeavoring to use
| satellites and computers, that are artificial intelligence and
| machine learning to replace the boots on the ground foresters
| that have to go out and do these very precise measurements of
| trees by using satellite imagery to size up the trees and tell
| you how many trees there are, how big they are, how much they've
| grown over time. And the thinking is that by doing that and
| removing a lot of the upfront costs, you can start doing smaller
| and smaller tracts of woods."
|
| It seems like having a national or a global database of trees
| would be a useful and interesting public data set to have. For
| instance, you could have the location, approximate age,
| approximate mass and height, and probable species for all the
| known trees in your region of interest. I wonder what the
| technical limitations on collecting this data are? I mean, the
| imagery and metadata Google Maps uses probably could be used to
| find most of the full-grown trees, as long as they aren't
| clustered too tight to each other to distinguish. Maybe you'd
| need radar scans or close-up imagery for dense forests. Most
| young trees would probably be missed unless you had some very
| precise way to detect them. (Drones flying through forests,
| maybe? Or miniaturized Google-streetview-type cameras affixed to
| wild deer?)
| greenie_beans wrote:
| i don't think this is a good solution for climate change. it
| doesn't make sense to offset a major polluter, so they can
| continue polluting.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| It seems like a much better solution to think in terms of
| continuous material flows, rather than trying to stop all flows
| of a material humans consider waste.
| notatoad wrote:
| don't think of it as offsetting a polluter, think of it as
| charging a polluter.
|
| requiring the purchase of offsets equal to the amount of
| pollution is essentially a tax on pollution. assuming it's
| fairly priced, it should create a market for non-polluting
| alternatives to the pollution-causers and lead to the eventual
| decline of pollution-causing processes as they're replaced with
| alternatives that don't require offsetting.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| "assuming it's fairly priced, "
|
| From what I know we are far away from that. It would need to
| be priced much higher to effect change.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| This also rubs me the wrong way and feels like something that
| can be gamed too easily.
|
| It also feels like something rich people can throw some money
| at a problem to make it go away for themselves. Some years I
| remember an article about Paul Allen's super yacht and the
| enormous amounts of fuel it was consuming. But they quickly
| added that he had offset this by planting a few trees
| somewhere... In my mind it would better we didn't have 100m
| yachts ship around a few people for leisure.
| goatlover wrote:
| It does make sense until renewable power, cleaner manufacturing
| tech and electric vehicles are able to replace the polluters.
| Would have been easier if more nuclear plants were ready to go.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| carbon offsets let businesses not invest in those things, nor
| invest in the r&d that would create those things. further
| kicking the can down the road.
| goatlover wrote:
| The have the carbon offsets go into funding r&d in cleaner
| tech.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| wait, what? the companies pay forest owners to offset
| carbon. so you're suggesting that forest owners fund the
| r&d with the money they make from selling offsets? that
| doesn't make much sense for a forest owner. they're
| already doing their part by providing a carbon sink.
|
| the responsibility is on the businesses to reduce their
| carbon footprint. and carbon offset credits don't
| incentivize the businesses to do that.
| goatlover wrote:
| No, the companies pay for the R&D as their carbon offset
| instead of the forest owners, if that's the concern. A
| fossil fuel company isn't going to reduce its carbon
| footprint as long as energy demands need to be met by
| fossil fuels.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| yeah that would make more sense.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| Neither growing forests nor any other approach I've heard is
| carbon-negative on a scale of more than a few decades. Maybe
| someone could usefully deploy the credits to fund the science
| necessary to know how to properly use them.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Humanity does not do large scale fundamental change in less
| than a few decades.
|
| We are actually changing very quickly. Now that solar is
| cheaper than coal, we are simply turning coal plants down,
| even on the middle of their lifetime. Transport
| electrification is basically bounded by supply, we are just
| not able to do it faster.
|
| The one thing that could be better is grid storage. It
| doesn't help that there is a patent minefield around
| battery chemistries, and it also doesn't help that it's
| only economically viable after the grid has a large share
| of renewables. A government could intervene on both of
| those problems right now, but if they are left for markets,
| it will take another decade after we start working really
| hard on them (what is still quick, by the way, and it helps
| that we can solve basically half of the emissions on the
| previous paragraph alone).
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| Chemistry is pretty much DONE for batteries.
|
| The only advancements possible are fairly limited and
| have to do with nanostructure of electrodes and
| electrolytes which won't give more than 2x-5x. There are
| NO 10x, 100x, 1000x futures with batteries.
|
| If you want 10x-100x, the answer is hydrocarbon fuels and
| nuclear energy. Period. Otherwise you are living in a
| fantasy bubble disconnected from STEM and factual
| reality.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > 10x-100x
|
| 10x what?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Price and durability are pretty much open problems. Ion
| exchange materials are a completely open problem.
| Structure of electrodes and electrolytes on dissolved
| chemical batteries are an open problem. Substrate for the
| ion exchange element of molten chemical batteries is a
| completely open problem.
|
| There's nothing done in grid battery chemistry. The only
| thing people have ever optimized for is energy density by
| weight, and this is an almost completely irrelevant
| dimension for that application.
| 71a54xd wrote:
| Good thing Elon is funding the same anti-hydrogen
| lobbyists that the oil industry has employed for decades.
| gizmondo wrote:
| It would've made sense if it was a true offset, i.e. carbon
| capture in various forms. But "offsetting" carbon-positive
| activity with carbon-neutral is just bizarre. Where is my money
| for sitting on a couch instead of taking a plane to Australia?
| modriano wrote:
| That would be hard to sell. Trees actually pull CO2 out of
| the air and lock it away in wood fibers. That produces an
| actual (albeit infinitesimal) reduction in the net
| atmospheric CO2.
|
| Choosing to not take a flight to Australia, on the other
| hand, is just deciding to produce CO2, just less. That makes
| it categorically different, as it can't negate any amount of
| CO2 production.
|
| Also, the supply of "not flying to Australia" is unbounded,
| and without scarcity, the price will naturally go to $0. If
| you only focus on potential fliers, that would have the
| perverse effect of incentivizing people to take actions
| intended to convince the regulators of this market that they
| were planning on flying to Australia, which would likely
| result in empty seats on flights to Australia and a net
| increase in the number of chartered flights to Australia.
| gizmondo wrote:
| In addition to mature forests being carbon neutral, not
| negative, the scheme in question has exactly the same
| problem you described - the supply of "not cutting trees"
| is very large if not unbounded, and it has very little to
| do with CO2 in the atmosphere.
|
| This is indulgence trading, in my opinion.
| notatoad wrote:
| trees pull CO2 out of the air, so _planting more_ trees is
| carbon-negative. but how is just allowing the trees that
| are already there to continue existing carbon-negative? it
| can 't be less CO2 that the status quo if it's literally
| the status quo.
| kgwgk wrote:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-21/you-ca...
|
| "The other reason to love this story is that it is about getting
| paid not to do things. That is always complicated. If you are
| paid to do things, it is relatively easy to measure how much you
| did and how much you should get paid. If I want you to cut down
| trees for my sawmill, we might agree on a price of $5 per tree.
| You will cut down the trees and deliver them to me, and I will
| count them. If you deliver 100 trees then I'll pay you $500.
|
| "But if I want you not to cut down trees for my carbon capture
| program, it is harder to measure how many trees you didn't cut
| down. Just sitting here right now, typing this column on my
| computer, I have cut down zero trees,[1] which means in theory
| that there are absolutely billions of trees that I have not cut
| down. Where is my check? A landowner might have planned to cut
| down only a few trees this year, but she will have incentives to
| say "I was planning to cut down all my trees," in order to get
| paid for not cutting down all of them. She might have trees that
| are impossibly un-economic to cut down, but it's easy enough for
| her not to cut them down.
|
| "Similarly, if I agree to buy 100 trees from you, and you sell me
| the trees, you can't sell them to anyone else: I have the trees.
| If I agree to pay you not to cut down 100 trees, though, what's
| to stop you from getting paid by someone else not to cut down the
| same trees? The trees stay there; you can sell the concept of
| them staying there as many times as you like."
| cortesoft wrote:
| Matt Levine is the best
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| >"His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of
| not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel
| of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow,
| the more money the government gave him, and he spent every
| penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of
| alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without
| rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he
| remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of
| bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that
| the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and
| soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the
| county. Neighbours sought him out for advice on all subjects,
| for he had made much money and was therefore wise. "As ye sow,
| so shall ye reap," he counselled one and all, and everyone said
| "Amen."
|
| -- Joseph Heller, Catch-22
| quickthrowman wrote:
| " The Lord gave us good farmers two strong hands so that we
| could take as much as we could grab with both of them" -Major
| Major Major Major's Father
| pintxo wrote:
| I have to - don't do it - say it: put your trees on a NFT
| blockchain - he said it, sorry!!1!
| gibspaulding wrote:
| Seems reasonable - We have proof of work, proof of stake,
| proof of storage. Why not proof of trees!
| ineedasername wrote:
| Although if it's trees, then technically each individual
| piece of paper might be a single Satoshi.
| isaacimagine wrote:
| We could have proof of air too!
|
| https://www.gwern.net/CO2-Coin
| leogiertz wrote:
| It's actually a quite good idea: https://www.single.earth
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Heck, put them on TWO blockchains. ;D
| zug_zug wrote:
| I suppose to align incentives you should only get paid if you
| grow a tree cut it down and then bury the carbon [trunk] somehow.
| Anything less isn't permanently removing carbon from the
| atmosphere
|
| For example just growing a tree is no net carbon reduction - the
| tree dies naturally the carbon is released at some point.
| elihu wrote:
| Yeah, that sounds more reasonable. Pay people for the quantity
| of carbon they sequestered at the point it's turned into
| biochar and buried (or whatever technology is used), and maybe
| have financial instruments set up so that investors can buy the
| rights to future carbon from the people growing the trees, so
| the growers don't have to wait fifty years to get paid. If
| there's a forest fire, the investors lose their investment, and
| that's just part of the built-in risk.
|
| On the micro-scale, I wonder if towns and cities could start
| incentivizing people to dispose of more yard waste. For
| instance, you get a rebate on your garbage bill based on how
| many hundreds of pounds of lawn clippings and branches you
| stuff in your yard waste bins each year (assuming that yard
| waste is processed in a way that sequesters the carbon, and
| people don't try to game the system by filling their bins with
| dirt or trash). You could also have something like a free
| service for people in rural areas to request a dumpster that
| they can fill with organic material and have hauled away as an
| alternative to just burning it.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| I see this point brought out often. Some counter points:
|
| a) Trees can live for hundreds of years. We're in the midst of
| transforming how we produce energy and improving energy
| efficiency all around... A good CO2 'battery' to smooth out the
| problem can still be very helpful. Think of it as a low-pass
| filter to help reduce a shock.
|
| b) Forests have a massive number of positive effects beside co2
| sequestration, including local cooling and aiding the water
| cycle. A world with more forests is a healthier world. (See
| also: riding a bike instead of driving. It saves CO2, and has
| numerous health benefits.)
| 55555 wrote:
| Oh boy, I'm huge into trees and boy could I talk about this. Not
| cutting down trees is way more lucrative than cutting down trees.
| You can only cut a tree down once, but you can not cut it down as
| many times as you like. And then, once you're done not cutting it
| down, you can cut it down and sell it to a sawmill.
| Igelau wrote:
| Buy my Non Fungible Tree, backed by proof of bark.
| cven714 wrote:
| Reminds me of the man who became wealthy by not growing
| alfalfa.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/771699-his-specialty-was-al...
| greenie_beans wrote:
| yeah, this will only become part of a forest management plan. i
| bet that everybody will do it eventually, and the market will
| have too many credits for sale. and the polluters will continue
| to pollute, and use their carbon credits as a marketing
| gimmick.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Same here. The dang things literally convert scorching sunlight
| into shade.
| ineedasername wrote:
| An interesting question would be "How many times per second
| could you not cut down a tree?"
|
| I'm guessing the throughput on that is incredibly fast.
| NonContro wrote:
| If we want to avoid carbon emissions and save the environment
| then we should be paying poor people in the 3rd world not to have
| children.
|
| Offering vasectomies to 25 million young males across Africa in
| return for $200 in goods or cash would cost less than the USA's
| annual aid to the continent but do far more for poverty and
| development.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > If we want to avoid carbon emissions and save the environment
| then we should be paying poor people in the 3rd world not to
| have children.
|
| Impact is far from obvious; the immediate result you'd expect
| would be that someone else has the children instead.
| tezzer wrote:
| The optics of paying people in a culture not your own to not
| reproduce are problematic, yes? Besides, we know how to get
| people to have fewer children. Raise their standard of living.
| [deleted]
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Less extreme would be offering family planning in the form of
| condoms and birth control globally. You don't have to
| incentivize people to change their behavior, but help them
| achieve what they already want.
| CommieBobDole wrote:
| There was an interesting article a while back about how pine tree
| farmers have moved away from cutting cutting timber and are
| instead selling pinestraw for landscaping because it's more
| lucrative.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/03/31/pine-need...
| Biologist123 wrote:
| I work in an adjacent space, and have been encouraged by an
| investor to push into the reduced emissions and avoided emissions
| sector. I'm yet to decide, but a few factors are currently
| dissuading me:
|
| 1. The assumptions behind forestry and soil offsets on closer
| inspection can seem a bit stretched.
|
| 2. An offset creates revenue for the person creating the offsets
| - which money is then spent on things which have their own carbon
| intensity - eg fuel or a vehicle or whatever. So there's
| ultimately no offset.
|
| 3. Being able to offset your carbon emissions has unpredictable
| consequences. I remember seeing some study which showed people
| who bought a Macdonald's salad were likely to reward themselves
| with a burger. I can see how I'd offset a flight and then piously
| reward myself with a steak later.
|
| 4. Companies buying offsets open themselves to reputational risk
| associated with the quality of the offsets. Is it worth the risk?
|
| There seem to be a bunch of other reasons why offsets are
| questionable but those are my four reasons for not going into
| this space.
|
| [Edit: I added reason 4].
| contingencies wrote:
| I looked relatively deeply in to this area when starting an
| asset exchange ~2011. My conclusion at that time was that
| existing carbon trading / offsets tokens were basically non-
| fungible due to disparate definitions from different
| regulators. Nominal assets ranged from honor-system self-
| declarations to heavily audited. The resulting asset types were
| found to be effectively illiquid, despite a rush to open
| exchange platforms and media talk of trading schemes, owing to
| lack of buy-side demand. Individually the systems were mostly
| only useful for gaming local regulators. I doubt their primary
| purpose today has changed from multinationals greenwashing
| their dirty operations with suitably distracting levels of
| misdirection.
| Biologist123 wrote:
| At about that time I came into contact with a carbon offsets
| brokerage which European royalty had backed. I wondered if
| what they were actually selling was the opportunity to rub
| shoulders and network with some big hitters. That company was
| sold for a lot of money before the carbon market crashed last
| time for a range of reasons which I don't think have been
| resolved.
| andyxor wrote:
| I'm currently donating to Ecologi and Eden Reforestation on
| regular basis, what other non-profits have good reputation for
| reforestation and carbon offset projects
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/zSCV1
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-08-24 23:01 UTC)