[HN Gopher] Planting trees not always an effective way of bindin...
___________________________________________________________________
Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon
dioxide
Author : hhs
Score : 86 points
Date : 2022-09-08 14:23 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gu.se)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gu.se)
| mountaintimefrm wrote:
| So having read the article summary, then the research paper, then
| reading the article summary again... it seems that the summary
| isn't at all an accurate summary of the research paper, but
| rather a narrow focus on the suboptimal cases where tree growing
| isn't super effective at sequestering carbon. It sort of
| completely ignores the cases where they observed enhanced carbon
| sequestration, increases in soil organic carbon, enhanced soil
| nitrogen availability, etc.
|
| The emphatic message of the research paper is basically like,
| "tree growing to sequester carbon is very complicated, there's a
| lot we don't know, and there are a ton of different outcomes
| depending on how/where the tree growing is carried out."
|
| One part of the paper I found most interesting was the section on
| nitrogen fixing microorganisms; they made it seem like the
| nitrogen fixation occurs via microbes pulling nitrogen from the
| soil and making it available to the plants. However my
| understanding is that those nitrogen fixing microbes pull N from
| the air, not the soil. Even good ol' wikipedia says "The bacteria
| are filamentous and convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia via
| the enzyme nitrogenase, a process known as nitrogen fixation."
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankia) ... Undoubtedly there are
| microbes that can mine nitrogen from the soil, but why focus on
| those when the real bang-for-your-buck nitrogen fixation occurs
| when pulling nitrogen from the atmosphere.
|
| Anyhow, great research paper, crappy summary.
| frazbin wrote:
| hm not sure but I think at high growth rates the majority of
| soil N does come from decomposition even when nitrogen fixation
| is present.
| OJFord wrote:
| Regarding nitrogen fixing, my understanding is that 'green
| manure' & cover crops take from the air, leave in the soil -
| but microorganisms sounds like it's more in the context of
| composting, where whatever waste material is 'broken down'. So
| not 'soil' in the sense of 'it was already there anyway', but
| rather.. 'in the ground but needing to be made smaller and more
| available'.
| shagie wrote:
| Cover crops have a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen
| fixing bacteria that they maintain in their roots. When the
| crop is harvested (and the roots die), the nitrogen that was
| fixed by the bacteria in the roots remains in the soil.
|
| Free living, nitrogen fixing bacteria are free living and
| have a protein that allows them to fix nitrogen to allow
| faster growth than the bacteria that need to get their
| nitrogen through other processes. They are often anaerobic
| (or functionally anaerobic) and so flourish in areas that are
| oxygen poor (like soil and decomposing organic matter) and by
| fixing the nitrogen present they enable other organisms to
| live there (their nitrogen fixing allows fungus to become
| established in the decomposing organic matter - the bacteria
| themselves aren't doing the decomposition).
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paenibacillus_polymyxa is one
| such species of nitrogen fixing bacteria that forms a biofilm
| on plant roots, fixes nitrogen, and produces a substance that
| makes the plant roots more resistant to other pathogens.
| mountaintimefrm wrote:
| Thanks for that explanation. I assume by "free living" you
| mean they can exist by themselves in soil apart from plant
| roots (or at least for part of their lifecycle)? I'm more
| familiar with the ones that are symbiotic with plants,
| especially the ones for woody plants (Frankia, etc), which
| I think are largely of a different type than the ones that
| live on cover crop plants like clover.
|
| Soil and decomposing organic matter aren't necessarily
| oxygen poor environments, and in ideal conditions they
| aren't at all. Depending on factors like soil porosity, and
| rate/frequency of precipitation, there can actually be
| quite a lot of gas mechanically exchanged between the soil
| and the atmosphere (water fills up soil pore spaces and
| pushes out air, then water drains out of soil pore spaces,
| pulling air back in). Plant roots can respire atmospheric
| gases into soil as well. Part of the reason why compacted
| (ie minimal pore space) soil is harder to grow in than the
| same soil made friable, is because the lack of porosity
| causes the soil to go anaerobic, which is inhospitable to a
| lot of beneficial soil microorganisms.
| quixoticelixer- wrote:
| Not all cover crops are nitrogen fixing.
| badrabbit wrote:
| Why isn't there more focus on phytoplankton since it produces
| more O2? Maybe have a device that seeds/catalyzes their growth on
| every boat?
| TheBlight wrote:
| I don't think you can treat phytoplankton as having this
| singular property of O2 production. The ocean and its food
| chain is a complex system.
| thangalin wrote:
| Stop killing whales.
|
| https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2019/12/nat...
|
| > When it comes to saving the planet, one whale is worth
| thousands of trees.
|
| > Marine biologists have recently discovered that whales--
| especially the great whales--play a significant role in
| capturing carbon from the atmosphere.
|
| > In recent years, scientists have discovered that whales have
| a multiplier effect of increasing phytoplankton production
| wherever they go. How? It turns out that whales' waste products
| contain exactly the substances--notably iron and nitrogen--
| phytoplankton need to grow.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Sending plankton is a lot more scaling and economical than
| saving whales directly. It may also have the added benefit of
| increasing whale populations.
| detritus wrote:
| In addition to this, it's a belief of mine that we need to
| make shipping quieter too, so that we don't bother large sea
| creatures so much.
|
| If there's one use-case for civilian small-scale nuclear
| reactors in trasport, it's behemoth cargo ships. And yes, I
| get how complicating a matter that is in the short-term.
| Here's hoping one day (soon-ish) we can make hugely contained
| fail-safe reactors that don't act as a high prize for trrrsts
| and such... .
| Maursault wrote:
| > Stop killing whales.
|
| Definitely.
|
| But we should probably focus on stopping the major
| contributors of atmospheric carbon and greenhouse gasses. The
| idea that planting trees or saving whales will help us now is
| unrealistic. We'd make a huge dent if we double-timed
| replacing fossil fuel energy producers with clean energy
| production, whether geothermal, solar, wind, nuclear, or a
| little bit of everything, whatever. Then we should replace
| the entire global bunker oil burning shipping fleet. Then we
| should figure out how to replace or manufacture concrete
| cleanly, then glass. We should be using pure ethanol for air
| travel, how hard could it be to invent a clean airliner? Then
| we should regulate the meat industry into the ground, and
| figure out how to do agriculture cleanly without contributing
| to the problem. All ICE should be phased out within a decade.
| And we should do all these things with a mind towards global
| cooperation; if we want to remove a major contributor in a
| foreign country like China or South Africa or Turkey or
| Texas, we should be investing there in kind towards clean
| energy.
|
| Most of all we need to sacrifice, even the damn libertarians.
| We are energy and travel and consumer hogs. Every new
| structure should generate its own power, everything else
| converted into doing so. If everything was off-grid and
| clean, the petroleum and coal energy industry would vanish.
| 90% of what we need should be produced locally. We need to
| stop the clearing of forests and natural ecosystems for more
| urban sprawl that everyone hates.
|
| It is ridiculous how the elephants in the room are being
| ignored. If we'd just usher them out, it would be a lot
| easier on everyone and the planet.
| gumby wrote:
| This is an area of active research but at the moment
| essentially all such efforts are banned by the London Protocol.
|
| The ocean is 70% of the planet's surface and, I think, is where
| a lot of the work should go on.
| smallerfish wrote:
| > essentially all such efforts are banned by the London
| Protocol.
|
| Interesting, why? Plankton != dumping, right? Could there be
| contained plankton "farms" that are similar to fish farms?
| shagie wrote:
| https://www.whoi.edu/fileserver.do?id=24744&pt=2&p=28442 is
| specifically on the deliberate introduction of iron into
| the ocean ecology to stimulate plankton growth.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| There's been talk of dumping iron particles into the ocean to
| to spur phytoplankton growth [0].
|
| [0]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/iron-dumping-
| ocea...
| shagie wrote:
| This is known as the "Geritol solution" and was an idea that
| was debated back in the early 90s.
| anon291 wrote:
| Planting tree in Savannah is a terrible idea that no one is
| suggesting
|
| However planting new forests in forested areas, and harvesting
| trees periodically to encourage new growth is a great idea
| known wrote:
| simple10 wrote:
| Trees need to be cut and buried to effectively sequester carbon.
|
| Here's a detailed article on the technique
| https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0...
| vkou wrote:
| Won't this result in soil depletion, as you bury vital non-
| carbon nutrients?
| simple10 wrote:
| Good question. Maybe it depends on how deep they're buried
| and how far the nutrients leach into the surrounding soil.
| sp332 wrote:
| Perennial grasses are a great option for CO2 capture, and one
| that has been removed across large areas of the Midwest for farms
| and pastures. But I don't know if it would perform better in poor
| soil?
| hinkley wrote:
| My native plant friend has a rant I've heard twice and I gather
| he's given countless times.
|
| The logistics of a wetland restoration are that you get a lump of
| money to get a group to go out and stick plants in the ground,
| but the problem is that in an intact habitat plants compliment
| each other. Some won't grow next to tall plants, others will only
| grow next to tall plants. So a restoration should ideally be a
| series of planting events over three or four years, but that's
| either not 'sexy' enough for the financial and public policy
| people, or doesn't have the sense of closure they're chasing.
|
| Mass tree plantings aren't fundamentally different, and doing
| mass anything means disturbing the soil. The current wisdom is
| that there's a point of no return with soil compaction, where if
| you cross it, there are only two solutions: One is to raise the
| surface area of the soil to increase the distance, the other is
| is to wait for the next ice age to scrape it all up and
| precipitate it back out. Those compaction layers also affect the
| flow of groundwater, so building upward only solves part of your
| problem. And it's heavy work, so you're again tromping the
| ecosystem you're trying to save.
|
| The moral of the story is that if you disturb an area and end up
| with 90% dead trees, you may have done more harm than good.
| Floegipoky wrote:
| I bet your friend would be into mass "Earl comes by every year
| with a few buckets of native seed"- no closure, and definitely
| not sexy
| westurner wrote:
| "Hemp twice as effective at capturing carbon as trees, UK
| researcher says" (2021) https://hempindustrydaily.com/hemp-twice-
| as-effective-at-cap... :
|
| > _"Industrial hemp absorbs between 8 to 15 tonnes of CO2 per
| hectare (3 to 6 tonnes per acre) of cultivation."_
|
| > _Comparatively, forests capture 2 to 6 tonnes of carbon per
| hectare (0.8 to 2.4 tonnes per acre), depending on the region,
| number of years of growth, type of trees and other factors, Shah
| said._
|
| > _Shah, who studies engineered wood, bamboo, natural fiber
| composites and hemp [at Cambridge, UK], said hemp "offers an
| incredible scope to grow a better future" while producing fewer
| emissions than conventional crops and more usable fibers per
| hectare than forestry._
|
| "Cities of the future may be built with algae-grown limestone"
| (2022) https://www.colorado.edu/today/2022/06/23/cities-future-
| may-... :
|
| > _And limestone isn't the only product microalgae can create:
| microalgae's lipids, proteins, sugars and carbohydrates can be
| used to produce biofuels, food and cosmetics, meaning these
| microalgae could also be a source of other, more expensive co-
| products--helping to offset the costs of limestone production._
|
| Carbon sequestration:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration
| quixoticelixer- wrote:
| > > "Industrial hemp absorbs between 8 to 15 tonnes of CO2 per
| hectare (3 to 6 tonnes per acre) of cultivation."
|
| > Comparatively, forests capture 2 to 6 tonnes of carbon per
| hectare (0.8 to 2.4 tonnes per acre), depending on the region,
| number of years of growth, type of trees and other factors,
| Shah said.
|
| Per hectare PER YEAR. Trees can store much much more carbon per
| hectare.
| i5heu wrote:
| tonnes of carbon per hectare is not relevant.
|
| What you need is tonnes of carbon per hectare per year.
|
| We don't have enough space to let these plants be there, we
| need to convert them into coal and throw it back into the
| mines.
| samatman wrote:
| The efficient thing to do is render them into charcoal, yes.
|
| Biochar is a great soil amendment, and doesn't oxidize over
| decades or even centuries, depending. Putting it back in the
| mines is an option, if we ever need to stop rebuilding
| topsoil, which is itself getting urgent.
| quixoticelixer- wrote:
| Biochar is also intensive and only converts a relatively
| small amount of that carbon into stable charcoal.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| and it could fuel a biomass generator while you make the
| charcoal
| [deleted]
| tlb wrote:
| The figures given are per-year. The article is just sloppy
| with units.
| [deleted]
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Do you know of any papers investigating how kelp or other
| seaweeds compare? I've heard some biologists informally claim
| that they would be even more effective because they can grow
| incredibly fast.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| I thought trees were somewhat ideal because the carbon
| sequestered in them can be used as long-lived lumber. If the
| kelp sequesters carbon but then it gets released immediately
| when it decomposes or someone eats it, then it doesn't really
| solve the problem.
|
| We need to be putting carbon back into the ground where we
| got it, or at least converting into forms where it lives a
| long time on the surface (decades or centuries).
| westurner wrote:
| > _I thought trees were somewhat ideal because the carbon
| sequestered in them can be used as long-lived lumber._
|
| This is why hempcrete is ideal. But hemp, by comparison,
| doesn't result in a root-bound tree farm for wind break and
| erosion control; hemp can be left down to return nutrients
| to the soil or for soil remediation as it's a very
| absorbent plant (that draws e.g. heavy metals out of soil
| and into the plant)
| quixoticelixer- wrote:
| Why hempcrete when you could use wood?
|
| > Hemp can be left down to return nutrients to the soil
| or for soil remediation as it's a very absorbent plant
| (that draws e.g. heavy metals out of soil and into the
| plant)
|
| It won't remove heavy metals from the soil if you leave
| it there. You also can't turn it into a product if you
| leave it there.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| I think the idea with kelp would be to harvest it and use
| it for soil creation, but again this is from vague memory
| of an informal conversation with some biologists
| knoebber wrote:
| A redwood tree can live for more than 2000 years. That seems
| plenty long for carbon sequestration.
|
| We should pay the logging companies to save a certain number of
| trees instead of cutting them every 30 or so years.
| toast0 wrote:
| When the trees are logged for use as lumber, the carbon is
| sequestered into structures and new trees are typically planted
| (or allowed to grow) for future logging, capturing carbon in
| the meantime.
| knoebber wrote:
| Good point!
|
| I wonder if a 1000 year old tree would gather more or less
| carbon over it's lifetime than 20 separate 50 year old trees?
| quixoticelixer- wrote:
| Depends on the trees but if we are talking about redwoods
| its certainly more for the 1000 year old tree.
| zbrozek wrote:
| I recall reading somewhere that trees follow a sigmoid
| growth pattern, reaching a maturity where they no longer
| create a whole lot more biomass. I think the 20 separate
| trees would do better.
| TEP_Kim_Il_Sung wrote:
| Giant Sequoias need forrest fires to reproduce. Their pine
| cones won't open without sufficient heat. This makes sense, if
| you consider the dense forests these trees create.
| knoebber wrote:
| Older / larger redwoods can survive intense fires. Their bark
| is fire resistant.
| dendrite9 wrote:
| That is less and less true. The intensity of the fires has
| changed due to the recent history of excessive fire
| suppression and the resulting fuel accumulation.
|
| https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/wildfires-kill-
| unprecedente...
| michaelwww wrote:
| I don't understand people who like to point out the planting
| trees is not always as green as people think it is. Planting
| trees is always good in my book. We can plant trees and do the
| better thing.
|
| "quitting smoking is not always an effective way of avoiding
| cancer"
|
| "walking in nature is not always effective in preventing heart
| attack"
|
| "quitting gambling is not always an effective way of avoiding
| bankruptcy"
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| If done incorrectly, it can cause ecological harm and provide
| little benefit. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, just that
| it should be done carefully.
| michaelwww wrote:
| That's just common sense. You don't waste your time planting
| trees where they won't grow or will crowd out existing
| plants.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| Something something about common sense isn't all that
| common. :) China has had some issues with planting
| absolutely massive monocultures that end up looking nice on
| paper but being bad in the long run.
| michaelwww wrote:
| The CCP aren't exactly experts on the environment. They
| are quite careless about disposing toxic waste in rivers.
| A friend of mine told me this story recently. While he
| was working for Apple, he visited a factory and the owner
| started crying in his presence how Apple was telling them
| they would be dropped if they didn't stop polluting and
| he said it was too late, that the land they were on was
| toxic and Apple dropping them would put hundreds out of
| work.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The biosphere is essentially in steady-state on human lifetime
| scales. Estimates are that 100 gigatons of carbon are released to
| the atmosphere as CO2 by fungal and animal and bacterial action
| on plant material, and an equivalent 100 gigatons are taken up by
| photosynthesis.
|
| There were periods in the geological timeline where
| photosynthesis >> respiration and the result was massive
| accumulation of coal and oil deposits, such as the during the
| Carboniferous era (~350 million years ago).
|
| Of course there are many good reasons to do reforestation -
| prevention of erosion, a supply of timber, habitat for wildlife,
| retention of water, etc. Offsetting fossil fuel emissions is not
| one of those reasons.
|
| [edit: on medium length (10K year) timescales, there is an effect
| of storage of photosynthesis products, one that's involved in the
| past ~2 million year ice age cycle (with periods of around 100K
| years). There are two processes: storage of photosynthetic
| products in the deep ocean, related to decreased circulation, and
| storage in permafrost, related to growth of permanent ice, that
| slowly decrease atmospheric CO2 during the descent into ice
| ages.]
| Gravityloss wrote:
| While it's a good point that plant sequestration of CO2 is slow
| compared to digging up coal, oil or methane and burning it,
| it's not meaningless.
| ravenstine wrote:
| It's not meaningless, but it's an example of humanity chasing
| its own tail.
|
| Photosynthesis is not the most efficient process in the
| equation by far. It is competing against two things; a system
| that can use lots of oxygen as an oxidizer to release energy,
| and titanic stockpiles of hydrocarbons waiting to be burned.
| An animal can either consume plants after they've done their
| job or consume other animals, and use animated lungs to
| consume a constant stream of oxygen that can be used to
| _oxidize_ the energy substrate. Plants can only use
| photosynthesis, which is much less efficient of an energy
| transfer than respiration (creating molecules instead of
| breaking them apart). Because plants are stuck with
| photosynthesis as a food source, they are limited by its
| speed. Plants still need oxygen to respirate the food they
| create for themselves, but they cannot afford lungs and a
| cardiovascular system to utilize more oxygen. If they could,
| then they might as well be eating other organisms that
| already performed the hard work for them.
|
| What I'm saying is that humans, being respiration animals,
| are _always_ competing with plants, and do even more so when
| they release carbon from reserves in the earth. The ability
| of artificially propagated plants to compete against that
| system is minuscule. It can only compete with surface area,
| and for humans to be able to even make a dent in atmospheric
| CO2 by planting trees would mean planting way more trees than
| is likely worth their own expended energy. In such a
| scenario, the tables are flipped, and the animals (humans)
| are competing against the inefficiency of photosynthesis and
| must use enough energy to compensate. That is neither a
| proven strategy nor sustainable. Just as body fat can _in
| theory_ be lost entirely through exercise, it is orders of
| magnitude more efficient to simply not introduce more energy
| into the system (i.e. consume less food, and eat food with
| fewer if any deleterious side effects).
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The point is, plant matter is not geologically sequestrated
| in the present world. The oceans are oxygenated and
| circulation is pretty strong, and permafrost is decreasing,
| not increasing. Hence, any photosynthesized carbon material
| will be returned to the atmosphere as CO2 relatively quickly.
|
| The only way to sequester carbon is to make something like
| limestone (Ca/Mg + CO2 + H2O -> (Ca/Mg)CO3) and that requires
| calcium or magnesium ions. There are some sources of those
| ions, but not that many. Another option is production of
| something like carbon fiber material, or even better, blocks
| of diamond.
| wikfwikf wrote:
| Why can't you just create oil or coal or similar products?
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Well, the only reason to do that is to combust those
| products to create energy, right? If you want to bury the
| oil or coal as a means of carbon sequestration, well I
| suppose you could do that with wood instead, but if
| people _really_ want to stablilize atmospheric CO2, the
| first step is to stop using fossil fuels entirely.
| Klapaucius wrote:
| Sequestring CO2 is a huge scale problem, and all solutions have
| significant flaws. Forests require vasts amounts of land, and
| storage is only assured as long as nobody decides to chop down
| the forest for other more pressing purposes (looking at you,
| Brazil). Storing CO2 in oceans (either in the form of "ocean
| fertilization" or by directly dissolving CO2 in seawater) could
| have huge and unknown consequences for marine ecosystems. Other
| solutions such as biochar and enhanced weathering of minerals
| have limited scalability.
|
| As I see it, Geological CO2 storage (CCS) may be the only large-
| scale practical way going forward, despite all the bad rap it
| gets due to its historical association with the fossile fuel
| industry. After all, the excess C in the system came from the
| ground, and the ground may be the only place able to re-absorb it
| without significant environmental consequences.
| modo_mario wrote:
| >despite all the bad rap it gets due to its historical
| association with the fossile fuel industry.
|
| It's not really historical as in far in the past. The
| relatively recent bill pushed by Trump that gives massive tax
| credits for CO2 sequestration were a veiled subsidy(or whatever
| you wish to call it) towards extracting more oil with enhanced
| oil recovery.
| Klapaucius wrote:
| Even if proposed for vicarious motives, the technology as
| such may still be the right way to go.
|
| From an environmental perspective, CO2 sequestration for EOR
| (enhanced oil recovery) makes little sense, other than
| reducing the carbon footprint of production a bit,
| demonstrating the storage principle and further developing
| key technology.
|
| What makes more sense is to use geological storage for CO2
| captured from industrial processes other than power
| generation - production of cement, steel and chemicals, in
| other words processes that would release large amounts of CO2
| even if switching 100% to renewable energy.
|
| Also, we need some place to store all that CO2 that
| purportedly would be captured using DAC (direct air capture)
| in the future.
| kokojie wrote:
| Is it possible to vent the CO2 into space?
| shagie wrote:
| The earth is constantly 'venting' gas to space. This is known
| as atmospheric escape.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape
|
| The earth is currently losing 3kg/s hydrogen and 50g/s of
| helium because that's what is in the upper atmosphere where a
| molecule can gain sufficient velocity to escape the orbit.
|
| The issue with CO2 is that it is a heavier gas and so takes
| more energy to escape and is also more likely to fall. Left
| on its own over a sufficiently long time period, you'll end
| up with an atmosphere that is mostly rarefied carbon dioxide
| (see Mars).
|
| Ejecting CO2 from ground level to the upper atmosphere and
| beyond in the quantities that are talked about when dealing
| with carbon sequestration (tons - not kilograms or grams)
| would be very energy intensive and using current technologies
| (we don't have surplus non-carbon based energy) would mean
| that we are adding to the total amount of carbon instead of
| reducing it.
| whiddershins wrote:
| Carbon is necessary for all life.
|
| It might be in the wrong place (atmosphere) but we definitely
| want it on the earth, not in outer space.
| mplewis wrote:
| No.
| sam-s wrote:
| Everything is possible.
|
| Feasible is a different issue.
|
| It is hugely expensive (give CO2 escape velocity) and
| wasteful (CO2 is a valuable substance, containing 2 important
| elements).
| gonzo41 wrote:
| Short answer is no. CO2 is sitting at about 400ppm( parts per
| million(. So take a million things, say golf balls, and paint
| 400 of them red. The rest white. Put them in a container,
| then search for the red balls. The goal is to get at least
| ~150 to 200 before you have to look at the next batch.
| There's not really a quick way to do that.
|
| Green house gas is such a hard problem because it's a
| dispersed problem. This is where we need to stop removing
| plant life from the earth, and start seriously considering a
| little bit of CRISPR to tweak plants to grow fast and absorb
| as much co2 as possible. It'd also be great if we started
| iron seeding the southern ocean to kick that ecosystem into
| gear as we really need evertying to start sequestering
| carbon.
| fatherzine wrote:
| "start seriously considering a little bit of CRISPR"
|
| We should consider taking a collective pause to think
| things through. Our extensive technology use is pushing
| ecosystems out of balance at planet scale. Perhaps the
| solution is NOT more technology, with inherently unknown
| longterm consequences.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| Unless we quickly get much better at this at some point
| not long from now we are going to end up in a situation
| where such reckless solutions might be the only options
| we have left.
| quixoticelixer- wrote:
| It actually is more technology. Our extensive techonology
| use it not pushing ecosystems out of balance. It's our
| massive land use changes and requirements for land that
| are.
| criddell wrote:
| I don't think this is a great explanation. I could build a
| machine that would get rid of 200 red balls (out of a
| million) in 30 minutes. It's a linearly parallelizable
| problem, so with enough machines, I could make it go as
| quickly as you'd like.
| Knufferlbert wrote:
| Don't know, seems like a good explanation. We have a
| number of machines that can take CO2 out, the "enough
| machines" is the problem.
|
| - they either require space (forests or whatever)
|
| - are hard to produce in sufficient numbers (materials,
| production capabilities)
|
| - are expensive to run (like energy input, maintenance),
| in particular don't generate new red balls while removing
| them.
|
| - disposal cost (where the machine becomes the carbon,
| like trees, cutting them down and doing something with
| that)
|
| Once we got it out, on a "pile of carbon", the problem
| becomes much easier.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| Maybe we could use a massively scalable set of machinery
| that uses sunlight to produce energy and sequester
| carbon. Seems like the machinery could be nature
| inspired... or maybe just natural. Plants could just be
| the answer we are all reaching for here.
| criddell wrote:
| You want to find _an_ answer? I believe the solution (if
| any is to be found) is going to be a combination of
| dozens of different actions. So grow plants and build
| machines and dump iron in the ocean and cut down on oil
| use and move people away from coasts around the equator
| and come up with some type of global basic income and
| build nuclear reactors and windmills and geothermal and
| move to electric cars and redesign cities to reduce the
| need for cars and come up with a plan for colonizing the
| stars and embrace GMOs to reduced the impact of
| agriculture and encourage people to eat less meat and so
| on.
| shagie wrote:
| One of my favorite channels on YouTube is Kurzgesagt and
| they recently (looking at date, well, last year - still
| recent in the scale of things) had a video on global
| warming - Can YOU Fix Climate Change?
| https://youtu.be/yiw6_JakZFc
|
| There's also
|
| Do we Need Nuclear Energy to Stop Climate Change? -
| https://youtu.be/EhAemz1v7dQ
|
| Is It Too Late To Stop Climate Change? Well, it's
| Complicated. - https://youtu.be/wbR-5mHI6bo
| shagie wrote:
| As you are doing this, you need energy. You either need
| it from a source that doesn't generate red balls and thus
| is sufficiently dense energy to be useful, or leave the
| density of red balls after you've identified 200 to be
| remove lower than it was before you started.
| shagie wrote:
| On that gene editing...
|
| (background on C3 vs C4 plants)
| https://ripe.illinois.edu/blog/difference-
| between-c3-and-c4-...
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3075750/
|
| https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2021.7153
| 9...
|
| https://innovativegenomics.org/projects/improving-
| photosynth...
|
| https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/can-
| w...
| xenadu02 wrote:
| > storage is only assured as long as nobody decides to chop
| down the forest for other more pressing purposes
|
| Yes and no; if we're talking about logging for lumber then it's
| really a question of efficiency. Logging in optimal ways helps
| you minimize carbon release and maximize wood production long-
| term. If most of the wood is used in construction the carbon
| remains captured so long as the building stands or the timber
| is re-used or eventually buried, i.e. scrap wood from a tear-
| down or remodel isn't burned or left near enough to the surface
| to rot.
|
| Setting aside land for logging this way has the benefit of
| using economic activity to our advantage. There are obviously
| limits but there is no one magic solution to climate change.
| fatherzine wrote:
| "storage is only assured as long as nobody decides to chop down
| the forest"
|
| In 2020 "the Lionshead Fire [...] have almost completely
| engulfed the largest forest dedicated to sequestering carbon
| dioxide in the state [of Oregon]". Turns out that Nature may
| also decide to destroy a forest. Biomass comes and goes. As you
| stated, geostorage is the only solution that makes sense from a
| first principles perspective.
|
| https://grist.org/climate/this-oregon-forest-was-supposed-to...
| ehnto wrote:
| Wildfire is a natural part of many forest ecosystems, so it
| is definitely worth factoring that into plans for CO2
| capture. Perhaps we can lean more heavily on high carbon
| capturing forests for construction and furniture again.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| 'Not always'. Sure, trees are enduring, nice to look at, make
| things cooler and might help with carbon dioxide. Let's plant
| them anyway.
| baryphonic wrote:
| I found the arguments in the article rather weak. One was that
| trees die. True enough. But if you plant 100 trees and 10 die
| within ten years, that's still quite a bit of CO2 converted
| into O2. It may not scale so well, sure. But as far as I can
| tell, neither do wind & solar. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to
| make the best use of them.
| Floegipoky wrote:
| And for those that die, something else will grow. I found
| myself thinking "they're literally missing the forest for the
| trees".
| soperj wrote:
| Nearly all the trees we plant are planted to cut down
| eventually.
| quixoticelixer- wrote:
| Even so you still have 30-100 years of carbon
| sequestration.
| jokoon wrote:
| I wonder if there are plants/trees that grow fast and capture a
| lot of CO2, that you could just cut early, bury, plant another
| and repeat.
|
| Maybe a GMO kind of tree that just grows fast? I've read that
| it's the young trees that capture a lot of CO2.
|
| I guess one could imagine large areas dedicated for this kind of
| operation, but it's really difficult to know if it would really
| be effective, and those plants could become invasive.
|
| The best solution is still to stop using cars and airplanes, ban
| plastics, force companies to make durable and repairable
| products, degrowing the economy and enforce sobriety everywhere.
|
| I know most americans refuse to listen to de-growth, but they
| need to change their mind quickly.
| quixoticelixer- wrote:
| There are those trees but the difficult bit it finding a cheap
| was to bury thousands of tonnes of wood so that it won't
| decompose.
| danans wrote:
| Biochar [1] is a potential approach to long term carbon
| sequestration using waste biomass that has the positive side
| effect of enriching agriculture soils and producing biofuels, and
| it does not require special caverns like CCS.
|
| There are potential unknown negative side effects of reducing
| environmental plant residues from current levels, however, so the
| choice of feedstock biomass shouldn't be taken lightly. Perhaps
| it should be made from human waste streams or fast growing
| grasses from areas that have high regeneration potential.
|
| Then again, agriculture itself has fundamentally modified
| ecosystems for centuries, so there's not much that is timeless or
| sacred about the current state of industrial agricultural land.
| If it's a question of whether the leftover crop matter rots and
| CO2 is released, or is captured long term in biochar, then its
| compelling to consider it.
|
| https://www.patch.io/blog/biochar
| Tyndale wrote:
| TEP_Kim_Il_Sung wrote:
| Now lets find a way to sequester volcanic CO2!
| colechristensen wrote:
| Yes you need to build ecosystems not just plant trees.
| Monoculture tree stands are often mostly empty of other life.
|
| You need to plant a variety of native species keeping track of
| keystone species and year round food production so that your
| forest supports other life.
| goda90 wrote:
| A "keystone species" that is important for a lot of ecosystems
| but on the surface seems contradictory to the goal of carbon
| sequestration is wild fires. A stand of coniferous trees can
| block out light year round, limiting all other species of
| plants from growing underneath, but a fire will make the holes
| in the canopy that they need to spring up. Likewise,
| grasslands, which sequester a lot of carbon in their
| roots/soil, depend on fire to keep out trees and letting
| prairie plants thrive.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| There is a grove of red pine near where I grew up that was
| planted row on row about 15 feet apart. These trees are 70+
| years old but most of them are only 7-8 inches in diameter. The
| floor of this grove is just red with pine needles, nothing else
| can grow and any animals are just passing through.
|
| Whenever I hear about planting trees for "carbon
| sequestration", I immediately remember walking through that
| forest and thinking how quiet and dead it felt.
| TEP_Kim_Il_Sung wrote:
| Look into permaculture; It is all about restoring natural
| forest floors!
|
| Geoff Lawton and Sepp Holzer are good people to look into.
| adolph wrote:
| From Ch 1, Seeing Like a State By James C. Scott:
|
| _The great simplification of the forest into a "one-commodity
| machine" was precisely the step that allowed German forestry
| science to become a rigorous technical and commercial
| discipline that could be codified and taught. A condition of
| its rigor was that it severely bracketed, or assumed to be
| constant, all variables except those bearing directly on the
| yield of the selected species and on the cost of growing and
| extracting them. As we shall see with urban planning,
| revolutionary theory, collectivization, and rural resettlement,
| a whole world lying "outside the brackets" returned to haunt
| this technical vision._
|
| _In the German case, the negative biological and ultimately
| commercial consequences of the stripped-down forest became
| painfully obvious only after the second rotation of conifers
| had been planted. "It took about one century for them [the
| negative consequences] to show up clearly. Many of the pure
| stands grew excellently in the first generation but already
| showed an amazing retrogression in the second generation. The
| reason for this is a very complex one and only a simplified
| explanation can be given.... Then the whole nutrient cycle got
| out of order and eventually was nearly stopped.... Anyway, the
| drop of one or two site classes [used for grading the quality
| of timber] during two or three generations of pure spruce is a
| well known and frequently observed fact. This represents a
| production loss of 20 to 30 percent."_
|
| _A new term, Waldsterben (forest death), entered the German
| vocabulary to describe the worst cases. An exceptionally
| complex process involving soil building, nutrient uptake, and
| symbiotic relations among fungi, insects, mammals, and flora--
| which were, and still are, not entirely understood--was
| apparently disrupted, with serious consequences. Most of these
| consequences can be traced to the radical simplicity of the
| scientific forest._
|
| https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/sc...
|
| Azn link for HN Books: https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-
| State-Certain-Condition/d...
| wikfwikf wrote:
| Why do you care about the forest supporting other life? Isn't
| the goal just to take carbon out of the atmosphere?
| monknomo wrote:
| The more life a forest supports, generally, the more carbon
| gets removed and the longer the forest lives.
| quixoticelixer- wrote:
| That's not necessarily true
| colechristensen wrote:
| Ecosystems grow, maintain themselves, and can be better at
| sequestering carbon.
|
| Random example: blue jays plant oak trees. They like acorns,
| pick them off trees and bury them for later, and forget some.
| If you have an ecosystem that supports blue jays your forest
| will expand without fundraisers and government programs.
|
| Ecosystems fix carbon in more active biomass than just tree
| trunks. If you get soil building ecosystems and ecosystems
| that put more carbon in living creatures, you have less
| carbon in the atmosphere. The extra CO2 in the atmosphere is
| like fertilizer, and you can get life to utilize it more and
| grab more of it out of the atmosphere by supporting it in
| small ways so it can go on to support itself.
| TSiege wrote:
| Absolutely. Our ways of thinking about the environment are
| trapped in the past. Where we focus on one variable and miss
| the importance and resilience that comes from a holistic
| approach. We need to be encouraging the right ecosystems for
| the right environment. For example, we need to be encouraging
| native grassland ecosystems in the great plains, not forests.
| Native grasses can have root systems 8 feet deep to deal with
| droughts and erosion, a forest just doesn't make sense there
| Floegipoky wrote:
| We need to plant trees to "ride the wave" of climate change by
| mitigating ecological collapse and desertification. Carbon
| sequestration is just gravy; from the estimates I've seen the
| time scale is, IMO, beyond the scope of our species.
| Floegipoky wrote:
| > The researchers also warn that the actual planting of trees can
| have major negative effects. A heath or tundra-like land is a
| good carbon sink as it is. If machines roll in to prepare the
| soil for planting, there is a high risk that the carbon bound in
| the soil will be released into the atmosphere.
|
| X is harmful if you go out of your way to do X in the most
| harmful way. How insightful! /s
| remote_phone wrote:
| This looks like an article that wanted to give a particular
| outcome (that trees are not enough) and backed into that out with
| a study that "proved" it.
|
| However I can't find a link to the actual study in the article.
|
| Has there ever been a study that linked the increase in CO2 to
| the increased logging efforts in places around the world?
| foobarian wrote:
| It's alarming how much ignorance there is about forests being
| carbon neutral in steady state. The sooner we can get cars and
| power plants off fossil fuels the better.
| advisedwang wrote:
| It's linked at the bottom:
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gcb.16351
| ajuc wrote:
| My main problem with planting trees is - you're not planting
| seeds, but seedlings. These seedlings were already growing
| elsewhere, you just burned some fuel to transport them to another
| place.
|
| Additionally at least in my region whenever I leave a plot of
| land unattended for a few years - tree appear on it. If you leave
| it for more than a decade it becomes a forest.
|
| So - it seems the important part is assigning land for forests
| and not bothering the trees that will grow there. The tree-
| planting is optional.
| quixoticelixer- wrote:
| The amount of fuel used by transporting 10,000 seedlings is
| easily sequestered by just one of them growing.
| olivermarks wrote:
| https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/OceanCarbon
|
| 'Oceans take up carbon dioxide through photosynthesis by plant-
| like organisms (phytoplankton), as well as by simple chemistry:
| carbon dioxide dissolves in water. It reacts with seawater,
| creating carbonic acid. Carbonic acid releases hydrogen ions,
| which combine with carbonate in seawater to form bicarbonate, a
| form of carbon that doesn't escape the ocean easily'.
|
| We need to be doing more to enhance the performance of the half
| of the planet that is covered by water and which is the primary
| source of carbon dioxide processing imo
| debacle wrote:
| Trees are enduring. Certain trees take forever to decay.
|
| It's "slow sequestration" but it lasts a long time. Hardwood is
| very valuable, and growing more valuable, and trees are pretty.
|
| Everything else might sequester the carbon faster, but a tree is
| "forever."
|
| And you wouldn't just plant trees on that piece of land. You
| could interplant other sequestration for probably 15 years before
| it was no longer viable, or raise livestock, whatever.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| Trees absorb while growing. Reach "max CO2" At which point you
| need to cut down the trees and plant the next generation. You
| somehow store the trees so they will not have any risk of
| releasing the CO2 again.(like if they burn)
|
| or at least that is was Neal Stephenson wrote in his latest book.
| (fiction is always great for scientific knowledge)
| quixoticelixer- wrote:
| Most trees take >100 years to reach "max CO2"
| arbuge wrote:
| Building with the lumber from them is one way of storing them.
| Even that is not infinite though, though it could buy you a lot
| more time until renewables and possibly CCS become more viable.
| DayDollar wrote:
| Ironically, ice fracking large amounts of stone and filtering
| atmosphere gas rich water through that is more effective. But you
| goto expell large amounts of energy to turn the rock "spongy".
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| Planting monocultures of trees is probably not ideal for plenty
| of reasons. Maybe there is some argument for re-wilding, allowing
| land to return to its natural (or as natural as it can given the
| proliferation of non-native species in the adjacent area).
| quixoticelixer- wrote:
| Planting monoculture also has big advantages
| oliwary wrote:
| I recently looked up the difference in CO2 emissions between
| burning 1kg wood vs 1kg petrol. Surprisingly, the values are
| relatively close:
|
| Burning 1kg wood releases 1.65 - 1.8 kg of CO2. [0]
|
| Burning 1kg of crude oil releases 3.16 kg of CO2. [1][2]
|
| I would have expected the carbon density of oil to be much
| higher! To me, this suggests that a very naive approach of
| growing trees and storing them in the places where we obtained
| the oil would be a hypothetically feasible way of significantly
| reducing the CO2 content in the air. And that is before the wood
| has been turned into charcoal etc. What am I missing?
|
| [0] https://www.kaltimber.com/blog/2017/6/19/how-much-co2-is-
| sto... [1] https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-
| equivalencies-ca... [2]
| https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Barrels_of_oil_equiv...
| tlb wrote:
| Oil doesn't come from huge caverns that we could drop trees
| into. Oil is often deep underground, soaked into porous rock.
| So wood would have to be liquified before attempting to pump it
| into oil wells, and it ruins the well for future use.
|
| Wood is valuable and other plant material is similar carbon/kg,
| so the low-hanging fruit is to take agricultural waste
| (currently burned or left to rot) and bury it. Hauling all that
| straw around burns a lot of fuel, so it's not clear how well it
| scales compared to other approaches.
| vkou wrote:
| > so the low-hanging fruit is to take agricultural waste
| (currently burned or left to rot) and bury it.
|
| Which would, as in the case with 'cut and bury trees' deplete
| the soil of non-carbon nutrients. There's a reason farmers
| leave that waste 'to rot'.
| quixoticelixer- wrote:
| You can pretty easily replace those nutrients though.
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