While I appreciate the sentiment, this is straight from grandma's facebook feed.
Broken clock, etc.
that’s all OP posts anyway. FB meme “humour “
Slap a cackling minion in the corner for maximum effect.
Trees are great and all but there's much better carbon sinks, algae is a big one.
You mean the stuff that grows in what we use as global garbage sink?
"Aaaahhh, the ocean.. the toilet of the world!"
Doing some back of the envelope calculations we have put about 1.6 trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution. Latest estimates put the number of trees on earth at around 3 trillion. Looking at how much CO2 a tree takes up puts the average around 600lbs over the first twenty years. So combing all this if we want to plant enough trees to take up all the excess CO2 we would need about 5.3 trillion more trees, or almost double the total number of trees on the planet.
This is simply not achievable in a fast enough time span to make a difference. Nevermind that I was being super optimistic with all my calculations and the real number needed is likely much higher still.
It is simply a necessity to develop better methods to pull CO2 directly from the air and to do it on the same scale that we have been releasing CO2.
It is simply a necessity to develop better methods to pull CO2 directly from the air and to do it on the same scale that we have been releasing CO2.
Instead of wasting energy and effort trying to remove existing CO2 from the air, people should instead spend effort on not releasing more carbon dioxide into the air. It's similar to things like plastic waste where it's better not to create any waste than to recycle plastic, or the same as private transport where it's better to not have or drive a private car or private jet than to drive or fly energy efficient.
There's about 0.05% CO2 in the air. So pulling CO2 from the air is as inefficient as it gets. It's somewhere between moving to Antarctica to bathe in the sun and using the full moon for solar panels.
The theoretical best place to sun bathe is, unsurprisingly, on the sun! Similarly it's best to scrub CO2 at the source, meaning the exhausts! Filter it at motors, kilns, chimneys, etc.
We have to do both. If today our emissions went to zero we would still see more warming because of all that CO2 we've already released. First priority is to get to net zero so we can stop making the problem worse, then we have to remove all the CO2 we released. We have the technology now to do step one it's just a matter of scaling it up. While we work on step one we need to do the research on the best way to do step two so when we get to that point we have something ready to go. Pulling CO2 out of the air is going to be inefficient no matter what just from the physics of the problem but it still needs to be done and the energy to do so has to come from renewables.
One proposed solution is using the excess energy production during peak hours for renewables to sequester carbon which would help but likely only be a small initial step in the right direction.
How do we get these "trees" into a decentralized block chain with integrated AI? Only then will we get people to carelessly throw money at them.
Its capitalism, no one will invest in technology that can not be patented.
We all die to preserve the market.
Oops, it turns out mass extinction event really hurts the market.
It's going to be so dumb when that is the actual argument that wins over corporate America.
Yeah you fucking idiots, ruling the ashes defeats the purpose.
"Imagine if trees gave off Wifi signals, we would be planting so many trees and we'd probably save the planet too. Too bad they only produce the oxygen we breathe."
-- Tarun Sarathe
I'm saddened by the deforestation I've seen in my hometown. A lot of kids would go to hang out and play in the forests, but it looks like only the designated protected areas some distance off will be left in the future. Having wildlife in one's back yard will be reduced to a novelty.
but does it make the line go up tho
Does it make line go up faster than last year?
Trees only store CO² for a limited time. Then you need to somehow store it in the holes we got the oil out from. I prefer algae.
Algae or hemp. Hemp stores 85% of the carbon in its roots, so you can use the rest of the plant. Just collect the roots and compress them to a density that will NOT float and dump the root cubes into the Mariana Trench. That carbon will be trapped for a few tens to hundreds of millions of years. Also one acre of hemp pulls 10 times more carbon out of the air that one acre of trees does per harvest, and you can harvest the hemp 4 times a year as opposed to once every 60 years.
Just collect the roots and compress them to a density that will NOT float and dump the root cubes into the Mariana Trench.
Or throw them into a strip mine or oil well seal it up. Not like we don't have a ton of giant holes in our ground after a century of fossil fuel extraction.
I would be worried about seepage into and out of those holes, but I suppose it is unlikely to turn into something toxic...
This. Also, they're kinda slow. Unfortunately, we're in need of solutions that (in addition to using plants) work much, much faster.
You don't have to go THAT far, you can bury it over time through regenerative agriculture. Also, crazy I know, you can build durable structures with them. That said, the substantial majority of carbon sequestered by forests is in the soil as part of the lifecycle of the forest, therefore preserving trees, especially forests is extremely vital much more so than planting new trees. Restoring forests and wetlands is also vital but It takes a long time for a forest ecosystem to develop, and if you're trying to just convert land to rapidly sequester CO2, bamboo plantations and algae farms are faster.
There's a tiny creature that consumes much more CO2, cyanobacteria. Trees provide windbreaks, shade, and habitats, but cyanobacteria are the OG carbon sequesters.
Cut it down and build with it too. I wonder if this community dislikes that thought.
I was surprised to not see this until the very bottom. There’s usually a panel about it in a lot of the environment and conservation conferences I go to for work. Storing the carbon in tree trunks and the using that wood in to build the housing that’s required is a long term carbon sink.
If you really want carbon capture protect your wetlands. They're truly the best.
Trees are great but part of a larger picture of ecosystems that do a great job of taking co2 out of air and building with it. Soil is a huge deal for how effective ecosystems are at scrubbing co2. All plants die off and decay but much of their carbon can get sequestered into the soil. Healthy soil has deeper microbes and insects breaking down and sequestering better, and improving future plants growth.
Basically stop lawnmowing and industrial farming.
There are all these micro machines that suck up a lot more C02 it is called hemp
A tree absorbs about 25 kg of CO2 per year. A human breathes out about 250 kg of CO2 per year.
Trees are great, but not all that efficient. To deal with the amount of CO2 humanity is currently producing, we'd need a whole lot more of them.
That's just breathing.
A gallon of gas is nearly 9kg.
A ton is 1000kg. And it costs about $160 to capture it. So $1.44 per gallon to recapture it's CO2.
Costs are USD.
Could you imagine a 40% tax on gasoline to pay for carbon capture?
We're all fucked.
Not only can I imagine it, I think we should go for it. The goal ought to be one cylinder per person, a family of four gets driven around with a 1.6L naturally aspirated V4 engine.
Keep it balanced between simple and efficient.
We burned millions of years of plant growth within a few hundred years. Trees alone won’t make a dent within the time frame that’s necessary to stave off that 2 degrees increase. Even if we covered every square meter on the planet with trees. We need to start using every solution we can think of to slow down climate change within a few generations. This includes natural solutions like trees, plants and algae and man made solution like sequestering, direct air capture and even geo engineering.
So it turns out that trees are actually carbon neutral, and aren’t carbon sinks like previously assumed.
The tree does store co2 in a sense, but as much co2 is also produced by the tree during its life cycle, it’s leafs are eaten by bugs, the leaves that fall to the ground decompose and also provide feed to microorganisms.
Now once the tree is dead, it also decomposes releasing co2 as well as providing food for bugs and organisms that all turn it to co2 as well.
Nature is wonderful, but they were completely wrong about trees scrubbing co2 from the atmosphere.
If the tree dies or is cut down and burnt, then absolutely, yeah. But a tree can survive for many decades, which is time when the CO2 is not in the atmosphere. Ultimately, the solution is to plant more trees and not cut them down until enough CO2 is bound.
You can turn it into biochar. (turn it into carbon) the carbon becomes stable for centuries and you can put it in compost to boost beneficial bacteria, use it to filter runoff, etc. You can just crush it and just throw it on the grass. You get about 50% stable carbon from whatever biomass you use.
A solution for a small but notable chunk of the problem perhaps.
There’s no way that we can solve the entire problem that way.
Before human civilisation trees covered entire nations that are mostly bare today. Humanity cut down a lot of trees during prehistory, and it presumably had an impact on the climate. But it was nothing compared to our fossil fuel burning.
And that’s pretty much the upper limit of what we can dream of achieving, realistically it seems unlikely that the UK will ever go back to mostly woodland, what countries will? Its have to be most of the countries in viable climates, and probably means most farmland, and we’d still just make a small blip compared to the scale of the problem.
Once we’re truly carbon neutral, and we’ve covered the world in trees, we’ll still have more carbon in the atmosphere, a lot more, and I guess a few billion starving people since we’ve turned the farms into forests that can’t sustain our population, and we’d still be a few degrees warmer.
We need a way to turn co2 back to solid carbon that won’t decompose, that’s the only way out long term (lower priority than carbon neutral of course).
Not to say that planting trees is bad or anything, it’s just not a solution to the level of problem we’ve created, it never could be.
An individual tree is neutral, but a forest is carbon negative as long as it exists.
They're CO2 storages that can provide fruits, shadow, oxygen and other nice things. That's pretty neat.
Yea CO2 storage and also help cool the vicinity around themselves
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