Planting tree is actually a great carbon removal technology. Unfortunately most forest owners in the world don't know or don't have incentive to care the about the carbon impact the forest have on the climate. Biggest reason forests are taken down is to grow cattle for beef. If you are working on a startup to reverse this we'd like to fund it too
Joel Salatin has done some great work related to this and collected decades worth of data.
So the irony is that we could grow more beef and pull carbon out of the air at the same time, only if we cared. But we don't, it's easier to slash and burn then to also take the environment into consideration...
I want this desperately to be true as someone who loves meat but everything I've read tells me it's not. There is definitely a nice symbiotic relationship that exists between cows grazing and grasslands but it is significantly more expensive to raise animals this way, and you can raise significantly fewer of them per sq ft.
The main issue with cows is methane, not carbon (edit: carbon dioxide*), anyway.
It is cheaper to raise them this way because you don’t need to buy corn feed.
The cows digest grass well. They do not digest corn well, which means corn fed cows produce methane and get sick, and don’t build the soil (sequestering carbon).
Definitely worth watching some YouTube videos and reading about it, it’s pretty fun and interesting.
Salatin's solution is to shift a major portion of the work force/economy into making sustainable food. It sounds amazing from a utopian standpoint but is a total fantasy.
Sounds like a win / win.
Although objectively it makes the most sense if we all eat less meat or even go vegan (in terms of bang-for-the-buck), from what I understand the methane problem is mostly a result of them not being fed a healthy diet.
Also, somewhat surprisingly, "free range grass fed diets" lead to more methane production then cows fed grain diets (factory farmed cows).
See https://www.fcrn.org.uk/sites/default/files/project-files/fc...
https://prairiesoilsandcrops.ca/articles/volume-1-3-print.pd...
From same section of the article it was picked from :
"While increased use of grains in ruminant diets reduces enteric CH4 emissions, there is concern that increased grain production may increase the use of fossil fuels for fertilizer, machinery, and transport, resulting in more greenhouse gas emissions. Grain feeding ignores the importance of ruminants in converting fibrous feeds, unsuitable for human consumption, to high-quality protein sources (i.e. milk and meat). Furthermore, high grain diets can negatively affect cow health due to acidosis. With escalating grain prices, the scope of further increasing the grain content of ruminant diets in Canada is limited"
Even ignoring CO2 cost, nutrition, grain availability and all other complications, what is required to show that grass fed diets necessarily lead to more methane output than alternatives - is a comprehensive study of the performance of all dietary options and supplements. I dont think that is setting too high a bar, to avoid arguing on sweeping generalization and loss of context.
Taste can often be regarded as ephemeral, while fast fattened livestock can be discerned to taste different and are considered inferior in most food celebrating cultures.
There is a possible health factor involved with grass fed (or mixed prairie for better) beef and dairy accumulating a markedly different spectrum of omega oils, which are debated inconclusively, but also formally studied and theorized to be superior for human consumption.
A focus on the strength of methane emissions seems increasingly common in discussions and magazine articles, while the long developed advice from the IPCC is that CO2 demands priority because methane clears naturally in a decade or so, and requires less action to avoid than CO2 output which takes much longer to clear.
My understanding of IPCCs focus on CO2, is that while methane reduction presents an opportunity to buy a few years time, the priority is to convince action on the hardest problem which has been created, is worsening rapidly and much harder to clear.
With traditional timber plantations we get the carbon in a load of timber mostly. Build with some of it, pulp and burn the rest. Timber plantations tend not to build soil either.
With relatively unheard of silviculture - the detailed management of mixed forest, the optimum efficiency of carbon absorption can be arranged with select and native symbiotic species, while producing wood and foods and building soil mass. In addition to economic (and atmospheric) services advanced management of mixed forestry and groves can tolerate and support ancient plant and animal species - for future generations - which have been critically devastated by the persistent strategy of individuating production goals.
We don't need to get any smarter at all, we need to get wiser. There is plenty enough grassland now, its time to grow trees.
Poorly managed grasslands that are under grazed leads to soil degradation. The answer seems to be intensive grazing followed by rest periods to allow grasses to use nutrients and grow.
More links in my post here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18287434
On this ungainly subject of grassland vs mixed forest here, I'll just remind - two hundred years ago about 60% of the earth surface was covered in mature and native forest. The figure is less than 30% today. Most of the worlds fertile crops are grown on deforested land, on the soil which native forests developed due to ecological diversity and lack of erosion. Most of the grasslands which are used for grazing, don't have soil to support demanding crops.
If anyone is interested in keeping in the loop on progress: https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/pledge-balance
I could see companies such as Patagonia, who have a strong reputation for prioritizing sustainability, potentially being interested in a service like that.
It seems tricky though to align the interests of your users, your customers (businesses, the ones who will actually be paying you) and the environment.
Which is not to doubt your intent, but is why I am skeptical of market-based approaches to solve a problem which is of the type (a problem of the commons) that governments can be good at (if they choose to be) and businesses struggle with.
Look 10 years out in the future though and I think it is easy to imagine 1) many more people care about this 2) the urgency they feel is increased. Can we start with the Patagonias of the world (there are many others) and build some traction? Can we make it something that young employees want and bring transparency to which companies participate? If it can give a slight edge to McKinsey over Bain for example, the cost is trivial.
[Update regarding above: no YC interview, which is understandable based on where things currently stand]
http://rameznaam.com/2018/09/10/yes-blockchain-can-help-us-s...
I'm in Australia and the geology of the Tasmania/South Victoria region is the best in the world for carbon capture using trees. Specifically it's the native habitat of the Tasmanian blue gum, the worlds fastest growing tree, and here it grows between 20-100% faster than anywhere else.
Is there any option for having non-US startups funded given that ego-engineering can't be done out of the Bay Area alone? I and the other co-founders have no interest in moving since we are already in the best place for what we are doing.
Happy to talk about it any time: ben at droneseed.com
Spending that money on intensive lobbying and forest advocacy in rapidly-deforesting countries could have an impact, too.
The trick, of course, is that neither of these techniques compound for the individual nor a startup. They are pure charity for the planet.
1. Automate tree/crop planting
2. Reform regulations stipulating that planting of trees/crops/plants should be required on any and all uninhabited lands, as a matter of "imminent domain" regardless of the land owner. Perhaps even as a tax incentive to land owners.
3. The development of a maintenance and management policy and system around all that is planted
4. In conjunction with the RFS for flooding deserts, develop a multi-stage water transfer to desert desalinization ponds, then to be used in irrigation of the tree planting efforts.
We already have autonomous farming combines with excellent ability to harvest crops and plant seed. They should be put to use at scale in panting trees.
Further, we could make an effort to employ the vast amounts of humans with little opportunity to be productive to build, plant and deploy a massive effort such as this.
We dont need to try to do everything with robots, when we have millions and millions of humans.
If we are so progressive and smart, maybe learning how to manage a labor force in the millions to accomplish a great work such as terraforming a desert is someting we should attempt again.
https://www.biocarbonengineering.com/ These guys use drones to shoot tree seeds in the ground.
Also regarding terraforming a dessert, I think one of the biggest problems with is the number of water needed in the area, but I do think that this will be a really interesting part of the solution. Maybe the increase of land prices due to the decrease of arable land might make such ventures more profitable. There's a great ted talk about reversing desertification: https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_worl...
Given that you need to do this once every 25-40 years (maturity cycle of the tree), is doing it with drones really that big a win?
Historically non violent direct action has been successful in changing politics (see womens suffrage, civil rights movement). This is the primary goal of the Extinction Rebellion http://extinctionrebellion.org
That's an interesting option, but I wonder how a company might sustain itself doing this.
Lease land to eco-friendly activities like zipline adventures or something?
Also sounds like a good reason for expansion of National Parks services.
Buying land and planting trees there will cost something like $2000 per acre and retain something like one ton of CO2 per acre per year (an order of magnitude estimate - depending on details both the cost and CO2 effect can be very different).
Industrial carbon capture at power plants can do that for something like 70$ per ton. That's much cheaper than forestry, but that's still not good enough. ycombinator is obviously looking for technologies that scale better than these existing approaches, something that might achieve large scale carbon removal at maybe $10/ton or less, at which stage the option "just pay a lot of money to reverse the effect of our emissions" might be plausibly considered affordable to our society.
And then you have a lot of captured carbon dioxide on your hands - next big cost is the storage/conversion.
IPCC summary on cost of forest sequestration :
> Estimates of the private costs of sequestration range from about US$0.10-US$100/tC, which are modest compared with many of the energy alternatives (see Table 3.9 and Figure 4.9). Additionally, it should be noted that most forest projects have positive non-market benefits, thus increasing their social worth
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg3/index.php?idp=171#fig...
Let say you can have 100 000 trees per square km. If 40 trees gives you 1 ton of carbon per year then spending $25 000 gives you $10/ton.
If you want to convert not-woodland into woodland, then that limits you to farmland or pastures - because there's no such thing as "unused natural potential woodland", any potential woodland that's not used and left alone becomes actual woodland; any potential woodland that's not woodland only became that way when we cut down the trees and cleared the land because we wanted to use it otherwise.
Some countries are increasing the forestation as well https://www.citylab.com/environment/2018/01/northern-forest-...
The founders of Patagonia and The North Face brands did start conservacion patagonia together. [1]
It is one amazing project. [2]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservaci%C3%B3n_Patag%C3%B3n... 2. http://www.conservacionpatagonica.org/aboutus_oh.htm
"Doesn't concentrate wealth exponentially; BZZT rejected!"
At some point, we apparently forgot that wealth/power inequality itself massively contributes to environmental problems.
* If you have no political power, you can't defend yourself and your land from pollution.
* If a large portion of the society has no political power, a large portion of the society cannot defend themselves and their land from pollution.
* In a society with extreme wealth, the price mechanism can't "kick in" to protect increasingly-scarce renewable resources (ie saving a species from extinction). Donella Meadows gives a much better explanation than I can, using fisheries as an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMmChiLZZHg&t=18m48s
EDIT: after reading other comments on how trees arent the greatest solution, replace trees with the best option and tie it to a continent wide / global wide black mirror credit score system.
I've been researching what's involved in reforesting, and it looks like a ton of work and a non-trivial cost. And maybe not the most efficient dollar / CO2 ratio, but also something that has the nice side effect of having a living forest around. (And also the side effect of providing exercise, access to the outdoors, etc.)
Our company is working on these issues by trying to reduce demand for meat and seafood by creating alternatives to it, but I think the problem is so large it needs to be tackled from multiple angles. As you term it both Phase I and Phase II type solutions.
What worries me is that the Phase II type solutions are going to be mostly a political problem at least much more than they are technical problems, and political problems are much harder to fix than technical problems where the solutions can be market driven rather than based on international consensus. I think with enough creativity most Phase I type solutions can be market driven and be accomplished without achieving consensus.
The other thing with trees is that they aren't permanent carbon sinks in the way that coal underground is.
Wood will eventually rot or burn and release it's carbon.
Human beings have taken carbon in the form of hydrocarbons underground and released is into the C02 - O2 cycle in the air. The main way to solve this would seem to be putting it back into the ground. So, reverse coal-mining? Turning wood into charcoal and burying? These seem like necessary counter-parts to simply growing trees.
Trees newly planted now will net-absorb carbon for the next 50-100 years, exactly the time period when we need to bring the carbon balance under control until we have our energy used cleaned up and other technologies developed. When the newly planted forest matures, trees fall and rot, but new growth takes their place. So it doesn't release a large amount of carbon, but enters a steady state roughly carbon-neutral.
Are there issues with raising cattle on land with a trees spaced maybe every 10 feet or so? Does it have to do with herding the cattle? Feeding the cattle? Those I feel can be solved with technology, specifically IoT/Drones/Autonomous Bots.
It seems to me, if every livestock pasture in the world has trees every 10 feet, maybe less, it could have a pretty big impact. Combine the Apple orchard with the cattle grazing land. Use technology to efficiently operate both.
Edit: And speaking of cattle. I wonder if we can literally strap something onto the back of a cow that would be able to capture methane, burn the bio-mass, and collect everything to be retrieved later on and used/buried.
Cattle is one main reason, second one is clearing forest for industrial agriculture like soybean and palm oil plantations. Third one is logging for wood products.
Essentially they are all because of overpopulation and massively increased demand for these products.
Even if countries implemented carbon tax and carbon incentives like many have it doesn't change that we innovation. Modern cheap verification systems, Marketplace's like Nori.com
I really really wish YC would bring on a polymer, nuclear, petroleum, or materials engineer to help wrangle on these thesis-es on all things related to energy. [I'm more on the textiles side of polymers, but I'm here if you need me.]
Trees are not a great carbon removal technology, grasslands are much better as they aren't impacted by fires and droughts.
Grasslands sequester carbon underground whereas woody trees store it in leaves and woody biomass.
What you're saying is actually questionable in a non-stable climate which is what humanity has today.
I think it's really foolish to allow carbon pollution credits to be backed by trees instead of grasslands.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/dec/01/trees-ma...
Also, bark beetles aside from droughts and fires are pretty onerous to tree populations.
https://www.greenbiz.com/article/could-perennial-grains-be-n...
Soil has a carbon budget but I'm not sure saturation is an issue - that's basically how grasslands work today
https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/soil-carbo...
So why limit yourself to existing forests?
Instead of flooding deserts (using energy-intensive/land-intensive/wealth concentrating desalinization), we can re-green those same deserts[1], which restarts the "atmospheric river" that brings water to the interiors of continents. Isotopic analysis has revealed that trees powers the water cycle (by recycling rainfall that would otherwise flow off into the ocean) and causes 80% of Earth's terrestrial rainfall.[2] Compared to desalination this is far less costly (downside being, it's harder for Nestle et al. to profit off it).
Yes Virginia, rain literally comes from trees! This partly explains why deforestation leads to desertification.
There's a nugget of a story in the Carboniferous being the result of a civilisation trying, but failing, to sequester carbon by burying trees and plankton.
https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions
https://blog.forest2market.com/fao-report-highlights-resurge...
Maybe if you were growing trees specifically for this purpose on degraded land it could work.
Someone want to engineer a tree with enormous, deep roots? Basically make the trees self-burying.
The tree already buries almost half of its biomass in the ground for you. And a lot of material goes through the food chain when the tree rots in situ. There's a big difference between regrown forest and converting prairie to forest and a lot of that has to do with quantity and quality of decaying matter on the forest floor. Dead trees are better than no trees.
Not all at once, though, and new trees spring up pretty quick. If you're replacing unforested land with forested land, you're still storing substantial carbon. Cutting down / burning an existing forest to plant trees doesn't work, sure.
This video makes me pretty proud to have graduated from UBC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHtdnY_gnmE
An extra reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DPp2NcnTb0
Sure, the individual trees will eventually die and release a lot, though far from all, carbon back again. But by then, new trees will grow and act as the storage buffer.
Regenerative agriculture is about harvesting sunlight (free resource), utilizing plants photosynthesizing abilities. Plants are a part of a larger ecosystem including producers, consumers and decomposers.
Plants exudate sugars feeding the soil microbial life, sugars from the photosynthesis where atmospheric carbon dioxide is converted into sugars. Large herbivores eat the grass, holistic grazing keeps the animals moving mimicking predators and the defensive herding mechanisms for efficient animal impact. The timed regrowth will let the plant photosynthesize more carbon dioxide, while the walking sun powered compost machine (cow) decomposes the organic matter and leaves it for further decomposition and utilization.
We have huge areas where desertification is happening [1] because of wrong management. Holistic Grazing is a easy implemented, low tech, approach with great benefits for capital, social and ecological level.
Regenerative agriculture is also covering land management in less brittle environments, field production, notill, utilizing plants, the soil community and the only truly free available resource sunlight.
Any carbon-based stuff you put in a landfill generally degrades to methane, which is 25-86 times worse than CO2 when it comes to global warming.
So recycle your paper :)
Trees (esp. those suitable for paper) either burn or fall over and rot, both of which release most of the carbon they used to store.
Fossil fuels used to be trees, and they were well sequestered. Paper would eventually become something similar when buried.
Fine, but by the same token, the absence of progress on climate change is because there is no political will, not because it is hard. With enough adults in the room, we could have solved this problem 20 or 30 years ago at comparatively little cost.
The prairies are amazing ecosystem pumping carbon into the ground when properly managed.
The knowledge is available, but this ted talk only has 2 million views. https://youtu.be/vpTHi7O66pI
As global warming devastates more of the biosphere, there will be perhaps less opposition to GMO plants engineered for maximum sequestration capacity. Also useful for Mars.
Maybe there is a good business in finding a good way to truly move old trees, so that we aren't forced to cut them down?
Trenching for the install may require more plant disturbance than would be needed to maintain nearby trees on a regular basis.
Distributed generation and redudnant distribution can help reduce the impact as well. Everything costs money though.
So, there is a ton of value to growing fruit and nut trees, not to mention hedge rows, vineyards, and other farmable plants, and then figuring a way to keep that carbon sequestered in the soil.
As you must know, trees accelerate their carbon sequestration as they get larger. Also, fruit and nut agricultural species are frequently not robust enough, fast growing enough, or zone hardy enough to be good candidates for this either.
Yes, trees have economical value. Trees an a AGW-countering scale carbon sink are not. I'm in favor of a carbon tax/credit system in part for this reason.
Definitely curious how hard it would be to have drones plant trees in arid regions. Feels like I've seen some related projects before
If I build a building out of wood, or print a book in a library, that carbon is sequestered at least as long as the building or book exists.
[Edit] I’m not being facetious. 40% of emissions are as a result of poor land management. We’ll need all the technological help we can get, but if we can’t manage land as carbon stores - not sources, we’re not going to win this race.