Re:Restoring natural forests is the best way to remove atmos...
by akimball on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @07:11AM
(#19562401)
There are twenty times that many people on Earth. You would have to compactify the wood for building materials, or something similar, to properly sequester. I suggest iron seeding the equatorial pacific as cheaper and more scalable.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Restoring natural forests is the best way to remove atmos...
by ph0rque on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @09:12AM
(#19563011)
Americans produce a disproportionate amount of CO2 due to their lifestyle. So you don't need to plant twenty times that amount of trees to sequester manmade CO2; only 2.4x.
Also, as long as you replace any trees that die with seedlings, you don't need to worry about what happens to the dead wood.
This method comes out to a cost of $6.70/ton sequestered. Other methods can cost many multiples of this amount. Do you have any estimates for iron seeding of the equatorial Pacific?
Re:Restoring natural forests is the best way to remove atmos...
by xyzzyz on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @09:55AM
(#19563302)
US emits only 15% of global carbon dioxide. If you plant 2.4x trees, you’ll only offset 40% of global emissions. For 2.4x to cover global emissions, global emissions would have to shrink by 60%. If US emissions were reduced by that much, it would put US emissions per capita below present day Belarus and Bulgaria.
> Also, as long as you replace any trees that die with seedlings, you don't need to worry about what happens to the dead wood.
You do, though. If the wood decomposes, all the CO2 is released back to atmosphere, which puts you back at square one.