1) The timescale is very long - a single tree to drive carbon neutrality is MOST optimistically pegged at 40 - 100 years depending on species. With expanding populations planning or guaranteeing execution on that time scale is limited. AKA it's very unlikely that most efforts, unless planted in an evergreen protected land will actually drive a net positive impact.
2) Forest soil and topsoil (from dropped branches, leaves, etc) can sequester up to 2x as much carbon as the actual trees themselves and is typically counted in the "net negative" C02 impact. But warming temperatures creates a negative feedback loop increases the rate of C02 release from soil.
3) Governments, in their effort to drive commercial tree planting, are accidentally driving the wrong incentives - farmed forests are <50% as effective at C02 sequester as natural forests and the act of burning wood pellets for fuel and or even using for building materials dramatically reduces and in fact calls into question ANY C02 benefits.
Effectively the only sure fire way towards atmospheric CO2 reduction is cutting consumption
(1) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/epa-declares-burni...
(2) https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/trees-carbon-emissions-bo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emis...
Displacing fossil-derived electricity with enough low-carbon electricity to supply an air conditioner is more effective than raising the AC temperature one degree or planting a tree.
The key issue is to reduce emissions. Sometimes that necessitates reduced consumption of energy services [1]. But reducing consumption is not sufficient and often not necessary to deeply cut emissions.
If 3 tons of CO2 per capita per year is a sustainable emissions rate, then the US emits at about 550% of the sustainable rate. Even Cuba emits at 107% of the sustainable rate. No polity is going to voluntarily reduce their material standard of living below that of Cuba. And even a super-emitter like the US could reach the sustainable rate with a combination of more efficient energy use and non-fossil (renewable and nuclear) primary energy production substituting for fossils. So I think that "stop burning fossils for air conditioning" is a prescription closer to solving the root problem than "endure a little more discomfort in the air conditioning season."
[1] For example, there is no foreseeable technology that will enable trans-Atlantic passenger flights without burning chemical fuels. Long distance flights could burn synthetic fuels made using non-fossil electricity, but that would raise fuel prices. Whether by fiat or by pricing, long distance air travel will necessarily become less common if/when aviation faces pressure to reduce CO2 emissions.
Just mention it as one of the low-emissions alternatives to fossil power. Cite climate-focused organizations for support rather than industry-specific organizations. The aim is to reduce emissions, not to promote one specific technology toward that end.
I wish that we just had carbon tax-and-dividend instead of a thousand different regulations and tax code incentives mandating or nudging toward specific kinds of efficiency measures and fossil replacements. At the same time I understand that carbon taxes face enormous popular opposition while tax credits and CAFE standards don't, so I'll accept having 3 different kinds of federal tax incentives to separately promote nuclear power, wind power, and solar power (plus a myriad of differently structured state level incentives) as the best the US can currently do.
In theory it seems like a great idea, in practice with decades of 10’s to 100’s of Billions in R&D it’s unlikely to improve that much within the next 5-10 years. (106 Billion and counting from the US government alone: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2018/07/09/nuclear-...)
Short of cutting the tree down yourself, hauling it yourself, and then processing & building it:
The C02 cost of harvesting, hauling, and processing trees into wood is very costly.
Elevated shade decreases local soil temperature.
I would say in 40 years we’re going to be in a much much worse situation so is your argument don’t bother ? Else we should do both, plant a trillion trees and replace fossil fuels and civilisation might be ok?
Sorry but it just seems like you’re trying to make this a negative idea, when it’s a clearly positive thing outside of just sequestering carbon, there are other areas of the eco system improved by having more trees.
When I see people who are anti-tree planting, I wonder if there is some authoritarian predilections at play and anything that doesn't result in central control or provide some mechanism for rent seeking or corruption is going to get down played.
The reality is that if you go and work with your local land management folks who can give you guidance on the types of trees and where to plant them, then going out and spending a weekend putting fifty trees in the ground, will give you quite a nice reduction for the CO2 emissions necessary to plant them. What's more is trees reproduce on their own. If you get a tree into the ground it will likely produce two additional trees over its lifetime if not more.
Also, do you keep track of the trees to make sure they actually grow? Just planting the seed or even a sapling is far from sufficient to ensure that carbon sequestration occurs. Young trees are food for a variety of animals and insects. Do you know what fraction of the trees you plant actually reach maturity? I've seen estimates that far fewer than one in five do.
Your own property, literally anywhere trees can survive.
Which I am the opposite of.
There are a lot of flower & daisy soft solutions to C02.
Drive to the suburban forest in your SUV, plant 100 trees that will inevitably be cut down long before they have a carbon negative impact, come home and run your AC.
You're still running 1000/1 in negative C02 balance.
Vs finds ways to dramatically cut use, double down on investigative hard solutions like nuclear and major infrastructure projects like mass transport, car banning, new taxation on major freight (sea and road) to force efficiency adoption etc.
Lots of hard solutions are readily available to solving the problem, but by definition they're hard.
I agree with the point that planting 100 trees should not leave anyone feeling they've done their part. Repeating the math until we're blue in the face is what helps there I guess.
But convincing the entire population of the world to set their thermostat 1 degree higher during the summer months would have a 1000x multiple impact on a 40x shorter time scale than if every one of those people planted a tree.
The spirit of my comment is that in general people LOVE the path of least resistance.
Ask the average person about combatting climate change and their response is "plant more trees".
Because that's easy, shit you can pay the gardener to do it or donate $10 to a plant the tree collective and feel instant gratification with no sacrifice.
Vs the highest possible impact solution which is cutting personal consumption - even a little bit!
This confused me for longer than I'd care to admit, but now that I get it, I'd just say that a much smaller proportion of 'the entire population of the world' - even the developed world - has AC than it might seem to an American perspective.
You can't ask people to set their thermostat 1 degree warmer every year for that 40-100 years. You can expect there to be scope for continued tree planting for decades.
Neither is a sole solution, but both are part of a holistic, reasoned and coordinated journey to carbon neutrality.
So do 1000 times that, and don't plant them in a suburban forest but one that will stay around longer. Or contribute money to tree planting initiatives who do it right.
Trees provide more services than log production
I'm pretty confident OP up there also loves trees. But we're at a point where we need to calculate efforts and allocate resources wisely. Maybe we need fewer forests and more nuclear. idk.
I know for a fact every tree I can plant with my bare hands would be carbon negative, because I did the math.
It's not that shocking. If two tree rings are the same width, the outer one contains more material due to the larger circumference. The surface area of a tree increases every year until it starts to decline. In a healthy tree, canopy and roots are balanced, and any gain or loss in material above ground is mirrored below. Dead roots rejoin the food chain much, much slower than twigs and leaves, so nearly half the carbon that goes into the tree goes into the ground and stays there, even if you cut the tree for timber. And due to root fusion, some of the roots may survive... if you didn't cut down all of the trees of the same species. I'm looking at you, timber industry.
Given that carbon has a half life of between 20-200 years, and that we appear to be reaching peak emissions, and that a lot of estimates say our emissions should drop by 70% just given how often we replace power plants and how completive renewables are right now and are projected to be in the future -- it seems like planting trees really could be enough.
Walking around parts of Portland on the sidewalk is like being on a rollercoaster because of the tree roots.
Here's a link to the discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20543605 -- on mobile so I can't figure out how to get the comment URL. If you're interested, just go there and search for my username -- onlyrealcuzzo. I'd love a second set of eyes on it. Not sure the math is right.
I've read in several places that 50% of carbon in the atmosphere is absorbed by the ocean within 20-200 years.
I'm guessing that's bad for the ocean, and maybe there's a limit, and the rate probably isn't constant. It's not a half-life at all.
Numbers are important and should be discussed transparently. Lots of variation in guesstimates, fudging, simplifications, etc cloud the issue and give drastically different "good ways forward". So, please, correct my back-of-the-envelope estimate below:
E.g. from [1]: "Following the estimations of carbon stock including above ground biomass, the total stock in the studied chestnut forests could be ordered as follows: CF3 (105.8 t C ha-1) > CF1 (102.1 t C ha-1) > CF2 (76.3 t C ha-1). The pure chestnut forest CF3 characterized with the highest total carbon stock per hectare and only 20.6 % from it is accumulated in the aboveground tree biomass."
Chestnut is one of the best carbon sequestering forest options we have. Estimate (overly positively) that this capacity cycles over 100y. Fudge down the CO2 and CH4 release from decomposition. That gives ca 100 tC/ha over 100y, aka 1tC/(ha y) or 100tC/(km2 y).
Globally we have ca 35GtCO2 or 10GtC carbon emission per year. Current forests store about 15% of that, but we are currently loosing forests at a rapid rate, and we need to not only reach neutral but also sink the 100y or so of spewing we've already fucked up. So let's keep the number at 10GtC/y.
10GtC/y would then require 100E6km2 of NEW perfect assumption chestnut forest.
We have ca 500E6km2 of total land surface on earth. That means we need to set aside 20% of all land on earth for our NEW chestnut forest. But we don't have that much land that can sustain something like this. Forest grows less well outside of humid temperate to tropical regions. E.g. Antarctica, Sahara, the steppes, boreal forest regions, etc. E.g: All agricultural land, both fields and grazing, is 11% of total land area but over one third of all culturable land, the rest of which is already mostly forest. Even if we covered all growth-possible land area that is not already forest we simply don't have enough land. And we would be out of farmland.
Based on this back of envelope calculation tree planting is not a viable solution. It's a good step in the right direction, but nothing to get the crowds overly excited about.
Instead, e.g. azolla is around 15x more potent as sequestering growth stock than forests, and it grows floating on water. Genetically engineering azolla to grow fast in higher salinity would be a better way to combat climate change. We have plenty of ocean surface area. There will be downsides to such a solution, but compare with other solutions or the horrors of what will be if we don't act...
And I'm sure someone can cook up some gm-franken-algae that is even more potent.
My point, if any, is to make sure to actually run the numbers. Get different estimates then pay skilled scientists to get better estimates. Discuss the numbers, assumptions, simplifications. Don't get the general population stuck on low worth paths when they could start fighting for more valuable ones.
And I don't propose "stop planting trees". I argue that planting trees is a good thing, but only a minor item that is overshadowing more valuable options in the general debate. We need to get people to start facing reality to the point where they can start thinking about compromises. There is no "solution" that don't require drastic changes in how we use our land and live our lives.
Side note: nuclear is the only short term low land-usage footprint solution I can see, and drastic genetic manipulation biomass or vast nuclear powered direct capture are the only long term solutions I can guesstimate. Anyone that can show me interesting alternatives?
[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285516686_Carbon_st...
The idea is not to just plant trees but to increase the number of trees on the planet over the long term so that effectively the CO2 absorbed does not go back to the atmosphere.
This is aimed at reducing CO2 in the atmosphere and has to go hand in hand with reducing emissions.
I tried to find literature, but came back empty handed, on whether it is better to let tree grows on a parcel, or cut grass regularly and let it compost, adding biomass to it.
Of those two options, trees. Compost does not sequester carbon in and of itself. That's a wishful thinking myth that is based on a lack of understanding of soil. Compost is organic matter, in various stages of life, death and decay. We want soil to have more organic matter. So people assumed adding compost to dirt would accomplish this. It does not. The organic matter is decomposed into CO2 and returns to the atmosphere. We need to increase STABLE organic matter in the soil, and compost does not do that simply by adding it to dirt. The only thing that creates stable organic matter is microbes living in the rhizosphere in symbiosis with plants. In order to increase soil SOM, we need more root mass. The way compost can help is to plant a forest or meadow and keep soaking it in compost tea so that the roots get deeper and deeper, expanding the rhizosphere and the depth of the soil. Normal roots will only grow as deep as there are symbiotic microbes, and yet those microbes will only live where there are roots, so there's a catch-22. We can use the microbes in compost, dissolved into water as compost tea, to get microbes deeper than the roots, so the roots go deeper, and then keep doing that. There's people with grass that has 20 foot deep roots from doing this.
So does that mean that at any given place, there won't be soil for deeper than the roots go? What happens to the soul if all the roots die or are removed (assuming it is not washed away by water)? Does it decay into CO2?
One is carbon-sinks. This can be done by permanent new trees. Or by replacing trees and use the old wood or plastics for buildings. Or make carbon based usables and permenantly bury their waste in deep landfils that don't let out co2. Or by new techniques for sequestering carbon from air. Planting trees and letting them die is only temporary.
Second and most important though is getting more heat out of the planet than in. Focusing on carbon is one thing. But reflecting energy to space also works, e.g. by white roofs, or mirrors, or heat conducting materials that send off energy in frequencies not absorbed by clouds and co2/water/methane.
[1] https://www.nationalforests.org/get-involved/tree-planting-p...
Based on wikipedia ([1], [2]), worldwide tree density is about 750 trees/hectare, with 4B hectares total (30% of land area). We clearly can't add another 7B to offset global emissions, but seems like a good marginal investment as long as there's room to grow that number. [3]
The real question is whether that $1 is enough to permanently "create more forest" Even at 5x the price it seems like a bargain for a lifetime of carbon emissions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest
We should plant lots of trees, but we should also do everything else in our power in parallel.
https://www.mpi.govt.nz/funding-and-programmes/forestry/plan...
They do have a programme to pay land owners for planting trees, but in minumum one-hectare units, and it's financially a loss. I own and live on farmland in NZ. I could turn a hectare into fully native bush and get their maximum one-time payout of $4,000. But the costs of native trees are expensive and the labour to fully plant up a hectare properly is not insubstantial. The $500 top-up payout for fencing doesn't cover the cost of fencing. Then I'd have to give up about $500 per year in farming income, permanently. It would feel good, but there is still a significant financial disincentive.
The government isn't really in a position to increase payouts. Taxes are about as high as the economy can handle and the government has lots of other projects to fund. If this is going to happen, it's going to be on the backs of individuals acting out of their own good will.
This guy built a whole forest.
According to: The University of Michigan and NC state:
The average American's footprint is 21 metric tons a year while the average tree absorbs 21 kg a year.
That makes it a ball park of 1000 trees.
That's pretty dense for a large tree.
You get customers to pay for the planting of 500 trees at $X/tree. This is treated as a long-term investment. 30 years later the trees are harvested and the "investors" get back X% of the value of the trees.
So they get to say they live a carbon-neutral life, and as a bonus, get to make some money.
You need to maintain it and it requires so much chemicals especially from Monsanto. It's so much work and money just to maintain grass.
I like alternatives like moss or clovers. Even cactus gardens seem better suited.
Thanks for the clarification, I some how thought grass was man made or domesticated/engineer like cows.
This seems really doable for the average person!
It's definitely possible for any healthy adult.
That's a hell of an error. Sorry folks.
nationalforests.org, the Arbor Day Foundation... there are probably lots of good options.
...an estimated 3.6 million metric tons of greenhouse gases that, as seems to happen at least once every fire season lately, was more than enough to obliterate the progress made by all of California’s climate-change policies in a typical year.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/31/magazine/para...
Whether it's at a lat/long that previously held a tree or not is largely irrelevant when considering whether your action was helpful or neutral.
That's only about a tree every 5-20 weeks. So about once a month to about twice a year.
Squirrels bury between 3,000 and 10,000 nuts each fall, so each person just needs to drive over one squirrel.
There are about 3 trillion trees for a population of 7 billion people for an average of 428 trees per person, so that means you have to make up the delta of about 172 to 572 trees over the course of your lifetime to erase your carbon footprint (of course, young trees don't sequester as much carbon, so your footprint will still be positive for much of your lifetime - but as the trees get older, they sequester at a higher rate per year, which eventually gives you a negative footprint). This projection was based on the CO2 sequestration per year and the average survival rate documented in [1].
[1] https://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/Downloads/method-calculat...