Can we eventually take per capita carbon footprint down to a fraction of what it was in 2016? I think so, if the people can be convinced to elect sane leaders in the US and elsewhere.
Can vast regions in the USA and other countries be re-forested? Yes, if the willpower is there.
Is it worthwhile to develop artificial carbon sequestration facilities that operate on vast scales? Yep.
There are political and practical difficulties doing that but there are also difficulties with wrecking the climate that might outweigh those.
It is called Carbon Forest Sylviculture (Leśne Gospodarstwo Węglowe). Over all it is more of a marketing scheme with very small impact. We tried to increase sequestration rates with correct sylvicultural regimes.
Currently it is more like a way for companies to sound ecological. IDK if it can be profitable, remember land and everything cost and I think those profit margins would be very small.
Forestry is science. There are loads of smart people working in this area currently.
China and India already plant a lot of trees.
US can sit back relax and dedicate that space to more research centers and get ahead while China/India are busy squeezing their population and putting up large pieces of land for reforestation.
Not every country has to do it, not many in Europe will shell out for reforestation.
The carbon in atmosphere will have effect nomatter where the tree is.
https://education.seattlepi.com/rates-deforestation-reforest...
The US is more forested than it has been in the past.
honest question: can you point me to any US politician that has stood up to a corporation or corporate interest with laws that effectively say, "No, you can't have what you want, the people need <this> instead." and - most importantly - got those laws passed? I can't think of one. I think obamacare came close (which became one of the most hardfought wins ever), and yet the health insurance lobby still came out ahead. I dare say that no congress shall ever pass a law that harms a corporation (a de facto constitutional amendment).
What does that have to do with carbon control ? ICE auto industry, coal industry, oil and gas, etc, would all be "harmed" if US lawmakers passed anything that had a material impact on CO2 emissions. It would require multiple layers of alternative realities for that to ever happen, in my (admittedly cynical) opinion. I'm sorry if this sounds like I'm saying we should give up/not try. I _want_ us to solve global warming. I just can't picture it happening (at least for the redress method I listed above).
Furthermore, both Warren and Bernie Sanders seem to have genuine convictions w.r.t. climate change, health care, social inequality, etc. Whether or not their particular points of view are desirable is open for debate, but their multi-decade commitments to these issues are beyond question. They seem to have non-trivial support in the electorate as well - I encourage you to check them out, especially if you're feeling cynical or anxious about the future.
Great convictions are a start. but in order for them to actually pass legislation, they need other congress members to vote for them. and that's where the dirty tricks start (I wont vote for your X unless you vote for my Y, etc).
I guess I'm contradicting myself a bit, because I said "name one" without acknowledging that it takes a majority in congress to pass anything. So yes, Warren and Sanders have the courage to face corporate interests. Thank you. I just yearn for the day where shareholders of XYZ get a 30% haircut because laws were passed that reigned in their company's behavior.
(Of course, institutions can only be so effective when their leadership is unlawfully replaced with incompetent industry hacks by the next administration; the only way to tackle that is with higher-level political action: court fights, impeachment, and ultimately elections.)
Just laws on the books doesn’t accomplish anything. There are already plenty of laws against ripping off consumers, but corporatist ideologues in control of the US Supreme Court have spent the last several decades watering down the potential liability via increasingly tendentious reinterpretations.
Now, the question is, why don't these agencies enforce the same laws against corporations? That's the premise of my initial comment, which you also misunderstood.
Many of the ones commonly considered to be “law enforcement agencies” per se are listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_law_enforcement_in_the... but there are many other federal agencies which might also be considered “law enforcement” under a broader interpretation of that term.
Different agencies have different focus, different mandate, different institutional powers, etc.
Arguably the functions established for the CFPB to perform could be undertaken by some other institution. But the point of the legislation and its implementation (which Warren and others worked very carefully on) was creating a semi-autonomous institution solely focused on consumer financial protection.
During the Obama years the CFPB was pretty effective, despite unified and extreme opposition from GOP politicians. (Its effectiveness explains why some folks were eager to see it defanged.)
This is a straw man. Nobody thinks this.
> but we don't need a "domestic violence bureau"
There are several federal institutions which deal with domestic violence (alongside additional state and local ones). For example the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, and has the mandate to “understand, respond to, and prevent” domestic violence.
The FBI can also investigate specific domestic violence crimes, but my impression is that it is not their highest priority.
Domestic violence is a huge problem and is famously underreported, underinvestigated, and underprosecuted. Probably not the best example you might pick; arguably having additional government agencies with the power to do something about domestic violence might make a positive difference. (Disclaimer: I know very little about this subject.)
OTOH, most corporate crimes do cross state boundaries and thus are within the jurisdiction of both state and federal authorities.
With respect to cigarettes, the product itself doesn't kill people. There are people that live for decades smoking multiple times a day. The secondary effects kill many people, but there isn't a sufficiently strong correlation to ban cigarettes outright.
It also possible that Empress is so efficient that the market for wood expands more than it would otherwise. Say you use more wood to replace concrete in buildings [1]. That would also count as a reduction. But in neither scenario would you be able to count all 103 tons per acre per year.
A confounding factor, can it really compete on a mass scale with existing lumber?
> Paulownia trees take a lot of work to manage. They require pruning twice a year to establish a clear timber trunk. They need particular growing conditions, and don’t like wet feet or strong winds. [2]
Is this why the industry is not already growing the tree?
[1] http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190717-climate-change-wood...
[2] https://thisnzlife.co.nz/how-a-small-waikato-farm-harnesses-...
Replacing a complete lack of tree with any other tree is an improvement.
Global CO2 emissions: ~40GT/year
Area required: ~600K square miles
This is approximately the size of the entire state of Alaska. Every year.
New forest can store a buffer in perpetuity, e.g., a new trillion trees can store 133 Gt. But current emissions are > 40 Gt/year, so this is < 4 years worth of emissions.
It's not the tree which does that. It's the organisms consuming the tree during the decomposition process which do that. And that doesn't happen all at once. Indeed, if you grow another tree then you're likely to still be net-positive.
If you use the tree for other purposes -- construction, for example. Or burning for energy production -- then it becomes a useful part of the lifecycle.
Doesn't that just release the C02 again? Construction purposes might help, or any other way of sequestering.
Probably other factors are small, but hard to predict (particulates, volatile chemicals, other effects of growth). Might be positive or negative.
>Once the trees reach maturity, farmers harvest their wood for use in houses or musical instruments
as in the article. You could make chunky log cabin type buildings to use more. I'd quite like a log mansion.
https://thisnzlife.co.nz/how-a-small-waikato-farm-harnesses-...
Also in all those discussions of processes(!) I find people even here seem to be looking at points in time only, and usually at the start of the process. That also includes the issue of looking at just one tree instead of a forest. When you look at the whole system individual tree life cycle doesn't matter any more. Some trees grow old and die or are harvested (what happens?), others grow in their place, overall the forest remains at a pretty stable and fixed weight. Unless you find trees that keep growing for miles and miles higher for thousands of years.
Look at total biomass, not at tree life cycles! The equations at that point of a mature forest are balanced. The whole forest stores a fixed amount and that's it. As long as we keep bringing carbon from very ancient forests back out of the earth, it does not matter how many forests there are. You will only get a temporary dip.
This whole thing is ridiculous: Even if we decided to bury grown trees deep underground to remove their carbon from the surface forever - why not save the huge effort (and the energy that process needs which again has to be fed somehow - with even more fossil fuels for quite some time to come) and simply leave the ancient forests where they are (deep underground)?
You can plant trees as much as you like, as long as we continue to bring up carbon from underground it is useless - apart from a temporary (small) dip. The above-ground forests will never be big enough to compensate for the below-ground forests being brought back up.
A quick search shows links and links of opinion and "studies" all about "we can store carbon underground!" Well, wait, what?? I don't get it. - it's already (down) there!! Earth did just that a long time ago! Just stop bringing it up, then you don't need to find ways to get it back down, which according to the laws of physics is a net-negative process. For the same amount somehow stored underground we need far more for the energy to do so, as long as we rely on carbon for energy (which won't change any time soon at scale across the world). And if we don't need the carbon for energy we won't bring it up any more (about three quarters of oil is used for energy or heating, an even higher share of natural gas and coal).
I really don't understand the discussion at all. It seems like a great distraction, all those studies and headlines and discussions about storing CO2 underground? For the reason mentioned. After you get it out and burn it (i.e. turned it into CO2), you will need even more of it to get the energy to get it back down where it already was to begin with. Even if we would have 100% solar/wind, the whole scenario does not sound very useful to me at the imagined scale. Even using it as temporary energy store/source for energy demand when wind/solar are not available should be done with what already is above ground, or if it involves a blow-ground cycle it should be one far smaller than the current extraction and the imagined reburying.
Having more forests is wonderful for many reasons (even though at this point vast areas are removed - https://www.livescience.com/27692-deforestation.html). However, the attention it gets as some sort of "solution" for global CO2 levels amazes me (in combination with the fact I just linked even more - stopping what we are doing would be soooo much more impactful, both destruction of current and previous forests above as well as underground).
You bury them in buildings. As lumber.
Replace concrete (which produces CO2) in new buildings with wood (which sequesters it) and you've tackled quite a bit of carbon emissions.
Unless you add additional options by having two different items (tress + buildings), e.g. the option to stack them on top of one another, it does not matter if the carbon is stored in a tree or a building made from it. They all share the same limited surface space and you could just replace all buildings with trees in the model, or vice versa and it does not change the total storage capacity here on the surface. I refer back to everything I wrote.
Unless you add additional options by having two different items (tress + buildings), e.g. the option to stack them on top of one another, it does not matter if the carbon is stored in a tree or a building made from it. They all share the same limited surface space and you could just replace all buildings with trees in the model, or vice versa and it does not change the total storage capacity here on the surface. I refer back to everything I wrote.
In 2016, U.S. GHG emissions were 20.15 metric tons CO2-equivalent per person[1].
So basically each american would have to cultivate about 0.196 acre of empress trees (792 sq meters, or 8522 sq foot) to become carbon neutral.
[1] http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/us-environmental-footprint-f...