I totally agree and I'm sorry if I gave the impression that trees should not be part of a solution. Trees (and other nature based methods) should definitely not be neglected.

I merely wanted to try and raise some awareness to those who question the need for technological removal methods as there is a bit of a toxic "trees will save us" attitude when things like this get mentioned.

This kind of civil discourse is what makes HN such a gem on the internet.

Meta-warning;

I'm more into the juxtapositions of interactions between idiots vs experts, specialists vs generalists, startup-billionaire vs unemployed-drug-addict-hacker, and the level of insight that can be gained from these conversations.

I believe that the civility, and desire for unfettered conversation (avoiding ad-hominem, flame-wars. etc···) are more of an instrumental-goal of this process, than the true goal.

I don't really know why the comments on hn are the way they are, and I doubt anyone ever will. But that's what keeps me coming back here. It's the only place on the internet I can get this kind of thing, whatever it is.

I do have to say, there's something special and unique here. Like the userbases of wikipedia, stack overflow, 4chan, or twitter, there's something here that's impossible to recreate and worth preserving.

You're sure it's not comments like these? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27826277

I thought it was funny to see similar sentiments back to back :)

> discourse

Hardly a discourse. Both gents above might have a negligible disagreement but they are sticking firmly to radical green agenda shadow-officially endorsed and promoted by Yahoo Combinator. Also, good for karma income. Just the same for praising comments.

> radical green agenda

What is this radical green agenda that you identify? I'm not disputing that exists, I'm certainly part of it, and I intend to continue leaning into it. I'm just curious how it looks from the outside.

Trees are nature's best solution after millions of years of evolution. The R&D cost is low as well as the complexity. The problem is that dead trees turn back into CO2 so there will need to be some kind of sequestration like burying lumber.

Trees did not evolve solely for the purposes of carbon sequestration. Similarly, it would be silly to say that mammals are nature's best solution at sequestering oxygen.

Even burying the lumber doesn't remove the coal from the cycle, just delays it by a few years. You'd need to get the carbon into a "not readily accessible to biological processes" form. Charcoal is probably an OK start, but something like calcium carbonate would be even more stable.

And you can (probably) do better than trees, in terms of carbon captured per time unit. But I guess you'd have to run comparative studies between birch and bamboo for biomass grown per time unit and area.

Hm, that means that a sensible unit for carbon capture would be "kg / (m * m * s)".

There's always some local maximum most efficient process. If you take into account process inputs trees would likely come out on top. A lot of carbon capture tech can capture lots of carbon but consumes a huge amount of power/energy intense resources. My unit would be kg / (W * m^2 * s)

IIRC, bamboo ends up as "less wasted" when you turn it into charcoal than most woods. And you'd need to do a lot more energy-intensive processing of the tree to get it into a for suitable for turning into coal. With bamboo, it's mostly "cut into suitable length". With wood, it's at least "cut into suitable length", but may also require splitting.

But, yes, my main reason for thinking bamboo is that it is pretty fast-growing under the right conditions.

And with a Watt actually being "kg * m^2 / s^3", your unit ends up being s^2 / m^4, which dimensionally looks less pleasant.

Intensive cropping of bamboo for carbon capture sounds like it would cause as many ecological problems as it solves.

Not necessarily. Well, not necessarily more than doing the same with trees instead of bamboo.

But, yes, it'd require some care.

Yes, the "magic bullet" mentality typical of media, politicians, and dumb Americans just isn't going to cut it. BEVs + wind + solar + storage. Tree planting. Efficiency. Insulation. Nuclear power. Synthetic fuels. Carbon taxes. Sequestration. Olivine. Seeding the ocean. Vegetarianism/cultured meat/fake meat.

We don't need to wait 100 years for maturation of the wood in forests, the nice thing about wood is that you can use it for paper and construction, and that effectively sequesters the carbon.

> The advantage of planting trees is that we know it works, it's cheap, and we can do it right now

Here in Sweden it is the law that if you cut down a forest you replant it. We have been doing it for a century. All forests here is basically in a constant plant-grow-cut cycle unless the land is claimed for new buildings (farm land has been steady declining every year).

It is debatable if the practice is carbon negative or carbon neutral. Most of wood product do get burned sooner or later, or turned into bio gas which then get burned. Almost nothing remain as stable carbon sink. A planted forest is an future investment to be cut, processed and burned. The only exception is forest reservations and those are much more expensive to make than planting trees.

The advocacy behind replanting might be better invested into a political action of bringing similar replanting laws to other countries. Sweden mostly did it because it looked ugly to have wast areas cut down without regrowth, and because it hurt biodiversity. It also make sense economically in the long run.

>There's no reason not to plant trees in addition to everything else we'll need to do to fix this problem.

Yes, there is. Trees take a up valuable real estate. As long as people can do something even remotely profitable with land they own, this can not work.

Trees are valuable too. The problem is we don't understand and/or appreciate that value.

For instance, trees essentially power the entire terrestrial water cycle. Without trees all the water rains out within a few hundred km of the coast. Trees (far moreso than simple evaporation) are responsible for pushing that water back into the air-stream. Isotopic analysis confirms that 80% of the rainfall on land is caused by transpiration, and most of that is trees. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11983

This explains why deforestation causes desertification. Cut down the trees and you get a continent-wide desert.

These dynamics aren't well-captured by the present economic system, which only sees "valuable real estate" being "taken up" by trees.

>> Anyone still think it's a good idea to utilize all that "valuable real estate" being "taken up" by trees?

As long as plantation owners and/or illegal loggers do, then all your argumentation is moot.

Correct, thanks. Incidentally before seeing your post I just edited that part for clarity. Since I already made the edit, I'll leave it as-is.

Just up the ante for illegal logging and equate it to terrorism. Life sentence for anyone involved. I am sure it will make anyone think twice before doing illegal logging with such punishment.

With carbon credits, planting trees can be a profitable land use.

Stop subsidizing industry by socializing the cost of carbon and planting trees will be profitable.

Yes, tree planting for carbon binding absolutely need to be profitable to get real traction!

The US government already pays many farmers to plant things other than commodity crops.