Finland has 23 million hectares (76%) of forest cover.
Probably that only works for people that are from nearby Finland and/or into geography, though. For huge scales like these, I'm thinking degrees might theoretically be a better unit, since it's easier to visualize a fraction of the globe (presuming people know there's 360 degrees around the globe) than picturing hundreds of thousands of some other unit.
I'm all for planting more Icelandic trees, but I don't think you're getting as much bang for your buck as you could.
You know what would really be better than planting trees? For the world to stop burning so much coal.
40% of global electricity is from coal. Europe needs to increase coal usage because of the war.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/germany-coal-renewable-energ...
There are 8 billion people on the planet. “Hey, everyone stop what you’re doing, let’s all do this” is quite ineffective. We don’t need to stop planting trees in Iceland in order to save the rain forests.
Again, I think planting Icelandic trees is awesome! Just since OP specifically mentioned "offset my carbon emissions" I thought I'd shill one of my favorite ways of doing that :)
https://www.duke-energy.com/home/products/renewable-energy/n...
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/19/deforestation-in-brazils-ama...
Isn’t the land being destroyed so people can have more meat, palm oil, etc.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2022/03/09/...
What are organizations doing to improve the situation? Fighting consumer demand is difficult
My ancestors on my “civilised” country uprooted an tore down all the trees and forests, most of the countryside is farmland. And now that we have destroyed our forests we go “no no, preserve the rainforests”… so we can keep planting wheat?
I'd expect the politicians to be launching a WWII-style industrial mobilization to ramp up heat pump installations. Even if they can't switch away from coal / natural gas this year, typical heat pump coefficients of power are well above 4. Going from 100% gas furnaces to 100% heat pumps powered off of natural gas peaker plants would more than halve natural gas demand! (And, in coming years, the natural gas plants could be replaced with greener options.)
The insulation needs to happen first for those houses, and this can be a massive undertaking costing tens of thousands of euros. The next best thing is a hybrid heat pump.
Although there's some subsidies here and there, you're very much right that we need something way more aggressive. For the houses I mentioned (which is almost all), a total sum of ~50K EUR is just not something the average family can afford. Those that do probably up their mortgage to finance it.
Also take into account the shortages. I have a family member that installs heat pumps, he orders them by the dozens. Currently he's afraid to place orders as the delivery time is a minimum of 6 months with no guaranteed final date nor is the price fixed. It's "6K but we will charge you whatever it will actually be when we deliver". "I don't know when it is coming or what it will cost" is not a great message towards home owners.
Or put another way, because they didn't bother to become energy independent and shut down nuclear plants instead of investing in more.
Also, I wouldn’t mind retiring early and doing some tree planting in Iceland or similar volunteer work to pay my way around a country.
It’s hard to quantify these things and get a conclusive answer on which is better; I think we can leave it at “both are good.”
I wonder why :P
When I was in Iceland, they told me the reason they don't have forests anymore is that the vikings and other later settlers logged it. (Of course, a random horse tour person isn't the best source so I could very well be misinformed.)
Only when they are initially planted and growing is there a net CO2 sequestration going on.
Burning fossil fuels is the problem we need to fix.
the problem with climate change is the wild swings in weather - if you want to stabilize and buffer these swings, you need to maximize biomass. having a mature forest ecosystem acting as a carbon/nitrogen buffer does a lot of good, but in a way that is difficult to measure
I think we get tunnel vision on CO2 ppm because it's a metric with a nice clean causative effect (greenhouse), but more energy on earth is not what's actually causing us grief, we've destroyed most of the mature ecosystems and decimated total biomass, and we are surprised that this causes issues with the total ecosystem because we consider atmospheric problems somehow unrelated to all the living things participating in chemical cycles with that atmosphere. we need more buffer wherever we can get it, and I hate to see someone poo-pooing ecosystem restoration in favor of carbon sequestration.
That initial sequestration can't make up for ongoing use of fossil fuels, sure, but it still has nonzero value.
Can we cut down forests and store them deep in former mines?
I'm not advocating for new mines.
The only way to sequester CO2 using trees is keeping the trees alive (or blasting them with chemicals to prevent rotting).
But of course, the solution you mention is the simplest: Treat the wood with one of the several known ways to make it not break down, and leave it in big piles somewhere.
I'm sure there are no possible repercussions to doing this.
If they rot the CO2 will still be below the surface?
That's kind of a given. People generally don't like it when their homes and furniture decompose.
Not eating beef / meat / dairy is the single best thing one can do to help.
https://www.beefmagazine.com/beef-quality/update-us-cattle-e...
I don't see them mentioning the Amazon or hinting that the USA's imports are contributing there, but maybe I'm misreading their comment then (also when re-reading it now I don't see what you're referring to). Oh, or are you referring to the link they posted rather than their comment itself?
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/soy [2]: https://awellfedworld.org/feed-ratios/
In January 2022 alone, Brazilian beef imports registered a more than 500% increase.
Record high U.S. beef prices and drought-impacted supplies in Australia, where the U.S. would otherwise source beef, have also contributed to growing imports of processing-grade beef from Brazil
https://www.beefmagazine.com/news/us-beef-imports-brazil-sur...
And note that my statement also included restoring native plants. We cannot survive on agriculture without pollinators, and given that forest cover has been reduced from around 70% to 20% in less than a century, it’s not hard to believe. Just look around you and notice the expanse of lawns around you. Lawns do almost nothing. They don’t support wildlife, pollinators, and they don’t capture carbon.
And like I said, this is something people can do now. People can’t magically start driving electric cars fueled by green energy or start driving substantially less or rework city and nation transportation infrastructure. It’s actually debatable how much electric cars will reduce emissions. I think it’s not much. Same for so-called green energy.
The benefits of composting and retiring native plants are undeniable.
(More concretely: individuals cycle, while household units generally compost together. A household of 4 produces a nontrivial amount of compostable waste and diverting it can be a significant ecological outcome, especially if it's replacing purchases of topsoil or artificial fertilizer. It also makes taking the trash out more pleasant, since it doesn't spend days rotting indoors before being tossed to the curb.)
If you’re spending your limited time and effort on 2% measures we’ve all already lost.
> If you’re spending your limited time and effort on 2% measures we’ve all already lost.
We're talking about one measure, one that's specifically coextensive with managing your waste (assuming you don't throw your trash into a pile in the corner of your room). It takes me no extra time to throw a banana peel in the compost bin instead of the trash can; they're right next to each other.
Also note that buying a different product in the supermarket is an entirely different order of magnitude than changing your life around so that you can cycle to work without less free time / degrading quality of life. I'd argue there's sense to recommending doing low hanging fruit.
We need institutional solutions; we can't afford to punt climate change to individual choices.
[1]: https://helpmecompost.com/home-composting/implementation/how...
"Carbon footprint" was originally invented by the public relations agency Ogilvy & Mather for BP as a concept to divert attention from industry to individuals.
https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sh...
That's not to say that public pressure is not a good thing. It is. But the actual causal effect it has for a better future is in the form of creating political sentiment. Individual carbon economy is mostly about promoting a political sentiment via signaling.
But generally it's a fools errand trying to scientifically balance your "carbon footprint" since this was not an engineering concept to start with. If it makes you feel good to plant trees do it! Trees are awesome. Buying less stuff you don't need is also always good I think. For example I use my cell phones until something irrevocably gives up and drive my current car as long as possible (generally making a new car is always more resource consuming than driving the current one I think).
[0] For example Vaclaw Smil "How the world really works" discusses our fossil fuel based economy at length
In German, it's more common to refer to an ecological footprint, its usage which goes back to at least 1992, and it wasn't coined by a PR company, but by very straight laced environmentalists.
I don't know whether BP falsified the evidence here, but everything kinda points towards that it really is the consumers that drive demand.
> generally it's a fools errand trying to scientifically balance your "carbon footprint"
How would you, then, unscientifically solve climate change if we aren't supposed to take individual action to bring our own footprint to net zero, encourage others to do the same, and bring about societal change using market pressure and all that?
> If it makes you feel good to plant trees do it! Trees are awesome.
But if the "you" in this sentence is being made to feel good for the wrong reasons, isn't that dishonest? Shouldn't we be looking at what is actually effective use of your money, and not let people fall for feel-good tree planting only for them to find out ten years down the line that their hard-earned money went into /dev/null and they should have done (and could have been told about) something like meat reduction or solar panels instead?
The simple answer is to vote, and if you can spare the time/money/effort to go and become political active.
Removing coal/oil/natural gas plants won't occur without political will. We need political will to build out rail infrastructure, regulating air/boat fuels, changing subsidies for fossil fuels into emission free alternatives, prioritize bike/pedestrian infrastructure, and so on.
Right now we had politicians in EU voting that natural gas is "green", driving primarily by a specific political party in Germany, and now the same people are turning on coal and oil power plants. Societal change need to start with replacing people in power that view fossil fuel as a tool to be used rather than something that should be left in the ground. No individual action can get near to undo the damage that those politicians are doing by allowing fossil fuels to be burned.
Ofcourse if you get your gas from a not so friendly imperialistic autocrat who decides to go full in on military territorial expansion and uses gas as a economic weapon you are screwed and need to do whatever you can and is necessary.
Gas is a terrible for backup for wind/solar, especially further up north. Even in countries who in optimal weather can have 100% energy from wind (Denmark reached this a while back), gas and other fossil fuel power plants are still the single highest source of emissions by a large margin. Wind operate on average around 40-60%, which mean that half the energy used has to be sourced elsewhere. When ~50% of your energy comes from "backup", then the word "backup" looses its meaning, and that is in fairly good situation where wind has been built out to have 100% capacity.
I could see an argument for gas if it was used less than 1%, and with a decrease use as the grid expanded their capacity, but that is not the reality we got in northern Europe. Instead we see an increase in fossil fuels usage each year. With increase use we also get increased prices, with energy prices being exceptional high and rising. Politically this is a terrible loss for everyone except those investing into fossil fuels, and in the current economical downturn, fossil fuel companies are doing very well at the moment.
They didn't say that.
> How would you, then, unscientifically solve climate change if we aren't supposed to take individual action to bring our own footprint to net zero, encourage others to do the same, and bring about societal change using market pressure and all that?
The individual action here is minor. Market pressure can work but only in certain circumstances. They already suggested working on political sentiment, since laws can do a lot here to tax or force certain methods.
> But if the "you" in this sentence is being made to feel good for the wrong reasons, isn't that dishonest? Shouldn't we be looking at what is actually effective use of your money [...]
I'm pretty sure the person you're responding to is also an advocate for effective use of money, specifically by focusing on the wider changes and not focusing much on the carbon footprint concept.
But you don't have to spend all your money on improving the world as much as possible.
It’s not about will you fly or take the train. The food we eat, the clothes we wear - everything has fossil fuel inputs at some point.
One can choose to consume less. Buy second hand etc. Then the fossil inputs in mining, transport, farming and whatnot will not be repeated.
Consumer choice electricity? You can’t choose non-fossil based electricity unless someone has invested large amounts of capital in e.g wind power.
The only thing that can affect things this large is industrial policy which again in democratic countries needs political support.
That’s why consumer carbon footprint is gaslighting. The individual choise does not exist, and trying to spin the carbon economy narrative towards consumer responsibility was a backhanded attempt to delay the energy transition which only the war in Ukraine launched to a better trajectory.
I was not suggesting people spend all of their money planting trees. I was thinking it in the context that sometimes people want to do something symbolic with extra cash that makes them feel better. It was not intended as a moral imperitive.
Here is my reasoning. Say I give enough to plant 10 trees a month. In 10 years that's 1,200 trees. Let's say half of them die, we're left with 600. Assuming a tree absorb 1 ton of CO2 throughout its life, that 600 tons. I live in a place where CO2 emissions per capita are about 6 tons a year (check for yourself here and don't forget to compare with the US https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis... ).
According to this back of the enveloppe calculation after 10 years I would have planted enough trees to offset 100 years of carbon emissions.
In any case, it really puts into perspective how messed up our continued use of fossil fuels is.
Just found this estimate 'the average tree absorbs an average of 10 kilograms, or 22 pounds, of carbon dioxide per year for the first 20 years.' My quick calculation of 1 ton of CO2 being absorbed is off by a factor of five then (200kg over 20 years).
> Forests and bushes now cover over 2% of Iceland, Vísir reports. That number may not seem like much, but since 1990, the surface area covered by forest or shrubs in Iceland has increased more than six times over – from 7,000 hectares to 45,000. In 20 years, the number is expected to be 2.6%.
And from another article :
> The Forest Service intends to deliver six million plants this year, says Þröstur, which is equivalent to pre-crash levels of production. “It was around five million last year, and four million the year before that. This is a rapid increase. Then we need seven to eight million next year, which we may not manage, and ten to twelve in 2025.”