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We already have carbon removal technology. They’re called trees. [Edit] I’m not being facetious. 40% of emissions are as a result of poor land management. We’l

We already have carbon removal technology. They’re called trees. [Edit] I’m not being facetious. 40% of emissions are as a result of poor land management. We’ll need all the technological help we can get, but if we can’t manage land as carbon stores - not sources, we’re not going to win this race.

tareqak 8y ago
I guess trees could be planted more creatively. There is one particular situation where I think they should cut down / or move trees, and that is when trees are near power lines: it's basically a matter of time of when the tree falls down and the local power company has to fix the power line and the local population has to deal with the disruption in power. Maybe there is a good business in finding a good way to truly move old trees, so that we aren't forced to cut them down?
- cure 8y ago
  Or you could just have the power lines under the ground. If they are low enough to be endangered by falling trees, they could perhaps go underground instead. No need to cut down trees or maintain buffer zones along power lines. No annual periods of days/weeks without power for affected areas.
  - toast0 8y ago
    Underground power can solve tree fall issues. But it is much more expensive, both initially, and when any repairs or new connections are needed. The number of repairs likely goes down, but time to repair goes way up. In some areas, soil conditions make it pretty much impossible. Trenching for the install may require more plant disturbance than would be needed to maintain nearby trees on a regular basis. Distributed generation and redudnant distribution can help reduce the impact as well. Everything costs money though.
throwaway5752 8y ago
Trees hardly make anyone any money (absent a carbon credits/tax system).
- bpicolo 8y ago
  Wood is 50-100 billion dollar business globally, it's not nothin. Plus, a bunch of trees are food sources.
  - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    Isn't that tearing them down, not putting them up?
    - bpicolo 8y ago
      Lots of it, yeah, but tree farms are a thing too. That's a matter of cost in modern times though. Currently faster/cheaper to convince a government to let you chop down rainforests, but that won't always be true. Definitely curious how hard it would be to have drones plant trees in arid regions. Feels like I've seen some related projects before
    - lostapathy 8y ago
      Isn't that ok, though? If I build a building out of wood, or print a book in a library, that carbon is sequestered at least as long as the building or book exists.
      - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
        That's true, but you've netted zero on carbon. You need to put up more trees if you want to remove carbon. I mean, by all means tear em down, but you gotta keep putting them up.
        eanzenberg 8y ago
        I think that's the point.. Grow more trees and use the wood and the tables and books that are created are carbon that used to be in the air.
mdorazio 8y ago
This is covered in the "Where We Are Now" section at the bottom that explains BECCS. The issue is really cost - to remove carbon semi-permanently with trees you have to grow a lot of them, and then bury them deep enough that natural decay processes don't just put the carbon back into the environment. Basically you have to do the exact opposite of what we've been doing with coal and oil for over a century.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > Basically you have to do the exact opposite of what we've been doing with coal and oil for over a century There's a nugget of a story in the Carboniferous being the result of a civilisation trying, but failing, to sequester carbon by burying trees and plankton.
- atupis 8y ago
  Why not build houses from trees that will take carbon out 100-200 years from cycle.
  - romed 8y ago
    Not just houses but any kind of building. There is an architectural movement called Mass Timber where the buildings are not just framed in wood but are virtually solid wood. It actually solves a lot of problems around building cavity thermodynamics, by eliminating the cavities. A large scale mass timber building sequesters a huge amount of carbon.
    - philipkglass 8y ago
      Carbon sequestration is a nice side benefit, but wood-into-durable-products can absorb only a small fraction of present anthropogenic CO2 emissions. We're emitting about 37 billion tonnes of CO2 per year at present (10 billion tonnes of carbon) and wood is about 50% carbon. To offset a quarter of human CO2 emissions, we'd need to turn about 5 billion tonnes of wood per year into long-lasting buildings and other manufactured objects. As of 2014, the world was producing about 0.8 billion tonnes of wood products that could be used in long lasting applications (sawnwood and wood paneling). https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions https://blog.forest2market.com/fao-report-highlights-resurgence-in-global-wood-production https://blog.forest2market.com/fao-report-highlights-resurge...
lowdest 8y ago
Trees ultimately burn or rot, releasing a large portion of that carbon back into the atmosphere. Cutting them down and burying them to grow more would be ideal, but takes additional work. Someone want to engineer a tree with enormous, deep roots? Basically make the trees self-burying.
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  > Trees ultimately burn or rot Not all at once, though, and new trees spring up pretty quick. If you're replacing unforested land with forested land, you're still storing substantial carbon. Cutting down / burning an existing forest to plant trees doesn't work, sure.
- soperj 8y ago
  We're essentially doing just that when we use the wood for housing and other products and then eventually landfill, then you can plant more trees on that land.
- hinkley 8y ago
  Too narrow a view. The tree already buries almost half of its biomass in the ground for you. And a lot of material goes through the food chain when the tree rots in situ. There's a big difference between regrown forest and converting prairie to forest and a lot of that has to do with quantity and quality of decaying matter on the forest floor. Dead trees are better than no trees.
- noselasd 8y ago
  It's a buffer as long as there is a forest. Once you establish a forest where there previously was none, you have tied up a certain amount of carbon in all those tree trunk/root/branches. Sure, the individual trees will eventually die and release a lot, though far from all, carbon back again. But by then, new trees will grow and act as the storage buffer.
- hannasanarion 8y ago
  Not if they're treated with preservatives and built into houses. Every wood-frame house and piece of wooden furniture is carbon sequestration.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jeff18 8y ago
This is mentioned on the website under "Bio-energy with carbon capture and storage".
Symmetry 8y ago
Trees will only absorb 1 watt of hydrocarbon emissions per square meter, on average, even before considering the cost of burying the woods so the carbon isn't released when it rots.
- crb002 8y ago
  Nuts. Literally. Breed oaks with acorns so dense they are like rocks.
pkhagah 8y ago
At the timescale and costs needed to combat climate change, trees will be prohibitively expensive(land, fresh water) and slow. If reducing global carbon with plants was easy, governments wouldn't probably be complaining about protocols, solutions for almost 3 decades starting with Kyoto discussions. Can we stop mentioning planting trees as ultimate solution everytime carbon capture research comes up?
- hyperbovine 8y ago
  > Can we stop mentioning planting trees as ultimate solution everytime carbon capture research comes up? Fine, but by the same token, the absence of progress on climate change is because there is no political will, not because it is hard. With enough adults in the room, we could have solved this problem 20 or 30 years ago at comparatively little cost.
- andersha 8y ago
  We can manage grassland and savanah. Grasses exudate a lot of their sugars (carbon) into the ground feeding the microbes. Holistically managed grassing is all about timing the regrowth and recycling the nutrients and fibers through the cow. The prairies are amazing ecosystem pumping carbon into the ground when properly managed. The knowledge is available, but this ted talk only has 2 million views. https://youtu.be/vpTHi7O66pI https://youtu.be/vpTHi7O66pI
gustaf 8y ago
This is Gustaf from YC. I wrote the first Carbon Removal RFS. Planting tree is actually a great carbon removal technology. Unfortunately most forest owners in the world don't know or don't have incentive to care the about the carbon impact the forest have on the climate. Biggest reason forests are taken down is to grow cattle for beef. If you are working on a startup to reverse this we'd like to fund it too
- ISL 8y ago
  If you'd like to fund trees, one could start buying land and start protecting trees. Spending that money on intensive lobbying and forest advocacy in rapidly-deforesting countries could have an impact, too. The trick, of course, is that neither of these techniques compound for the individual nor a startup. They are pure charity for the planet.
  - abledon 8y ago
    we need a black mirror-esque social credit score system where based on the individuals revenue, and what corporation they work for they have a 'tree quota' they need to fulfill. this could be hours volunteered at a global tree planting foundation, $$ donated to public works companies who plant the trees. I suppose if someone only made a small amount of $ and hid the rest behind their corporation , corporations would also have to be responsible in the system and donate $ to plant trees. website would be something like tree.global ... we need some way to tie all the world (or atleast continents) together under one government, a .global domain name or something. EDIT: after reading other comments on how trees arent the greatest solution, replace trees with the best option and tie it to a continent wide / global wide black mirror credit score system.
  - francisofascii 8y ago
    So does anyone know why this isn't happening more? Surely there are plenty of super wealthy tech titans, Hollywood stars, etc. that care about climate change. They could buy up rural land that is suitable for forestry and start planting trees, or prevent deforestation. Even small time donors could make an impact. Land in the US is cheap, right? What am I missing?
supercanuck 8y ago
Trees don’t make money for Venture Capitalists.
crb002 8y ago
This. We need USDA money going to tree genetics for carbon sequestration. Pat Schnabble at ISU would be amazing at this. He has already isolated genes to thicken cell walls. He also has a novel technique of using time-lapse video to isolate lines that maximize solar uptake by cooperating with neighbors on how they grow. Almost all grain productivity in the past 20 years has been on cooperative solar coverage, not per plant yield. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXiV1dTlRSU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXiV1dTlRSU
theonemind 8y ago
I once started thinking through what we would want out of some kind of ideal carbon sequestering device. I thought that for the scale of the problem, they would need to self-replicate, and run on some natural energy source, like solar power. Then, I realized I had just invented the tree.
- intended 8y ago
  Haha, I had that same chain of thought. I’m sure we aren’t alone.
- andersha 8y ago
  And animals, ecosystems!
PeterisP 8y ago
A set of forests that stays the same size, i.e. some trees fall down and rot or get cut down and burned while new trees sprout or get planted, so that the total amount of biomass in these forests is more or less stable long-term is not a carbon removal technology but simply a carbon store. To remove carbon, the amount of biomass needs to increase... so we essentially need to cut down trees and somehow store their carbon instead of releasing it back into air through decay or burning.
tgb 8y ago
So this might be a dumb question, but if I landfill paper instead of recycling it, does it degrade? If not, is that a poor man's form of carbon sequestration? A cursory glance suggests this is correct [1], though you'd need to know a lot more to say that it was more carbon efficient than recycling. [1] http://www.allaboutbags.ca/degradeinlandfill.html http://www.allaboutbags.ca/degradeinlandfill.html
- cheapsteak 8y ago
  Was the carbon not already sequestered when it was in the form of a tree?
  - tgb 8y ago
    I assume any serious paper production company replants the tree, so you start with a tree and end with a tree and landfilled paper.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Given strommen's statement about landfilled paper turning into methane, doesn't that mean paper manufacturing is basically a carbon dioxide->methane conversion operation?
      - tgb 8y ago
        Yes, the possibility I described was for if they did not biodegrade significantly. More reading makes it sound like they degrade in weeks, with a few exceptions.
  - mchannon 8y ago
    No, it wasn’t. Trees (esp. those suitable for paper) either burn or fall over and rot, both of which release most of the carbon they used to store. Fossil fuels used to be trees, and they were well sequestered. Paper would eventually become something similar when buried.
- strommen 8y ago
Gatsky 8y ago
Important to add that plants are the only carbon removal technology with a successful track record. As global warming devastates more of the biosphere, there will be perhaps less opposition to GMO plants engineered for maximum sequestration capacity. Also useful for Mars.
andersha 8y ago
We already have carbon removal development. It's called regenerative agriculture. Regenerative agriculture is about harvesting sunlight (free resource), utilizing plants photosynthesizing abilities. Plants are a part of a larger ecosystem including producers, consumers and decomposers. Plants exudate sugars feeding the soil microbial life, sugars from the photosynthesis where atmospheric carbon dioxide is converted into sugars. Large herbivores eat the grass, holistic grazing keeps the animals moving mimicking predators and the defensive herding mechanisms for efficient animal impact. The timed regrowth will let the plant photosynthesize more carbon dioxide, while the walking sun powered compost machine (cow) decomposes the organic matter and leaves it for further decomposition and utilization. We have huge areas where desertification is happening [1] because of wrong management. Holistic Grazing is a easy implemented, low tech, approach with great benefits for capital, social and ecological level. Regenerative agriculture is also covering land management in less brittle environments, field production, notill, utilizing plants, the soil community and the only truly free available resource sunlight. [1] https://youtu.be/vpTHi7O66pI?t=157 https://youtu.be/vpTHi7O66pI?t=157

tareqak 8y ago

I guess trees could be planted more creatively. There is one particular situation where I think they should cut down / or move trees, and that is when trees are near power lines: it's basically a matter of time of when the tree falls down and the local power company has to fix the power line and the local population has to deal with the disruption in power. Maybe there is a good business in finding a good way to truly move old trees, so that we aren't forced to cut them down?

cure 8y ago
Or you could just have the power lines under the ground. If they are low enough to be endangered by falling trees, they could perhaps go underground instead. No need to cut down trees or maintain buffer zones along power lines. No annual periods of days/weeks without power for affected areas.
- toast0 8y ago
  Underground power can solve tree fall issues. But it is much more expensive, both initially, and when any repairs or new connections are needed. The number of repairs likely goes down, but time to repair goes way up. In some areas, soil conditions make it pretty much impossible. Trenching for the install may require more plant disturbance than would be needed to maintain nearby trees on a regular basis. Distributed generation and redudnant distribution can help reduce the impact as well. Everything costs money though.

throwaway5752 8y ago

Trees hardly make anyone any money (absent a carbon credits/tax system).

bpicolo 8y ago
Wood is 50-100 billion dollar business globally, it's not nothin. Plus, a bunch of trees are food sources.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  Isn't that tearing them down, not putting them up?
  - bpicolo 8y ago
    Lots of it, yeah, but tree farms are a thing too. That's a matter of cost in modern times though. Currently faster/cheaper to convince a government to let you chop down rainforests, but that won't always be true. Definitely curious how hard it would be to have drones plant trees in arid regions. Feels like I've seen some related projects before
  - lostapathy 8y ago
    Isn't that ok, though? If I build a building out of wood, or print a book in a library, that carbon is sequestered at least as long as the building or book exists.
    - SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
      That's true, but you've netted zero on carbon. You need to put up more trees if you want to remove carbon. I mean, by all means tear em down, but you gotta keep putting them up.
      - eanzenberg 8y ago
        I think that's the point.. Grow more trees and use the wood and the tables and books that are created are carbon that used to be in the air.

mdorazio 8y ago

This is covered in the "Where We Are Now" section at the bottom that explains BECCS. The issue is really cost - to remove carbon semi-permanently with trees you have to grow a lot of them, and then bury them deep enough that natural decay processes don't just put the carbon back into the environment. Basically you have to do the exact opposite of what we've been doing with coal and oil for over a century.

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> Basically you have to do the exact opposite of what we've been doing with coal and oil for over a century There's a nugget of a story in the Carboniferous being the result of a civilisation trying, but failing, to sequester carbon by burying trees and plankton.
atupis 8y ago
Why not build houses from trees that will take carbon out 100-200 years from cycle.
- romed 8y ago
  Not just houses but any kind of building. There is an architectural movement called Mass Timber where the buildings are not just framed in wood but are virtually solid wood. It actually solves a lot of problems around building cavity thermodynamics, by eliminating the cavities. A large scale mass timber building sequesters a huge amount of carbon.
  - philipkglass 8y ago
    Carbon sequestration is a nice side benefit, but wood-into-durable-products can absorb only a small fraction of present anthropogenic CO2 emissions. We're emitting about 37 billion tonnes of CO2 per year at present (10 billion tonnes of carbon) and wood is about 50% carbon. To offset a quarter of human CO2 emissions, we'd need to turn about 5 billion tonnes of wood per year into long-lasting buildings and other manufactured objects. As of 2014, the world was producing about 0.8 billion tonnes of wood products that could be used in long lasting applications (sawnwood and wood paneling). https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions https://blog.forest2market.com/fao-report-highlights-resurgence-in-global-wood-production https://blog.forest2market.com/fao-report-highlights-resurge...

lowdest 8y ago

Trees ultimately burn or rot, releasing a large portion of that carbon back into the atmosphere. Cutting them down and burying them to grow more would be ideal, but takes additional work. Someone want to engineer a tree with enormous, deep roots? Basically make the trees self-burying.

ceejayoz 8y ago
> Trees ultimately burn or rot Not all at once, though, and new trees spring up pretty quick. If you're replacing unforested land with forested land, you're still storing substantial carbon. Cutting down / burning an existing forest to plant trees doesn't work, sure.
soperj 8y ago
We're essentially doing just that when we use the wood for housing and other products and then eventually landfill, then you can plant more trees on that land.
hinkley 8y ago
Too narrow a view. The tree already buries almost half of its biomass in the ground for you. And a lot of material goes through the food chain when the tree rots in situ. There's a big difference between regrown forest and converting prairie to forest and a lot of that has to do with quantity and quality of decaying matter on the forest floor. Dead trees are better than no trees.
noselasd 8y ago
It's a buffer as long as there is a forest. Once you establish a forest where there previously was none, you have tied up a certain amount of carbon in all those tree trunk/root/branches. Sure, the individual trees will eventually die and release a lot, though far from all, carbon back again. But by then, new trees will grow and act as the storage buffer.
hannasanarion 8y ago
Not if they're treated with preservatives and built into houses. Every wood-frame house and piece of wooden furniture is carbon sequestration.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jeff18 8y ago

This is mentioned on the website under "Bio-energy with carbon capture and storage".

Symmetry 8y ago

Trees will only absorb 1 watt of hydrocarbon emissions per square meter, on average, even before considering the cost of burying the woods so the carbon isn't released when it rots.

crb002 8y ago
Nuts. Literally. Breed oaks with acorns so dense they are like rocks.

pkhagah 8y ago

At the timescale and costs needed to combat climate change, trees will be prohibitively expensive(land, fresh water) and slow. If reducing global carbon with plants was easy, governments wouldn't probably be complaining about protocols, solutions for almost 3 decades starting with Kyoto discussions. Can we stop mentioning planting trees as ultimate solution everytime carbon capture research comes up?

hyperbovine 8y ago
> Can we stop mentioning planting trees as ultimate solution everytime carbon capture research comes up? Fine, but by the same token, the absence of progress on climate change is because there is no political will, not because it is hard. With enough adults in the room, we could have solved this problem 20 or 30 years ago at comparatively little cost.
andersha 8y ago
We can manage grassland and savanah. Grasses exudate a lot of their sugars (carbon) into the ground feeding the microbes. Holistically managed grassing is all about timing the regrowth and recycling the nutrients and fibers through the cow. The prairies are amazing ecosystem pumping carbon into the ground when properly managed. The knowledge is available, but this ted talk only has 2 million views. https://youtu.be/vpTHi7O66pI https://youtu.be/vpTHi7O66pI

gustaf 8y ago

This is Gustaf from YC. I wrote the first Carbon Removal RFS. Planting tree is actually a great carbon removal technology. Unfortunately most forest owners in the world don't know or don't have incentive to care the about the carbon impact the forest have on the climate. Biggest reason forests are taken down is to grow cattle for beef. If you are working on a startup to reverse this we'd like to fund it too

ISL 8y ago
If you'd like to fund trees, one could start buying land and start protecting trees. Spending that money on intensive lobbying and forest advocacy in rapidly-deforesting countries could have an impact, too. The trick, of course, is that neither of these techniques compound for the individual nor a startup. They are pure charity for the planet.
- abledon 8y ago
  we need a black mirror-esque social credit score system where based on the individuals revenue, and what corporation they work for they have a 'tree quota' they need to fulfill. this could be hours volunteered at a global tree planting foundation, $$ donated to public works companies who plant the trees. I suppose if someone only made a small amount of $ and hid the rest behind their corporation , corporations would also have to be responsible in the system and donate $ to plant trees. website would be something like tree.global ... we need some way to tie all the world (or atleast continents) together under one government, a .global domain name or something. EDIT: after reading other comments on how trees arent the greatest solution, replace trees with the best option and tie it to a continent wide / global wide black mirror credit score system.
- francisofascii 8y ago
  So does anyone know why this isn't happening more? Surely there are plenty of super wealthy tech titans, Hollywood stars, etc. that care about climate change. They could buy up rural land that is suitable for forestry and start planting trees, or prevent deforestation. Even small time donors could make an impact. Land in the US is cheap, right? What am I missing?

supercanuck 8y ago

Trees don’t make money for Venture Capitalists.

crb002 8y ago

This. We need USDA money going to tree genetics for carbon sequestration. Pat Schnabble at ISU would be amazing at this. He has already isolated genes to thicken cell walls. He also has a novel technique of using time-lapse video to isolate lines that maximize solar uptake by cooperating with neighbors on how they grow. Almost all grain productivity in the past 20 years has been on cooperative solar coverage, not per plant yield. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXiV1dTlRSU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXiV1dTlRSU

theonemind 8y ago

I once started thinking through what we would want out of some kind of ideal carbon sequestering device. I thought that for the scale of the problem, they would need to self-replicate, and run on some natural energy source, like solar power. Then, I realized I had just invented the tree.

intended 8y ago
Haha, I had that same chain of thought. I’m sure we aren’t alone.
andersha 8y ago
And animals, ecosystems!

PeterisP 8y ago

A set of forests that stays the same size, i.e. some trees fall down and rot or get cut down and burned while new trees sprout or get planted, so that the total amount of biomass in these forests is more or less stable long-term is not a carbon removal technology but simply a carbon store. To remove carbon, the amount of biomass needs to increase... so we essentially need to cut down trees and somehow store their carbon instead of releasing it back into air through decay or burning.

tgb 8y ago

So this might be a dumb question, but if I landfill paper instead of recycling it, does it degrade? If not, is that a poor man's form of carbon sequestration? A cursory glance suggests this is correct [1], though you'd need to know a lot more to say that it was more carbon efficient than recycling. [1] http://www.allaboutbags.ca/degradeinlandfill.html http://www.allaboutbags.ca/degradeinlandfill.html

cheapsteak 8y ago
Was the carbon not already sequestered when it was in the form of a tree?
- tgb 8y ago
  I assume any serious paper production company replants the tree, so you start with a tree and end with a tree and landfilled paper.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Given strommen's statement about landfilled paper turning into methane, doesn't that mean paper manufacturing is basically a carbon dioxide->methane conversion operation?
    - tgb 8y ago
      Yes, the possibility I described was for if they did not biodegrade significantly. More reading makes it sound like they degrade in weeks, with a few exceptions.
- mchannon 8y ago
  No, it wasn’t. Trees (esp. those suitable for paper) either burn or fall over and rot, both of which release most of the carbon they used to store. Fossil fuels used to be trees, and they were well sequestered. Paper would eventually become something similar when buried.
strommen 8y ago

Gatsky 8y ago

Important to add that plants are the only carbon removal technology with a successful track record. As global warming devastates more of the biosphere, there will be perhaps less opposition to GMO plants engineered for maximum sequestration capacity. Also useful for Mars.

andersha 8y ago

We already have carbon removal development. It's called regenerative agriculture. Regenerative agriculture is about harvesting sunlight (free resource), utilizing plants photosynthesizing abilities. Plants are a part of a larger ecosystem including producers, consumers and decomposers. Plants exudate sugars feeding the soil microbial life, sugars from the photosynthesis where atmospheric carbon dioxide is converted into sugars. Large herbivores eat the grass, holistic grazing keeps the animals moving mimicking predators and the defensive herding mechanisms for efficient animal impact. The timed regrowth will let the plant photosynthesize more carbon dioxide, while the walking sun powered compost machine (cow) decomposes the organic matter and leaves it for further decomposition and utilization. We have huge areas where desertification is happening [1] because of wrong management. Holistic Grazing is a easy implemented, low tech, approach with great benefits for capital, social and ecological level. Regenerative agriculture is also covering land management in less brittle environments, field production, notill, utilizing plants, the soil community and the only truly free available resource sunlight. [1] https://youtu.be/vpTHi7O66pI?t=157 https://youtu.be/vpTHi7O66pI?t=157