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Planting 1.2T Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions
- progfix 7y agoThat's a lot of trees though and it cancels out only a decade. EDIT: I just looked it up: there are roughly 4-10 trillion trees on earth right now.
- scottostler 7y agoThat is a lot of trees, but a decade’s worth is a lot of emissions
- tim333 7y agoAlso when they are grown (30 years?) you could chop them, stack the wood or use it in some way that doesn't release the carbon and then grow another lot.
- ip26 7y agoIndeed, we don't talk about the absolute numbers a lot but reportedly more than half of all CO2 emitted by human industrial activity has been released since 1988. So our current per-decade pace of emissions is truly colossal, historic, unprecedented, pick your term.
- aivisol 7y agoAnd lots of land. Suppose you can plant them in say 4m rows with 4m separation, it would be approx 60K trees per 1km2 or 20million km2 in total. Twice of the size of the US?
- cheerlessbog 7y agoI guess some land may become available as permafrost melts?
- adtac 7y agoAh, so we've been trying to do good all this time with industrialisation!
- d33 7y agoThis makes me wonder - could trees be modified genetically to handle more CO2 in order to make this number lower? Could we, instead of trees, have huge walls made of plants that would consume our CO2?
- wollstonecraft 7y agoWe have been genetically modifying plants to maximize CO2 utilization for millenia.
- Retric 7y agoPlants try to minimize CO2 utilization becase it’s energy intensive. We could design something that stores more carbon, but with real tradeoffs as it would have less energy for other things.
- ai_ia 7y agohttps://www.imnovation-hub.com/society/pollution-eating-moss/ https://www.imnovation-hub.com/society/pollution-eating-moss... This might be something you are referring to.
- layoutIfNeeded 7y agoJust use a bunch of these: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event It worked 49 million years ago.
- Zenbit_UX 7y agoI believe the Californian Redwoods are very good at this but one of their main disadvantages is they take forever to grow in their native climate. Ironically, they grow much faster on the other side of the world (New Zealand) due to its wetter climate but the wood is not as hard due to this so they aren't useful in construction. Basically the ultimate carbon sync and useless for humans.
- pvaldes 7y agoWould be trivial to put a hothouse over it for the first years to mimick the humid forest environment. Could act also as water collectors and a sort of fire barriers for stopping flying embers also. Metallic mesh dissipates hot.
- cl0ckt0wer 7y agoIt doesn't look like they factored in the CO2 emissions from planting that many trees. The actual presentation: https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2019/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/23744 https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2019/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/23744 Under a business-as-usual climate scenario our model suggests that warming would drive the loss of ~55 gigatons of carbon from the upper soil horizons by 2050. This value is around 12–17 per cent of the expected anthropogenic emissions over this period.
- m0zg 7y agoNor the emissions when those trees burn because they were planted in a place where waterbed can't support their density. This is happening in CA nearly every year.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago> the emissions when those trees burn We'd probably have to sequester them somewhere anaerobic. Bottom of a deep-sea trench or underground. Which also reduces the net carbon footprint of the activity.
- adrianN 7y agoThe best way for sequestering wood is turning it into biochar. You even get some energy out of it.
- TaylorAlexander 7y agoDoesn’t that release the captured carbon?
- brohee 7y agoNot all of it, that's the point. Some pure carbon (charcoal) is left that makes good soil amendment. That carbon doesn't make it back to the atmosphere unless somehow burned.
- 781 7y agoNoob question here: what is stopping nature doing this, seeds and all that?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ToBeBannedSoon 7y agoHumans.
- strainer 7y agoMost often its grazing livestock, they like to eat seedlings.
- ToBeBannedSoon 7y agoLivestock actually enriches the soil by their poop.
- Retra 7y agoLivestock eat to extract nutrients. Their waste is not more nutrient rich than the stuff they eat. That would be impossible.
- chrisco255 7y agoManure is fertilizer. https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/composting/manures/cow-manure-compost.htm https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/composting/manures/cow-manu...
- chrisco255 7y agoIt's pretty easy to mitigate this on a farm by roping or fencing off a patch of seedlings.
- tim333 7y agoI guess it depends on the location. Some have cattle and deforestation. Natural reseeding can be slow. Though in England if you leave a bit of land alone it'll pretty much be woodland in 30 years or so. If anyone fancies donating to plant a few 100 or 1000 trees https://donate.trees.org/campaign/trees-for-the-futures-earth-month-challenge/c230791 https://donate.trees.org/campaign/trees-for-the-futures-eart... does good stuff for about 15c/tree. It doesn't take very much to cancel out your personal CO2 load that way. I donated I think $100 for 1000 trees a while back.
- ai_ia 7y agoI wonder if desert soil can be gradually converted to make the land fertile. That would definitely be helpful to convert a lot of land to plant trees which is currently of no particular use. Any research or innovation on that front ?
- hliyan 7y agoWater would be a problem, although that could theoretically be solved with solar powered desalination. References: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_greening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_greening
- wolfspider 7y agoThat’s a really good point also where water and irrigation is concerned hopefully that would be done in the most sustainable way possible.
- coob 7y agoYes https://youtu.be/stc5MUIloP0 https://youtu.be/stc5MUIloP0
- 0xfaded 7y agoChina tried it and it's not really working https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-North_Shelter_Forest_Program https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-North_Shelter_Forest_P.... Also looks like a similar project in Africa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall
- michelpp 7y agoThe soil is generally fine, the limiting factor is water. In Central Oregon's "Lake County" near where I live, 10-20k years ago was dense forest and thousands of deep clear water lakes. It's all desert now except for the "Lost Forest" near Christmas Valley. A fascinating enclave of ancient trees that somehow survive in the middle of the desert due to what is suspected to be an unusually shallow ground water system.
- jammygit 7y agoIts hard for me to plant a tree, but I could expand my garden or add a bush. How many gardens are needed to equal a tree?
- G8WyaX 7y ago"Trees are supposed to slow global warming, but growing evidence suggests they might not always be climate saviours." https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00122-z https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00122-z https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19690382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19690382
- tosca 7y agoGenesis 1:28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
- EamonnMR 7y agoThis is a great illustration of how there is no hope of sequestration as a solution. We're unlikely to plant even just a billion trees.
- weberc2 7y agoWhy do you suppose that is the case? Is the cost per tree too great? Are you pessimistic about lowering that cost via automation? I read recently about drones that can drop large numbers of pods containing fertilizer and seeds over a huge area in little time; it doesn’t seem infeasible to iterate on a concept like that and drive down the costs considerably.
- avmich 7y agoArticle says "The United Nations’ Trillion Tree Campaign has planted nearly 15 billion trees across the globe in recent years."
- typon 7y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_Tree_Tsunami https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_Tree_Tsunami Successfully completed in 2017
- riffraff 7y agoSo we need the same effort only 1200 times over, which means something like 5 times for each country on earth including the very tiny ones. Still, every little helps.
- dilyevsky 7y agoUh “Each year Americans plant at least 1.6 billion trees or about 6 trees for each one we use.” - according to 5 sec of googling
- kekeke 7y agothis comment is a great example of baseless couch-general type of pessimism
- WalterBright 7y ago
- tcbawo 7y agoPlanting floating seaweed forests seems like a more feasible thing to do at scale. It might even help with marine ecology.
- vbuwivbiu 7y agodo both do everything we can
- jacknews 7y agoI agree, in addition to planting trees. Eg https://medium.com/invironment/an-army-of-ocean-farmers-on-the-frontlines-of-the-blue-green-economic-revolution-d5ae171285a3 https://medium.com/invironment/an-army-of-ocean-farmers-on-t... Also floating solar, with compressed-air energy storage in under-sea airbags (could work on hydro reservoirs too)
- Panino 7y agoA good way to take part in increasing the number of trees, if you own your own home, is to improve the state of your shade trees. The trees absorb atmospheric carbon while also reducing home temperatures in summer, which in turn reduces the electricity people use for cooling. (And you save money!!) So a shade tree is a particularly effective way to reduce both atmospheric CO2 and electric bills. You might think of shade trees as cheap, biological solar panels. Also, one can plant fruit trees in their yard. I put in 6 last fall and plan to put in another dozen in the next 2-3 weeks. Over the winter I added about 6 truck loads of wood chips to the yard to reduce water usage. (My general feeling at this point from working with the soil is that the wood chips reduce watering needs by at least 80% here. This is a form of xeriscaping, if you're interested.) With all this food growing in the coming years we'll be taking fewer trips to the grocery store while eating better. And probably giving away and trading a lot of food - we're already starting to trade for eggs from a friend, for example.
- ChuckMcM 7y agoCuts into my solar power generation through. So its a trade-off. Interestingly enough, from an energy production perspective the solar panels on the roof result in more reduction in CO2 than the trees do.
- jweir 7y agoCan you prove that or back that up with some facts?
- spydum 7y agoI suspect this is because you generate power all year round, while a shade tree doesn’t help heat your house in winter..
- village-idiot 7y agoThat’s pretty trivial to prove. Grid tied systems sell excess electricity back at bulk rates, at least in some states, which means that the solar panels are producing more electricity than the home needs for cooling. Thus such a house is actually spending negative carbon on cooling, since they’re providing green energy for their neighbors. A shade tree can reduce your need for electricity, but it can’t turn you into a net producer.
- strainer 7y agoStudies on this are very valuable. The IPCC's AR5 advises this kind of action to be funded and analyzes different policy approaches to enable action. There is no justification at skepticism and entertaining back-of-the-envelope gotchas about the climactic and environmental value of tree planting and enhanced forestry at this late stage. It needs to be supported ! https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_chapter11.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5... " Reducing emissions from deforestation; reducing emissions from forest degradation; conservation of forest carbon stocks; sustainable management of forests; and enhancement of forest carbon stocks (REDD) consists of forest-related activities implemented voluntarily by developing countries that may, in isolation or jointly lead to significant climate change mitigation. REDD was introduced in the agenda of the UNFCCC in 2005, and has since evolved to an improved understanding of the potential positive and negative impacts, methodological issues, safeguards, and financial aspects associated with REDD implementation. " (page 865)
- ToBeBannedSoon 7y agoCNN coverage: https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/17/world/trillion-trees-climate-change-intl-scn/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/17/world/trillion-trees-climate-...
- jweir 7y agoBut, wait... some places are clearing forest for solar farms. Georgetown https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/01/georgetowns-green-plan-destroy-forest-solar-farm-is-met-with-resistance/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/01/georgetow... Rhode Island https://www.providencejournal.com/news/20190414/proposed-ri-solar-farms-endangering-rural-forests-environmentalists-say https://www.providencejournal.com/news/20190414/proposed-ri-... Prineville Oregon(I dont' know how many trees will be cleared for this, maybe it will be on existing farmland) https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2018/07/massive_solar_projects_will_po.html https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2018/07/massive_so...
- village-idiot 7y agoAll things considered, clearing a forest to help wean us of natural gas and oil is probably a net positive.
- 11235813213455 7y agonuclear power is significantly more (space-, energy-, ..) efficient and clean than solar farms https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/23/if-solar-panels-are-so-clean-why-do-they-produce-so-much-toxic-waste/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/23...
- cure 7y agoExcept for those two huge externalities that are never priced in and always overlooked by people who say nuclear is 'clean': the waste that will remain toxic for a very long time, and the risk of accidents (slim, but the consequences are really, really, really bad).
- village-idiot 7y agoInstalling solar panels kills more people than nuclear ever has by orders of magnitude. We have the tech to deal with nuclear waste, we’ve just never spent the money to productionalize it. Look into “sub-critical nuclear reactors”, which “burn” nuclear waste for even more electricity!
- dalex00 7y agoAny donation organisation which convert donated money into trees and keep them alive or other co2 activities?
- burlesona 7y agoNot to be too snarky, but my first reaction to the headline was, “only 1.2 trillion? What are we waiting for!” More seriously, though: the article claims there’s “ample acreage” for such an endeavor but I didn’t see where exactly they’re referring to. Are we supposed to imagine these are sprinkled here and there around the earth, and that there’s plenty of space just waiting for a tree to be planted, or is this something where we need to create or re-create vast forest lands for it to work?
- jandrese 7y agoThat's only 160 trees for every man, woman, and child on Earth... It doesn't seem like a particularly practical solution.
- oliwarner 7y agoBut it might be part of a solution.
- dota_fanatic 7y agoHow hard is it to plant a tree? Especially if it's young and there is very clear guidance as to which native trees should be planted in which contexts you have available to you locally (account for full size growth and sunlight / water needs). If over one year everyone planted 3 trees per week, and we employed a work force of people to cultivate them further, we would make a huge dent in our catastrophic risk exposure? Sure, it's seemingly impractical alongside the status quo of land distribution and use ( $$$ into develop all the land and farm humans for rent!!), but... more green will be good for the health of nearly all the living things on Earth, and at the very least give us more time to find even better solutions.
- village-idiot 7y agoIt’s cheap to plant baby trees, and baby trees are the ones that are about to go through their main carbon absorption cycle anyways.
- pvaldes 7y ago
- maxander 7y agoFor reference, there’s about 500 trillion square meters of land area on the planet; so even if trees are crowded together one per square meter, this is talking about a 500th of that. But perhaps we can find a way to make the Sahara into a forest? That’s about what it would take.
- johnchristopher 7y ago> But perhaps we can find a way to make the Sahara into a forest? That’s about what it would take. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19557497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19557497
- anon1253 7y agoMy go-to model that might work is: - Plant heliostat molten salt reactors in desert coastal areas (the concentrated solar kind) - Use generated heat to desalinate water - Use desalinated water to provide irrigation - Plant (potentially GMO'ed) bootstrapping organisms to create a soil (greening) - Plant trees - Rinse repeat.
- maelito 7y ago> Trees are “our most powerful weapon in the fight against climate change” No, our most powerful weapon against climate change is reducing human GHG emissions.
- simonh 7y agoThe should probably say 'most effective'. Yes not creating the problem in the first place would be the most powerful approach, but it's just not going to happen at least in the short to medium term. It would hit our standards of living (everybody's, including the poorest people on the planet) too much to be politically viable. The things we can do to reduce carbon emissions immediately are somewhat limited, but planting trees right now is comparatively easy.
- rebuilder 7y agoYou have to find a way to do that, though, in a way that doesn't result in a revolt.
- antaviana 7y agoIt's a difficult endeavor. It involves greatly reducing human population, and both quick (war, massive deaths) and slow (fewer births than deaths) come each with their own set of issues.
- avip 7y agoSize aside, we need to plant some 15 Billion trees a year just to break-even on trees.
- filleokus 7y agoMy gut reaction to suggestions like this one is that it seems so hard to do stuff that is as geographically distributed as this. I mean, to plant a billion trees we need to find suitable locations that have an enormous area (twice the US per some comment here). The odds, I'm guessing, are that this will be spread among many/all the continents over multiple countries, involving so many local stakeholders and potential nimby/yimby-disputes. In my mind a solution needs to be implementable in a meaningful way by single actors. I'm not sure about the state of the art of direct air carbon capture, but for me it seems like a much easier solution. "Just" push X billion/trillion USD into an enormous plant somewhere in a dessert with access to solar/nuclear power and suck it up. Maybe negative emission solutions will turn out to be not feasible anyways, and the best we can do is to focus our efforts on reaching close to zero new emissions.
- vageli 7y agoWhile I certainly wish your view becomes the reality, in my mind, this problem is far too large for any single actor to ameliorate. I also worry that we are holding out for the best solution while ignoring decent solutions that could reduce the issue (perfect is the enemy of the good).
- rebuilder 7y agoThe problem with a push-button solution like you describe is that anyone trying it would be fighting an exponential growth curve. Economic growth remains closely correlated with increased demand for energy. Any solution that doesn't address the consumption side of the equation will run into a brick wall sooner or later. At the current rate of growth, we're not that far from directly producing more heat than the earth can radiate into space.
- ip26 7y agoAt this scale I think is where you must use distributed actors, which in turn implies you should be using economics. Name a price for each tree, establish quality control (inspection, approved list of species, etc) and let the billions of people on the planet figure the rest out.
- mrfusion 7y agoAn interesting idea I had. Obviously it’s destructive but maybe still a net win? Go through every forest on earth and cut down every third tree and sequester it so it won’t decompose and release the carbon. Then the forest rengerates itself and pulls all that carbon out of the atmosphere. Or an idea for a billionaire. Buy out the entire worlds annual output of lumber and sequester it.
- riffraff 7y agoThe tree grows anyway, plausibly at a faster rate than a small one (slower proportionally,but more in absolute volume) while keeping the existing volume sequestered, so cutting it down does not seem effective. You could dump vegetables or corn in a hole though, but I've read that's not a cost effective solution either.
- mrfusion 7y agoI heard forests were carbon neutral since old trees die and decompose and then new ones replace them.
- mrfusion 7y agoPeople wonder if we have the space to plant these. How about creating giant floating tracts of mangrove trees. They’re naturally able to live in saltwater. Maybe make the islands out of waste plastic.
- ouid 7y agothat's only 160 trees per person...
- thinkingemote 7y agoJust an aside, if you see campaigns such as "we have planted 2 trees for each widget you buy" you should understand that this is often in a forestry program where the new trees often get pruned or removed to make room. So a claim like "we planted 10k trees last year" doesnt mean much at all. the majority of trees planted in forestry do not survive. In terms of carbon a forestry program is neutral at best just replacing fallen trees and negative most of the time. It's not the planting that counts, it's the leaving the trees alone.
- noja 7y ago> It's not the planting that counts, it's the leaving the trees alone. And that's what's missing from the title (the "if we stop cutting down so many trees" part)
- viburnum 7y agoEverybody just keep doing what you’re doing, because problems could be solved, hypothetically.
- vbuwivbiu 7y agohttps://www.trilliontreecampaign.org/ https://www.trilliontreecampaign.org/ https://onetreeplanted.org/ https://onetreeplanted.org/ anyone got any other suggestions for organizations to donate to to get trees planted fast ? Because I love trees regardless of whether they going to help save our home planet
- DesiLurker 7y agoHere is one I like: https://www.projectgreenhands.org https://www.projectgreenhands.org they have Guinness record for most tree saplings planted in a day, over 28M planted so far.
- vbuwivbiu 7y agowhere are the best places on the planet to plant trees ? From the point of view of stabilizing soil, controlling local climate and politically.
- DesiLurker 7y agoOne analysis I read some time back claimed that Trees are net positive when they are closer to equator, IIRC 30deg each way. fortunately for this topic, the areas close to equator are also significantly poorer countries thereby maximizing the roi of a fixed dollar expense. Overall I believe that if a functioning carbon credit marketplace is established we can fund the whole green movement with a fraction of world GDP and might even end up creating a whole bunch of jobs doing it.
- ph0rque 7y agoTrees For the Future
- tamaharbor 7y agoBut the associated increase in wildfires will really be a bear.
- gmuslera 7y agoYou don't cure cancer taking painkillers. You should both go after the symptoms (if they are bad enough at least, that they are now) and the root cause, because if you don't solve the real disease the symptom mitigations will be shortlived, as the patient.
- elsewhen 7y agoa little extra runway on solving the problem is sorely needed. i agree that we shouldn't get addicted to this short term solution, but if it buys us a few extra decades, that would be a huge accomplishment.
- gustaf 7y agoY Combinator funded https://www.pachama.com/ https://www.pachama.com/ in the batch of YC. They're building a marketplace of carbon credit to enable exactly this. They're hiring for engineering and operations in San Francisco right now https://angel.co/pachama/jobs https://angel.co/pachama/jobs
- dfuego 7y agoThanks Gustaf! Yes, we will be hiring for many roles soon. Email us to jobs@pachama.com!
- gameswithgo 7y agoUntil those trees die, then its all back again. Trees are just a buffer, and how much co2 would be produced mobilizing the planet to plant 1.2 trillion trees?
- jhrmnn 7y agoNot necessarily. As other posters in this discussion point out, you can for instance create biochar from trees, which can be permanently planted in the ground, thus finally returning in the place of origin the carbon we earlier dug out in the form of oil and natural gas.
- bpfrh 7y agobut biochar requieres high temperatures, which usually produces co2... The problem with all this CO2 Storage is that we have a perfect storage for co2: Oil. Since we burn this storage, we release more and more of that CO2 without anyway to put it back to storage. The tree idea can maybe slow down the climate change, but it is in no way a solution, merely a short stopgap.
- ncmncm 7y agoBiochar can be produced (and is) by burning off the hydrogen. This is done by restricting oxygen availability, which the hydrogen preferentially bonds with. When the hydrogen is used up, you are left with charcoal, which powdered and mixed into the soil improves it wonderfully. Look up "terra nigra", invented in the Amazon basin.
- ip26 7y agoOr they seed out (or are replaced by humans). A forest can hold carbon for as long as it is allowed to propagate. There is no permanent carbon sink, see peat bog fires.
- Bluestrike2 7y agoTo put the number in perspective, that's a 40% increase in the estimated number of trees worldwide. That's a positively enormous increase, and would--by necessity--in large part be planted on and around existing agricultural land. That comes with a host of significant opportunity costs; just to start, population increases are projected to require a ~70% increase in food production from 2005 to 2050[0]. While there's a great deal of progress being made in improved agricultural efficiency and food waste reduction that will help lessen the environmental impacts of that increase, land for food production is still likely to directly compete with biomass plantations for carbon removal. There are also recent studies that highlight some of the potential environmental impacts of large-scale terrestrial carbon removal as a primary mechanism for reversing the effects of climate change. Optimizing for sequestration means converting the most productive agricultural land or using even more natural land, devastating either food production or natural ecosystems,[1] in addition to drawing heavily on water resources and fertilizers on a massive scale, risking other planetary boundaries.[2] The more realistic scenarios risk both, albeit to less catastrophic degrees, but do so by decreasing potential sequestration and limiting its effects on global temperatures. Put a bit glibly, it's jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. That's not to say that it isn't part of the solution. It is, as the first paper explicitly states in its conclusion, and "can significantly contribute as a “supporting actor” of the mitigation protagonist, if it gets started and deployed immediately." But it won't be a primary mechanism, nor will it reach anywhere near 1.2 trillion trees. Even the more limited "pertinent options available now, which include reforestation of degraded land and the protection of degraded forests to allow them to recover naturally and increase their carbon storage" need to be priorities. Other geoengineering proposals, such as possible solar radiation management techniques, might extend the period during which we can use tCDR and other carbon removal mechanisms to mitigate past emissions beyond just slowing the rate of temperature increase. But without drastic emissions reductions in the immediate future, all of those possible options become more difficult, with even more deleterious consequences. Not to mention more expensive. In other words, there's no easy or even optimal answer. Assuming, of course, that 1.2 trillion trees can be considered "easy." 0. http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/wsfs/docs/Issues_papers/HLEF2050_Global_Agriculture.pdf http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/wsfs/docs/Issues_pape... 1. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a712/e761c2360f927cbff0ee54d64761bb5d0709.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a712/e761c2360f927cbff0ee54... 2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-017-0064-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-017-0064-y
- IvanK_net 7y agoI think we need a system, where the rest of the world will pay countries like Brazil or Indonesia to keep their current rainforests. Currently, we are paying them to cut down rainforests and plant oil palms, so that we can buy cheap oil from them.
- piadodjanho 7y agoIn Brazil the deforestation in mostly for agricultural active and live stock. I'm curious to know how much the land would have to cost so the country made as much tax with the planted land as with other activities.
- ww520 7y agoI wish the government gives money or tax credit to home owners for planting trees, like X amount for first year and a little bit more every year for the next 5 years, instead of the punitive approach some cities taking now.
- bjourne 7y agoI made some rough calculations yesterday and user strainer corrected me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19701879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19701879 It would seem that even with his corrections and this article's data capturing carbon isn't feasible. 1.2T trees increases earth's forestation by 40% but only nets us 10 years of emissions. It seems very inefficient in relation to trying to reduce emissions.
- ddxxdd 7y agoIt seems to be more cost-effective than forcing everybody- including the poor- to buy brand new Teslas. Assuming that: * It costs $0.50 per tree planted, * trees absorb 1 ton of CO2 each, * Teslas cost $15,000 more than regular cars * Teslas emit 1 gallon of fuel less than regular cars per 25 miles (starting after 50,000 miles: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324128504578346913994914472 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324128504578346...) * 1 gallon of gas produces 20 lbs of CO2 * Cars will last 250,000 miles Then we have Teslas saving us: ( (250,000-50,000) miles * 1 gallon per 25 miles * 20 lbs per gallon)/$15,000 = 10 pounds of CO2 saved per dollar spent on Teslas, compared to 4,000 pounds of CO2 saved per dollar spent on planting trees. This is why I associate myself with climate skeptics despite their negative reputation. An economic analysis of climate change seems to suggest that the world will be worse off with climate change mitigation, as it's currently being practiced, than with climate change itself. Edit: It's actually quite interesting to see that your username resembles the name of Bjorne Lomborg, a famous scientist who often makes arguments about the economics of climate change and comes to similar conclusions as I do.
- DesiLurker 7y agoSo then you'd support a kind of carbon credits market for such tree planting scheme?
- ddxxdd 7y agoI likely would, with caveats. There could be an even cheaper scheme for climate change mitigation that we haven't thought of (like stimulating plankton growth with iron, for instance). And it's actually possible that the total cost of allowing climate change to progress unmitigated may actually be cheaper than 50 cents per ton of CO2; creating more fertilizer for farmland and building seawalls may become cheaper 100 years from now than the future growth-adjusted value of the proposed carbon-based tax credits.
- gigatexal 7y agoIf there’s land for them to be planted let’s do it!
- sooham 7y agoAt one tree per second It would take 38000 years to plant 1.2 trillion trees. This proposition is beyond our currently available resources.
- dev_dull 7y agoThat sounds more doable than current legislation that would cost more money than exist in the entire world.
- sametmax 7y agoAt one carrot per second, you can't provide food for the entire human demand. But we don't plant one carrot per second.
- tbabb 7y agoI don't think that's the right metric for assessing feasibility. Humans can do more than one thing at the same time.
- bencollier49 7y agoIf there are seven times more trees than previously thought, as per the article, and 1.2 trillion would have this effect, then what effect does that have on climate models which counted sequestration by trees?
- SlowRobotAhead 7y agoLikewise, is the water needed for 1.2 trillion trees calculated?
- tbabb 7y agoI wonder how increasing the forestation of the planet by 40% would affect the planet's average albedo, and by extension the solar thermal energy retention.
- noja 7y agoWe need to stop buying stuff we don't need, chucking food we didn't eat, and eating beef like there's no tomorrow.
- massive-tea 7y agoWhy not both? The best solution is probably somewhere in the middle.
- noja 7y agoWe must do both.
- Radim 7y agoCO₂ is a precious and much coveted resource in nature. It's predicted to become all sequestered under ground eventually, on a billion-year timescale (making it quite troublesome for life!). More pressingly, when it comes to plant life RIGHT NOW, we're still dangerously close to CO₂ starvation levels. The current ~400 parts-per-million are a good deal healthier than the ~180 ppm we've had throughout Quaternary (which nearly killed off all plant life). But compared to ~4000 ppm during the Cambrian explosion, we're still in a dire CO₂ drought. Interesting science tidbit: not all plant life is equipped to handle CO₂ equally well. To combat the "recent" CO₂ drought, some plants evolved a new photosynthesis pathway called C4 over the past ~5m years [0]. Only about 3% of flowering plant species use the C4 pathway (notably tropical grasslands), but these account for 23% of the carbon fixed (primary productivity) in the world. OTOH, trees in the OP fall under the older "C3 pathway", which cannot make use of CO₂ nearly as efficiently, and as a consequence struggle the most in CO₂-impoverished climates [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_carbon_fixation#The_evolution_and_advantages_of_the_C4_pathway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_carbon_fixation#The_evoluti... [1] https://phys.org/news/2018-04-carbon-dioxide-boost-plantgrowth.html https://phys.org/news/2018-04-carbon-dioxide-boost-plantgrow...
- noja 7y agoCO2 drought? Starvation levels? What's your point? We need more CO2 because... what? Edit: I can't help but think your comment was sponsored.
- drawnwren 7y agoOp provided a clear explanation of their argument. I don't think they argued that we need more CO2 just provided an interesting perspective on a different time scale. No need for ad hominem attacks.
- jarvelov 7y agoI think you need to read the comment you're responding to again. OP is not arguing for anything, rather pointing out that different plants evolved to more effectively handle low CO2 environments.
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- jloughry 7y agoThis is one global-scale geoengineering project I can rally get behind. It has the smallest chance of catastrophic second-order effects of any of the several methods I've heard of.
- taf2 7y agoI hope this is the American version of a trillion and not the British.. googles how many billions are in a trillion and got back “In the American system one billion is 1,000,000,000 and a trillion is 1,000,000,000,000 so one trillion is one thousand times one billion. In the British system one billion is 1,000,000,000,000 and one trillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 so one trillion is one million times one billion.”
- seraphsf 7y agoNo longer true, the divergence is archaic. “In British English, a billion used to be equivalent to a million million (i.e. 1,000,000,000,000), while in American English it has always equated to a thousand million (i.e. 1,000,000,000). British English has now adopted the American figure, though, so that a billion equals a thousand million in both varieties of English. The same sort of change has taken place with the meaning of trillion. In British English, a trillion used to mean a million million million (i.e. 1,000,000,000,000,000,000). Nowadays, it's generally held to be equivalent to a million million (1,000,000,000,000), as it is in American English.” https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/how-many-is-a-billion/ https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/how-many-is-a-bill...
- aj7 7y agoIf the US share is 10%, that amounts to planting 40,000 trees per square mile over 3 million square miles. That is a square grid of trees, every 26 feet in X and Y, over 80% of the US landmass. Say what?
- foolfoolz 7y agoand just because the trees are in the ground everyone magically has enough water to care for them
- true_religion 7y agoOne tree every 26 feet is barely anything. Every suburban yard could support that instead of grass, and more rural environments would simply have actual forests.
- ph0rque 7y agoYes! And you can do so at the tune of $0.10 a tree. To offset your CO2 emissions, you need to spend $15/person/year (if you're an American resident). I wrote a blog post about it here: https://automicrofarm.com/blog/2019/03/solving-climate-change-with-trees.html https://automicrofarm.com/blog/2019/03/solving-climate-chang...
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- harryh 7y agoYour quoted price for CO2 offsets is about $1/ton (us residents emit a bit more than 15 tons of CO2 per year). That's about 150x smaller than most other estimates for the cost of carbon sequestration. I think your math is probably wrong.
- ph0rque 7y agoHere's my source: https://trees.org/faqs/ https://trees.org/faqs/ (see the answer to question #15). I think the more important question is, can they scale that cost per tree planted? Hard to say until it's tried. Also, my calculations assume 22 tons emitted by the average US resident.
- harryh 7y agoAnother way to know your number is wrong is to consider the fact that the US emits ~5.5 gigatons of CO2 per year. If it cost only $1 a ton to sequester that then the total cost would only be only 5.5 billion dollars a year. That's....not very much at all. Global warming wouldn't be a problem if Jeff Bezos could fix it by himself.
- ph0rque 7y agoFeel free to point out where my math is wrong, or what any of the numbers should be. I show my math work in the blog article I linked to. I would be happy to make any corrections.
- acd 7y agoHow many trees has been removed in total by deforestation? Planting trees is a good thing, but at the same time there is deforestation. The deforestation must also stop. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34134366 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34134366 Earth's trees number 'three trillion' "Scientific research has shown that there were once six trillion trees on our planet, and now there are around three trillion left.[1] Human activity was the main driving force for this decrease and humans can, therefore, be the main driving force in increasing it again!" source: Trillion Trees Three major international conservation organizations – the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the World Wide Fund for Nature - UK (WWF-UK) and BirdLife International (BLI) We probably also need to remake the economic system what parameters it optimise's for, so that it does not focus on exponential economic output growth as that will drive exponential energy consumption. Reasoning, the planet is already literally on fire due to global warming, why put more fuel on the fire?
- lifeisstillgood 7y agoSo humans are pumping, each year, 100 Billion trees worth of CO2 100 Billion trees. Holy Crap. So if every household in the UK planted a tree in their (often non existent) garden, that would be about 22 Million trees - or about 2 hours worth. Holy fucking crap. that's a lot of CO2
- Aeolun 7y agoIf only every person in the world could plant roughly 150 trees... I mean, this is a great conclusion, but what are we supposed to do with it?
- Uptrenda 7y agoThere used to be this series about "guerilla gardening" where people would throw all kinds of seeds in an urban area and weeks later it would be over-run with beautiful flowers. You could do the same thing to plant trees with a drone and even water them. Throw in some IOT sensors and incentives, and you've got yourself a crap coin for tree drones that might actually help the environment.
- ggm 7y agoThe great thing about a million nay-sayers is they tend to drown by each other out. Almost all unintended consequences or downsides will play out, but in a Darwinian sense what remains will be the tractable part. Trillions of plantings will only leave behind hundreds of billions of trees but also millions of jobs and effective enriched lives and for every damaged water table depleted another will be renewed and remediated. The downside of inaction is staying depressed about a solvable problem. The downside of acting is dying on your feet not on your knees. The far more likely upside is succeeding in some places and learning everywhere. I'm tired of the jeremiad of gloom from Eeyore. Boastful optimism is tiring too, but somewhere in-between is a nice place. Can we have some realism tempered optimism in our kids ability to un-fuck-up the last 100 years? Please?
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoNot cutting down rainforest, and encouraging their expansion again, seems a far better plan somehow. The satellite images of continuing, and still accelerating, forestry loss were the most striking part of Attenborough's Climate Change prog for me.
- jacknews 7y agoAustralia has announced a plan to plant a billion more by 2050 as part of its effort to meet the country’s Paris Agreement climate targets. Laudable, but a tiny fraction of the 1.2 trillion mentioned as offsetting a decade of co2, and over a period of 3 decades.
- ip26 7y agoThey are 0.35% of the world population, and that's 0.08% of the 1.2 trillion trees, so they're actually within an order of magnitude. And in their defense they have no water.
- paraschopra 7y agoEven though planting trees seems like an overall good idea (and I certainly believe so), I recall a recent article where scientists debated whether planting trees will have any impact. From https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00122-z https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00122-z > Several analyses in the past few years suggest that these warming effects from forests could partially or fully offset their cooling ability. What's consoling is that at least planting trees is unlikely to harm (although rapid tree plantation will certainly send ripples in the complex, inter-connected ecological chains).
- Haga 7y agoSo, to plant this many trees, you need Gene modification. The tree sapplings have to be toxic to sheep, heat & dry resistant, and they need to be non harvest able. You need to engieer a plant that is economically uninteresting for humans. Then distribute it via drones to the post human desolation.
- lvs 7y agoYou can't engineer anything to be immune to exploitation except for laws. Genetic modification is absolutely the wrong message to send for this purpose anyway, if you want to get it done fast. We only have a decade or two in which to do this. We go to war with the trees we have. Genetic modification for this purpose will make clonal populations that are more susceptible to disease, requires much more research and regulation, and makes many more problems than it solves. Planting ecologically native trees back into their native land is the best way to minimize unintended consequences and just get this done.
- Haga 7y agoBad news the native lands are gone. Gone is the little layer of topsoil, gone the biome. And your laws fix it only where poverty is not so bad it constantly subverts all laws. In other words your approach is a reality blind first world approach, destined to fail the moment it runs out of money support fashion and sb pulls the ic-plug on the project. Mine is about rolling with the punshes, fast forwarding inevitable evolution. Bamboo comes to mind. Now that is a forrest which will survive us.
- ykevinator 7y agoThis is a greet solution to a problem only half the population believes exists.
- derdot 7y agoAn easy way to contribute to tree planting is ecosia.org (more info at info.ecosia.org). We've already planted more than 55 million trees and won't be stopping there.
- nojvek 7y agoAfter reading a ton about genetics I wonder if it’s possible to modify one of our existing tree species to make them a better store of carbon without destroying wildlife habitats. Entertain my thoughts: Suppose you could have a tree X. It grows fast, is very water efficient and better at trapping sunlight and C02 than existing specifies. It’s wood grows straight and makes a great building material. We could plant billions of it in semi-deserts and it would terraform the land into a livable habitat. Basically the promise is rather than planting trillions of trees, can we plant billions of 1000x efficient trees in places where current trees don’t exist.