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My 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 tree

My 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 8y ago
While 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 8y ago
The 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 8y ago
At 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.

vageli 8y ago

While 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 8y ago

The 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 8y ago

At 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.