12 ms·

Telling a lie then saying 3 Hail Marys means you are forgiven for the lie, it doesn't fix the lie. As such, planting a tree to be forgiven for going on a fligh

• peteradio 7y ago
  Trees rotting produces compost and over time soil, soil which ultimately contains organic carbon. Perhaps overtime the organic carbon from the original tree is entirely gassed into the air somehow, but in the meantime you've been growing a second, third, and forth. Growing and composting plants does contribute to the sequestration of carbon and more importantly prevents methane production.
  • DanBC 7y ago
    Rotting trees produce methane which is a potent greenhouse gas. We do need massive re-forestation programmes though.
• hanniabu 7y ago
  Well, good thing there were more EPA rollbacks recently....
• samcday 7y ago
  You're kinda just stoking my paranoia here. I hadn't dug too deeply into whatbuying "carbon offsets" for flights (as a eco-conscious consumer, that is) actually entailed. But I suspected it was basically just planting N trees to offset the carbon emission. To play devil's advocate, is it possible that planting the trees at least helps in the short to mid-term? So let's assume we don't run out of viable land to plant more trees on, and we keep planting enough trees to offset a big chunk of our carbon emissions. Doesn't that buy us, say, 100 years to figure out the technology to economically capture excess carbon and put it back underground again?
  • hudibras 7y ago
    > But I suspected it was basically just planting N trees to offset the carbon emission. No, this is not what happens. Check Wikipedia for "carbon offset" and "carbon credit" to learn more.
    • wbronitsky 7y ago
      Please stop with the reddit comments. You can so so so easily post the information here instead of being pompous about it.
  • elorant 7y ago
    No, it doesn't. First of all, you have to account for deforestation which is already happening in unprecedented pace. So while you'll go around planning trees, in some other part of the world people are chopping them down to provide more land for agriculture or to support the demand for wood. So the overall net effect might be zero. Aside from that, the fact is that you need a shit ton of trees to negate climate change. Planting 1.7 billion acres of trees would remove only 8% of yearly carbon emissions. Where will we find the land to plant all those trees? We simple don't have the real estate.
    • wbronitsky 7y ago
      You seemingly just argued for planting more trees, in that if we did not try and replace the trees being cut down, we would have a negative growth rate of trees, which seems much worse than 0 growth rate. I’m not sure why you dismissed out of hand the argument, as it only took a hot second do deduce that it’s actually a good thing.
      • elorant 7y ago
        You misunderstood. I'm not arguing whether we should plant trees or not, but whether that is enough. The answer is that it's not. We have to do much more things than just plant trees.
    • JamesBarney 7y ago
• cowwithbeef 7y ago
  Put another way, carbon has been slowly leaking from the ecosystem into the ground for hundreds of millions of years and now we're abruptly reintroducing that carbon to the ecosystem.
  • jacques_chester 7y ago
    A very large amount of that fossil fuel was deposited during a period when plants could not be broken down successfully but microorganisms. In the current world much more of the carbon taken into a tree is released back into the atmosphere than presently. That is: the original deposits were a process over millions of years, but the flow between stocks of carbon no longer behave as they used to. Whereas the stock of living and dead plants used to both remove carbon from the atmosphere, this no longer really the case.
• yters 7y ago
  Nuclear power doesn't seem too politically non viable, especially if the alternative is rapid depopulation.
  • bin0 7y ago
    > rapid depopulation What exactly do you mean by this, and how would you accomplish it? Assuming, that is, that nuclear doesn't work (for whatever reason), as you've drawn a dichotomy.
    • yters 7y ago
      Dump some infertility causing chemical in all the water supplies. Or, nuke a bunch of countries, which has the added bonus of cooling down the earth. But, it's unclear that even completely eliminating humanity would reverse global warming.
      • bin0 7y ago
        Jesus Christ, you're not serious, are you? How evil can you get? The ends do not justify the means.
        • yters 7y ago
          No, not serious. Just pointing out what the alternative seems to entail.
      • teucris 7y ago
        How about something a little less demonic, like finding an economic system that doesn’t rely on endless growth as a catch-all for humanity’s problems?
      • Spooky23 7y ago
        Or you work on raising living standards, which naturally lowers fertility. Warming is going to happen. Humanity will adapt. Modern spins on eugenics isn’t an answer and frankly is disgusting.
• torpfactory 7y ago
  The optimistic side of me reads this as a call to arms for engineers. The political and economic calculations aren't stagnant. If there emerge better and cheaper alternatives, the market will usually make the switch happen. The key thing is the presence of better alternatives. We're already seeing this in action with electricity generation. Solar and wind are cheaper for bulk generation than fossil sources. A few incremental advances in battery technology are now required to unlock the full potential of renewables, but there seems to be a clear path forward. These developments are the result of thousands of engineers time and energy along with relatively modest subsidies and private investment to pay their salaries. The same may be true for cement. The alternatives are not yet better or cheaper, but some investment might get them there. Or not, we don't really know for sure. We may be too late to prevent total catastrophe, but I'd rather go down trying. It's up to us to create the alternatives which allow the political and economic solutions to be viable. Who's with me?
  • xcklo 7y ago
    It is an engineering challenge, but not in development and innovation so much as in policy and implementation. There is a lack of understanding of that what is happening isn't a choice. It is an escalating situation where things you don't deal with today will cost more to deal with tomorrow. Something we and our societies aren't used to. Rather we are used to a Moore's law situation where things get better by themselves. The future will very likely be defined by who can provide more prosperity for less energy. Something that many countries won't manage to align with for many decades. So unfortunately I think the optimism is misguided. The current trend is more like that demotivaional poster, "if you are not part of the solution, there is good money to be made in prolonging the problem".
    • torpfactory 7y ago
      It won't get better by itself, hence the "call to arms". Engineers need to choose to work on, maybe even for less money or less job security, solutions which are so much better that policy and implementation will contort themselves toward the new paradigms. Politics is the really effective avenue to solve this but it is a lot easier if better alternative solutions exist. I wanted to emphasize that the optimism can be a useful tool to gain motivation. Realistically I think we're in for a world of hurt, but being depressed doesn't motivate me like optimism does. It's a mind trick, not a realistic accounting of the current state of affairs.
• agumonkey 7y ago
  > all the carbon gets re-released over time back May I question the veracity of this statement ? wood decay does release atoms back in the air, but some may be captured on the ground, some may be captured by the plants/trees nearby. I highly doubt 100% goes back airborne. Also there are other factors with more trees, they interfere with winds, create shadows. Some say massive forest also transpire humidity. All this might be positive to dampen climate change (if done worldwide).
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > Some say massive forest also transpire humidity. All this might be positive to dampen climate change (if done worldwide). Caveat though: higher humidity + rising temperatures = bad. The more humid the air is, the worse evaporative cooling works, which means it's that much harder for human body to keep its temperature in check. For example, [0] tells us that at 46 °C and 50% humidity, humans can no longer cool down through sweating - i.e. the ambient air becomes deadly to all humans. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature.
    • agumonkey 7y ago
      I thought about large scale higher altitudes humidity but fair point (although the less humans the better the climate statistics say)
      • TeMPOraL 7y ago
        > (although the less humans the better the climate statistics say) Yeah, I've seen those, but that's like observing that the best way to kill cancer is to kill the patient. Kind of missing why we bother with the problem in the first place :).
        • agumonkey 7y ago
          I shall not try to sell my ballistics based therapy ..
• bin0 7y ago
  > The only way this is happening is if the planet gets depopulated of humans rapidly. Please don't tell me you're one of those "earth would be better of were we all dead" people. I can't stand that kind of post-modernist, nihilistic garbage. I'm not mister optimist, but still, that's way too far. Also, that kind of rhetoric is going to end up being a justification for some one very evil doing some thing very bad. > The only way to fix this problem is to stop using fossil fuels. There is no politically viable way for this to happen. Eeh, wrong. The fact that we're not there yet doesn't mean we can't get there. At some point, pulling energy out of thin air will end up cheaper than doing expensive drilling operations. Post-modernists are the philosophical equivalent of the kid who gets mad when he loses at Monopoly, flips the board, and walks away.
  • c048 7y ago
    It's easy when you just focus on doom thinking and relegate everything else as fake or irrelevant.
  • spynxic 7y ago
    The proposed solution of depopulation is based on a flawed premise. It isn't necessarily true that a growing population needs greater access to fossil fuel. Rather, as access to fossil fuel grows so can the population.
  • icxa 7y ago
    If these people really believed that overpopulation was the problem, then why don't they start depopulating with themselves?* It sounds terrible I know, but it serves to demonstrate the hypocrisy of the stance. Like George Carlin said, "I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. Not in the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me." * note: don't actually do this if you believe this wretched, damned worldview, go seek help, I don't really want anyone to off themselves because they think it "helps the world"
• johnr2 7y ago
  "Planting a tree does capture carbon. However, when it dies and rots, all the carbon gets re-released over time back into the atmosphere." Not all the carbon. Some of it stays in the ground to eventually form more fossil fuel.
  • rleigh 7y ago
    Not really, not in any meaningful quantity. That only happened once, on a geological timescale (the carboniferous period). During that period, there was no breakdown of dead trees; fungi and bacteria hadn't evolved the enzymes to break it down at that point, so it just sat there, piling up layer upon layer, and eventually got turned into coal seams and oil reservoirs deep underground. Consider just how long it took to get buried deep under all that strata. Millions of years. That process will never happen again. Life subsequently evolved to break trees and all plant matter down fast, on the order of years for a whole tree. Much faster if it's chopped into smaller bits. It is ultimately metabolised by saprophytes and returned to the atmosphere. Very little is sequestered away. Consider that the layer between rock and atmosphere is just a thin film. Bare in some places, a few inches to a few feet deep in others. That's the biosphere, the bit of the planet that is living. That's the store the carbon has to be sunk into. There are some places which do sequester some carbon. Peat bog would be one example. But when you look at how much a peat bog sequesters in a year though the slow growth of sphagnum mosses, heather and the other lichens and plants found there, it's a tiny drop in the ocean compared with the amount of CO2 we are pumping out daily. It's also not going to be super stable. It could catch fire if there's a really dry summer, for example. Higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere will encourage plant growth. There are plenty of scientific experiments to show a direct correlation between CO2 concentration and crop size and dry weight. That's been known for decades. We learned this on a plant science course over two decades back. But there isn't a stable store for all the excess carbon we have released to be sequestered on a meaningful timescale, and the existing biosphere isn't going to be able to expand sufficiently to compensate or to store it long term. It's going to be cycled back into the atmosphere. We have spent the last few hundred years ceaselessly burning unimaginably large quantities of stored carbon which took millions of years to originally deposit. There's no magic bullet to reverting to the pre-industrial state. The effects of this, and any corrective action, will take place on timescales much longer than a human lifetime. As a species, we aren't very good at dealing with problems which can't be solved in a decade or two.
• valw 7y ago
  You seem to imply that planting trees cannot durably decrease the CO2 levels in the atmosphere; if so, your reasoning and conclusion are incorrect. Increasing the biomass of trees (e.g, growing a new forest) does reduce the CO2 levels; true, each tree in this forest will at some point die and re-release its carbon, but another will grow in its place; therefore, if the forest has grown and stays there forever the the result will be a net negative contribution to CO2 levels forever as well. That of course does not change the fact that carbon offsetting alone is NOT a sufficient way to tackle climate change. Please do reduce your carbon footprint people, and encourage others to do so. Of course, there's nothing wrong with planting trees in addition (not instead of) reducing your emissions - you can think of it as charity for the planet; if you're interested in donating money so that forests get protected / grown, I recommend Stand For Trees: https://standfortrees.org/en/#protect-a-forest https://standfortrees.org/en/#protect-a-forest (I'm not affiliated with them). Please people, be careful about what you write on these topics. We really need a high bar on scientific rigour on these topics if we are to act effectively.
  • hokkos 7y ago
    This only works if we are sure that the forest will stay a forest for several hundreds of thousands of years, the time the offseted co2 needs to disappear and absolutely nobody can assure that. Not consuming fossil carbon means it will stay in the earth mantle for a geological time. So carbon offsets by planting tree is a scam, and we need better than that.
    • kgwgk 7y ago
      Neither can anybody assure that the carbon/oil will remain untouched for hundreds of thousands of years.
    • valw 7y ago
      > This only works if we are sure that the forest will stay a forest for several hundreds of thousands of year You do realize that carbon sequestrated in a forest 100ks of years is prevented from contributed to global warming during all that time period, right? > Not consuming fossil carbon means it will stay in the earth mantle for a geological time. Nobody's arguing against that. But it's silly to argue that not consuming fossil fuels is a better solution than carbon sequestration. We urgently need to do BOTH. When your house is burning, you don't choose between calling the firemen and using the extinguisher - you do both. > So carbon offsets by planting tree is a scam, and we need better than that. That's naive and simplistic. If carbon offsetting was widely adopted, it would 1) be a fast way to start our transition towards a sustainable economy and 2) encourage reducing fossil fuel consumptions as it gets more and more expensive (as it will inevitably). When it comes to fighting climate change, what matters is results, not this sort of uninformed rethoric.
• lifeisstillgood 7y ago
  Nah, Dr Evil has me run the numbers and it turns out that killing six billion people, you have all their body mass rotting and putting carbon back into the atmosphere, add on top transport costs and so on - it just was not worth it. Seems much simpler to fix global politics and improve technology.
  • valw 7y ago
    Have you considered that once they're dead, they stop farting? Methane counts too!
    • hirundo 7y ago
      Eventually but not immediately: https://www.quora.com/Can-a-dead-body-fart https://www.quora.com/Can-a-dead-body-fart "Definitely yes. Having worked as an undertaker’s assistant in my youth I have witnessed this at least twice. The odour is unmistakable and the gas (should there be any in the bowel) easily comes out when moving the deceased from the hospital cold slab to the coffin. I have not heard any sound but the foul smell is there - so yes."
• dillonmckay 7y ago
  So, would it not be more environmentally friendly to bury, not recycle, plastics back into the earth?
  • mgbmtl 7y ago
    That would become a technical debt, especially considering we do very little to reduce our use of plastics, which seems like the obvious thing to do before any other change.
    • dillonmckay 7y ago
      Well, do you think we would use less plastic if we stopped decycling it and trying to find additional uses for it? Treat it as waste, not a raw material input for an inferior good?
  • gruez 7y ago
    Recycling is carbon neutral - it doesn't cause co2 to be released nor does it sequester any. You can argue that the process itself generates co2, but so does producing virgin plastic.
    • dillonmckay 7y ago
      How is recycling plastic carbon neutral? The amount of energy required to chew/melt/process the plastic, the energy to transport the recyclables to the processing facility, and then the transportation costs to ship the decycled material to the buyer(s)?
      • gruez 7y ago
        >You can argue that the process itself generates co2, but so does producing virgin plastic. It's carbon neutral compared to the alternatives.
        • dillonmckay 7y ago
• tarsinge 7y ago
  > Fossil fuels are excess carbon atoms sequestered safely deep inside the Earth. Unless you can find a way to put them Not Uranium. > There is no politically viable way for this to happen. It’s sad because we have the technology (that could surely be improved if trillions of dollars were suddenly poured into).
  • mac01021 7y ago
    Uranium is not a fossil fuel.
• m3kw9 7y ago
  Trees are ok, but they create a carbon debt, because the tree stores the co2, and when it dies either in fire or fermenting, it releases that back. It’s more like a 50-100 year debt contract.
  • fwip 7y ago
    Luckily, trees have a built-in mechanism to beget more trees.
• scythe 7y ago
  The formation of peat in bogs does sequester carbon, but the timescale is long, on the order of several thousand years. However, higher atmospheric CO2 leads to greater plant biomass at “equilibrium”. Studies suggest that about 75% of CO2 has a half-life of decades and the remaining 25% has a half-life of tens of millenia, as I recall.
• BurningFrog 7y ago
  > Planting a tree does capture carbon. However, when it dies and rots, all the carbon gets re-released over time back into the atmosphere. Unless you build something out of the wood, instead of using cement, for example. Even if the tree is just left to rot or is burned, this is 50-100 years in the future. Giving the world 50-100 years of buffer time to figure out how to solve the technical and political problems around climate change is close enough to a solution that I'd take it in a heart beat!
• dr_dshiv 7y ago
  Please don't take this the wrong way, but I think we are at much more risk from people who believe that the best path forward is rapid human depopulation (are you really recommending that?) than those who believe in the contemporary utility of fossil fuels. If anyone wonders why anyone could possibly be against the modern environmentalist movement, it may be because so many believe in the movement believe in "rapid depopulation" (though few will say it so directly as you).
• nradov 7y ago
  Unfortunately large scale depopulation is probably coming for us in a few decades. Once the wet bulb temperature exceeds 35°C for a few days people start dying of heat stress. Many tropical and equatorial regions are close to the limit already; a few degrees of global warming will push them over the edge.