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I did a rough spreadsheet some time back based on this 1998 EPA carbon sequestration worksheet [1] and found that an average person from a high carbon output c
by jerkstate 7y ago
I did a rough spreadsheet some time back based on this 1998 EPA carbon sequestration worksheet [1] and found that an average person from a high carbon output country needs about 600-1000 trees to offset their carbon output.
There are about 3 trillion trees for a population of 7 billion people for an average of 428 trees per person, so that means you have to make up the delta of about 172 to 572 trees over the course of your lifetime to erase your carbon footprint (of course, young trees don't sequester as much carbon, so your footprint will still be positive for much of your lifetime - but as the trees get older, they sequester at a higher rate per year, which eventually gives you a negative footprint). This projection was based on the CO2 sequestration per year and the average survival rate documented in [1].
[1] https://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/Downloads/method-calculating-carbon-sequestration-trees-urban-and-suburban-settings.pdf https://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/Downloads/method-calculat...
- IgorPartola 7y agoMy understanding was that trees are not the best way to go about this. Seaweed is best, followed by grass, then trees. To be fair, planting seaweed isn’t as satisfying.
- anthony_doan 7y agoGrass is so terrible. You need to maintain it and it requires so much chemicals especially from Monsanto. It's so much work and money just to maintain grass. I like alternatives like moss or clovers. Even cactus gardens seem better suited.
- IgorPartola 7y agoI am not talking about your lawn, but fields of wild grass.
- anthony_doan 7y agoOh wow I feel like an idiot. Thanks for the clarification, I some how thought grass was man made or domesticated/engineer like cows.
- NikkiA 7y agoIt is domesticated - wild forms of grass are very different from lawn grass - they are more similar to the grains that we also domesticated from the grass family. Some of it is even closer to ferns in appearance (eg, wild dogstail)
- CalRobert 7y agoThat's actually way, way less than I'd have thought. 500 trees isn't all that much, really. A nlick of 25x20 trees? What is that, an acre? (Genuinely asking... Giant sequoias will be different from sitka spruce)
- markdown 7y agoSounds like a business opportunity. You get customers to pay for the planting of 500 trees at $X/tree. This is treated as a long-term investment. 30 years later the trees are harvested and the "investors" get back X% of the value of the trees. So they get to say they live a carbon-neutral life, and as a bonus, get to make some money.
- Alex3917 7y ago> an average person from a high carbon output country needs about 600-1000 trees to offset their carbon output. Squirrels bury between 3,000 and 10,000 nuts each fall, so each person just needs to drive over one squirrel.
- maxencecornet 7y ago> an average person from a high carbon output country needs about 600-1000 trees to offset their carbon output. This seems really doable for the average person!
- dleslie 7y agoIt's far less than what a professional tree planter will manage in a single day in Canada. It's definitely possible for any healthy adult.
- jerkstate 7y agoKeep in mind that the 600-1000 number is for "tree age 0" which is a sapling about 6 feet (two meters) tall - the germination/survival rate for planting smaller saplings or seeds is much lower.
- guelo 7y agoMost people don't have acres of land to plant trees in.
- dsr_ 7y agoWhich is why you outsource the tree planting to a place that has room for trees -- and it's more efficient because they can grow trees better than you can, anyway. nationalforests.org, the Arbor Day Foundation... there are probably lots of good options.
- pmontra 7y agoThere is one thing that I don't understand. I plant 1000 trees, I sequester the CO2 I create by driving, heating my home and all the activities done by third parties to keep me alive (food, hospitals, etc). But that CO2 is still under the sky and most of it will be released when the trees die. It's not like we're pumping it back into oil fields or coal mines and never see it again. So this 1T trees initiative is a stop gap measure to buy us some time but it won't solve the problem. But it's better than doing nothing.
- quixoticelixer- 7y agoIt is a stop gap, but it's at worst a 50 year stop gap and we can go a long way in reducing our gross emissions in that time.
- guelo 7y agoIf the tree is harvested for lumber or buried then the CO2 is not released back into the atmosphere
- _eht 7y agoThis comment does not scale linearly.
- mytailorisrich 7y ago> most of it will be released when the trees die The idea is not to just plant trees but to increase the number of trees on the planet over the long term so that effectively the CO2 absorbed does not go back to the atmosphere. This is aimed at reducing CO2 in the atmosphere and has to go hand in hand with reducing emissions.
- hillz 7y agoIf a tree is planted, grows, and then for example is burned down and paved over, that'd be true. But if a tree grows and eventually dies in a forest, it'll be replaced with new trees naturally, cancelling out the CO2 leaked from the tree dying. This C02 can also be stalled by harvesting the tree and using it in some way that stops C02 from being released for a longer time than natural.
- uberman 7y agoTo echo this: According to: The University of Michigan and NC state: The average American's footprint is 21 metric tons a year while the average tree absorbs 21 kg a year. That makes it a ball park of 1000 trees.
- samdoidge 7y agoYes, but American's produce more than the average person on the planet.
- aresant 7y agoNo easy way to plot this - planting trees to sequester CO2 may or may not have a net positive impact at scale for a variety of reasons: 1) The timescale is very long - a single tree to drive carbon neutrality is MOST optimistically pegged at 40 - 100 years depending on species. With expanding populations planning or guaranteeing execution on that time scale is limited. AKA it's very unlikely that most efforts, unless planted in an evergreen protected land will actually drive a net positive impact. 2) Forest soil and topsoil (from dropped branches, leaves, etc) can sequester up to 2x as much carbon as the actual trees themselves and is typically counted in the "net negative" C02 impact. But warming temperatures creates a negative feedback loop increases the rate of C02 release from soil. 3) Governments, in their effort to drive commercial tree planting, are accidentally driving the wrong incentives - farmed forests are <50% as effective at C02 sequester as natural forests and the act of burning wood pellets for fuel and or even using for building materials dramatically reduces and in fact calls into question ANY C02 benefits. Effectively the only sure fire way towards atmospheric CO2 reduction is cutting consumption (1) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/epa-declares-burning-wood-carbon-neutral-180968880/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/epa-declares-burni... (2) https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/trees-carbon-emissions-bob-mcdonald-1.4132679 https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/trees-carbon-emissions-bo...
- bamboozled 7y agoOk, so what ? I would say in 40 years we’re going to be in a much much worse situation so is your argument don’t bother ? Else we should do both, plant a trillion trees and replace fossil fuels and civilisation might be ok? Sorry but it just seems like you’re trying to make this a negative idea, when it’s a clearly positive thing outside of just sequestering carbon, there are other areas of the eco system improved by having more trees.
- quixoticelixer- 7y agoFarmed forest can be very effective in the short term for CO2 sequestration how ever, although the net CO2 sequestration over 200 years or so may be lower the sequestration in the short term can be very high. This gives you time to reduce the amount of emissions that are being made in the first place. Planting trees is not a long term solution in and off itself but it is an important tool in reducing emissions
- VBprogrammer 7y agoIt would be interesting to see how coppicing / pollaring impact the amount of carbon potentially sequestered.
- hinkley 7y agoI recall there being some considerable surprise when they figured out that trees gain mass (of which a fraction is carbon) faster as they get older. It's not that shocking. If two tree rings are the same width, the outer one contains more material due to the larger circumference. The surface area of a tree increases every year until it starts to decline. In a healthy tree, canopy and roots are balanced, and any gain or loss in material above ground is mirrored below. Dead roots rejoin the food chain much, much slower than twigs and leaves, so nearly half the carbon that goes into the tree goes into the ground and stays there, even if you cut the tree for timber. And due to root fusion, some of the roots may survive... if you didn't cut down all of the trees of the same species. I'm looking at you, timber industry.
- fovc 7y agoSo for a one time $600 donation ($1/tree [1]) I can be a carbon neutral person for life? Seems like a bargain. Am I missing something? [1] https://www.nationalforests.org/get-involved/tree-planting-programs https://www.nationalforests.org/get-involved/tree-planting-p...
- ALittleLight 7y agoFrom my experience planting trees, most of the trees planted at such a rate will die. You may need to do a few multiples to be safe.
- antupis 7y agoCarbon offsetting is incredible effective. Currently donating to organizations like https://www.rainforestcoalition.org/ https://www.rainforestcoalition.org/ ($0.02 - $0.72 per CO2 ton) or https://www.catf.us/ https://www.catf.us/ ($0.35- $4.40 per CO2 ton) you can offset a huge amount of carbon. source:https://founderspledge.com/stories/climate-change-executive-summary https://founderspledge.com/stories/climate-change-executive-...
- Skunkleton 7y agoI am not an expert (even an armchair expert), but I have to imagine it couldn't be that simple. When the trees die, they need to either be replaced, or self-replace. That means the land they are planted on needs to be protected. Further, when the trees die, they will release a portion of the sequestered CO2 back into the atmosphere. I wonder what percentage is re-released? Does this imply that we need an ever-growing number of trees to offset steady-state carbon emissions?
- quixoticelixer- 7y agoIt takes a long time for trees to die (100+ years). The problem here is that it usually takes more than a dollar to grow a tree
- fovc 7y agoI think the tree survival rate is baked into the numbers, and most of these trees will outlive me anyway, so year-over-year CO2 I think would be fine. The EOL question is discussed in sibling comments and seems to be the crux of the issue. It seems like it mostly hinges on whether permanently increase the % of land that's covered by forest, or whether it reverts to something else once the trees die. Based on wikipedia ([1], [2]), worldwide tree density is about 750 trees/hectare, with 4B hectares total (30% of land area). We clearly can't add another 7B to offset global emissions, but seems like a good marginal investment as long as there's room to grow that number. [3] The real question is whether that $1 is enough to permanently "create more forest" Even at 5x the price it seems like a bargain for a lifetime of carbon emissions. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree#Distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree#Distribution [3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.FRST.ZS https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.FRST.ZS
- Balgair 7y ago172-572 tress per lifetime is totally doable! That's only about a tree every 5-20 weeks. So about once a month to about twice a year.
- ijpoijpoihpiuoh 7y agoPlanting that many trees is not what's required. What's required is growing and maintaining them. If they burn in a fire, you need to start over. If they get cut down, you need to start over. If the land they're on gets sold and redeveloped, you need to start over. Etc. I think this seems a lot easier than it is because the wrong language is being used to describe what is actually required. You need to bring into existence and perpetually maintain (even after your death) 172-572 trees. That is not easy.
- m12k 7y agoHow long does such a model expect the trees to keep the carbon captured? Most (non-rain-)forests burn eventually, so for a long-term solution, we need to make sure that the carbon that is captured stays captured. I saw some mention of special grass as a good option, since it stored most of its carbon in its roots.
- iamaelephant 7y agoNew Zealand currently has a programme to plant one billion trees in the next 10 years, about 250 trees per person, so this doesn't seem at all unreasonable. https://www.mpi.govt.nz/funding-and-programmes/forestry/planting-one-billion-trees/ https://www.mpi.govt.nz/funding-and-programmes/forestry/plan...
- mikedilger 7y agoYes, laudable in theory, but the current government hasn't delivered anything close. They should be at 184 million by now. They claim they are at 110 million. They estimate based on how many seedlings have been sold by nurseries, include seedlings "tranferred", which is a pretty sure way to overestimate. You'd think they would only count trees that the government was involved in planting, not trees that would have been planted anyways, but they take credit for everything anybody does. They do have a programme to pay land owners for planting trees, but in minumum one-hectare units, and it's financially a loss. I own and live on farmland in NZ. I could turn a hectare into fully native bush and get their maximum one-time payout of $4,000. But the costs of native trees are expensive and the labour to fully plant up a hectare properly is not insubstantial. The $500 top-up payout for fencing doesn't cover the cost of fencing. Then I'd have to give up about $500 per year in farming income, permanently. It would feel good, but there is still a significant financial disincentive. The government isn't really in a position to increase payouts. Taxes are about as high as the economy can handle and the government has lots of other projects to fund. If this is going to happen, it's going to be on the backs of individuals acting out of their own good will.
- braindead_in 7y agohttps://youtu.be/3VZSJKbzyMc https://youtu.be/3VZSJKbzyMc This guy built a whole forest.