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When a tree dies that CO2 will mostly just be released into the air again. Planting trees is a measure to slow the immediate effects of fossil fuel usage, but n

by nstom 7y ago

When a tree dies that CO2 will mostly just be released into the air again. Planting trees is a measure to slow the immediate effects of fossil fuel usage, but not a long term solution. At some point you’ll run out of space for new trees. It’s like fixing a leaky pipe by adding sponges. Sure, they’ll soak up the water and are cheap, but eventually you will run out of space for new sponges and have to pay for a plumber.

ddxxdd 7y ago
It's more like fixing a leaky pipe by adding a patch that will last for centuries, that can pollinate itself and produce additional patches in the future, and that can be removed and used as a building material for a new house.
- ElKrist 7y ago
  "and that can be removed and used as a building material for a new house." I'm all for building wooden houses. But I can also imagine the amount of work (=> energy consumption) needed to convert theses trees we need to plant to "offset emissions" as new houses. Transport the workers, feed the machines to chop the trees, the machines to transport the wood, to run the lumber-mill, to transport to the construction site etc. Unfortunately for now we still have: feeding machines => energy consumption => emissions We can argue that this energy would have been needed anyway to build new houses. However I find it dangerous to couple a carbon reduction strategy to a substantial amount of an activity involving machines (construction). Are we going to need the amount of houses at the scale of the amount of trees we need to plant? In all parts of the world concerned (we don't want to move trees across the world anymore..)?
- im3w1l 7y ago
  Unless you have a system in place to take responsibility from seed to logging to long term encapsulation I'll be highly skeptical of that. What's to say it wont be slashed and burnt to make room for agriculture? What's to say the surplus of timber wont decrease the price and cause less trees to be planted elsewhere?
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  It's still sponges, not patches. They absorb the water, and you have to manage them. If you don't actively store them, the water will leak out. If you do actively store them and then hand off storage to someone else, the water will leak out when that someone stops paying attention. The way to sequester carbon with trees is to cut them down when they're grown, and bury them somewhere where there's no air and no one will touch them for thousands of years, or otherwise store them in perpetuity while preventing decay or burning.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    Turning them into biochar is a slightly simpler proposal. Biochar is stable for a pretty long time. But of course the process of unburning all the coal we burned so far is not very viable.
richardwhiuk 7y ago
That's all the CO2 lifecycle is in nature - Oil / Gas are basically large sponges which absorbed Carbon a long time ago, and were buried. It's not impossible that we could grow a huge number of trees, and bury the resulting wood in a mountain-side to offset burning coal - but the amount of wood we'd need to bury might be prohibitively large. (We've buried much worse things than wood :) ).
lagadu 7y ago
It's not an infinitely long term solution but it's a solution that buys us at the very least dozens, if not hundreds of years before we run out of space. Because no solution is ever infinite, given that the Sun isn't, it doesn't make sense to consider something that will potentially work for a hundred years as a non long term solution. By the time that solution stops being long term, we'll have far more advanced options to buy us another century of time.

by nstom 7y ago

ddxxdd 7y ago

It's more like fixing a leaky pipe by adding a patch that will last for centuries, that can pollinate itself and produce additional patches in the future, and that can be removed and used as a building material for a new house.

ElKrist 7y ago
"and that can be removed and used as a building material for a new house." I'm all for building wooden houses. But I can also imagine the amount of work (=> energy consumption) needed to convert theses trees we need to plant to "offset emissions" as new houses. Transport the workers, feed the machines to chop the trees, the machines to transport the wood, to run the lumber-mill, to transport to the construction site etc. Unfortunately for now we still have: feeding machines => energy consumption => emissions We can argue that this energy would have been needed anyway to build new houses. However I find it dangerous to couple a carbon reduction strategy to a substantial amount of an activity involving machines (construction). Are we going to need the amount of houses at the scale of the amount of trees we need to plant? In all parts of the world concerned (we don't want to move trees across the world anymore..)?
im3w1l 7y ago
Unless you have a system in place to take responsibility from seed to logging to long term encapsulation I'll be highly skeptical of that. What's to say it wont be slashed and burnt to make room for agriculture? What's to say the surplus of timber wont decrease the price and cause less trees to be planted elsewhere?
TeMPOraL 7y ago
It's still sponges, not patches. They absorb the water, and you have to manage them. If you don't actively store them, the water will leak out. If you do actively store them and then hand off storage to someone else, the water will leak out when that someone stops paying attention. The way to sequester carbon with trees is to cut them down when they're grown, and bury them somewhere where there's no air and no one will touch them for thousands of years, or otherwise store them in perpetuity while preventing decay or burning.
- adrianN 7y ago
  Turning them into biochar is a slightly simpler proposal. Biochar is stable for a pretty long time. But of course the process of unburning all the coal we burned so far is not very viable.

richardwhiuk 7y ago

That's all the CO2 lifecycle is in nature - Oil / Gas are basically large sponges which absorbed Carbon a long time ago, and were buried. It's not impossible that we could grow a huge number of trees, and bury the resulting wood in a mountain-side to offset burning coal - but the amount of wood we'd need to bury might be prohibitively large. (We've buried much worse things than wood :) ).

lagadu 7y ago

It's not an infinitely long term solution but it's a solution that buys us at the very least dozens, if not hundreds of years before we run out of space. Because no solution is ever infinite, given that the Sun isn't, it doesn't make sense to consider something that will potentially work for a hundred years as a non long term solution. By the time that solution stops being long term, we'll have far more advanced options to buy us another century of time.