18 ms·

A global reforestation project is how we fix climate change

135 points by apsec112 7y ago

jcfrei 7y ago
A very interesting proposal. Given the current ultra low interest rates all the costs could be directly monetized by the central banks (via "climate bonds"), rather than making governments pay or introducing helicopter money when the next recession hits. We just need some key to distribute the resulting jobs and manufacturing orders between the countries.
fallingfrog 7y ago
No, ending the extraction and burning of fossil fuels is how we fix climate change. Anything else is just buying time.
- growlist 7y ago
  An honest question: if a technological solution were found that both solved climate change and allowed us to continue burning fossil fuels, would you accept it?
  - earthtolazlo 7y ago
    Having your cake and eating it too sounds like a great option. It just doesn’t have any basis in reality.
    - vorpalhex 7y ago
      Parent as I read it isn't suggesting that having your cake and eating it too is possible, instead they're attempting to establish a dual-scale demarcation of viewpoints with one scale being "Prohibition or allowance of fossil fuels" and the other scale being "Fixes or does not fix climate change". This is useful because polling has discovered many US Republicans will actually vote for climate solutions _if_ they employ new technologies that would result in new industries.
      - lotsofpulp 7y ago
        The people voting against environmental reforms are doing it because they don't want to reduce their quality of life. And since nothing comes close to the cost to energy density ratio of fossil fuels, there is no solution other than reducing energy usage and reducing quality of life. And so without convincing people they should reduce their quality of life for the benefit of future generations, nothing is going to happen.
        natch 7y ago
        >The people voting against environmental reforms are doing it because they don't want to reduce their quality of life. No. They're doing it because of tribalism and ignorance. They perceive that by allowing progress on energy sustainability issues, they allow the enemy tribe a victory. And many of them don't care at all about sustainability because they believe the second coming is just around the corner. The ones who think it would reduce their quality of life are just being ignorant. They don't understand the possibilities. >And since nothing comes close to the cost to energy density ratio of fossil fuels... Well, it's not that simple. You can't just look at the energy density without looking at the context. Even dry wood comes close (within an order of magnitude) to fossil fuels. And ethanol is even better. But there are issues with both of these. That's the thing. You need to also account for the issues. And fossil fuels themselves also have issues, namely, the topic at hand, climate change. If you want the highest energy density, you would go with an H-bomb or a high energy laser. But you need to harness the energy in a context so being realistic about it, fossil fuels need to go. Just as we can't power our civilization sustainably with fusion bombs, we also can't do so with fossil fuels. The energy density of fossil fuel is around 40 Megajoules/liter, which is impressive (though not compared to an h-bomb at over 7,500,000 MJ/L), but when you put it in a car, the energy density of the whole system drops to 0.2 on the same scale. Not so great at all. Where things get interesting is if you take batteries, which are an order of magnitude worse energy density on their own compared to fossil fuels on their own, and you make them into an integral structural component of the automobile system, as Tesla has done. So now if you look at the entire system, batteries become much more competitive in context. Your tank of gasoline is not serving any structural or stability enhancing role in your ICE car. But a battery is, thus bringing benefits which on an ICE car have to incur extra weight. >there is no solution other than reducing energy usage and reducing quality of life Not true. We squander so much freely available solar energy by allowing it to heat tar-covered rooftops which could instead be collecting it as solar power. There is plenty of energy for our use. There is no need to reduce quality of life. People are already living this. The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed.
    - growlist 7y ago
      > It just doesn’t have any basis in reality. So you're effectively denying the possibility? I'd say that's a pretty gargantuan assumption to make.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - fallingfrog 7y ago
        It’s very, very, very unlikely that we’ll find a magic bullet solution at this stage. Removing co2 from the atmosphere requires some external energy source, for one thing.
  - thrower123 7y ago
    Well, if there's anything that the environmentalists hate more than petroleum, it is nuclear power. So there's the sticky wicket. We have the solution in hand, but no will to embrace it.
  - fallingfrog 7y ago
    That would depend on the risks and the side effects, but assuming there was some magic bullet that would restore the atmosphere to a stable state and allow the burning of unlimited fossil fuels- yes, in a heartbeat.
- ebiester 7y ago
  All of these are "not only but also" solutions. One thing we need to do is end the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, but that only addresses one type of pollution, and it only gets us so far if the alternative doesn't pollute in some way. (For example, solar and the waste that it generates.) We need to solve the whole ecosystem issue.
  - growlist 7y ago
    > We need to solve the whole ecosystem issue. Which unless we come up with some pretty smart measures is inevitably going to involve poorer lifestyles for most in the developed world, in effect (and perhaps this explains the keeness on the left for environmental issues) moving us to a more socialist model, wherein hard work offers far less in terms of monetary reward than at present.
    - disgruntledphd2 7y ago
      What does it profit a man to gain monetary reward if he loses his sustaining ecosystem?
      - growlist 7y ago
        Well quite. But that doesn't change the fact that enforcing poorer lifestyles will inevitably affect the incentive to work hard. This website is in no small part about startups and getting rich, isn't it? Personally, I'm forced to compete because I live in a stupidly overpriced part of the world in terms of housing (SE UK) but apart from a nice house I need very little to support my ego apart from my dog and family, so I think I'd cope with the poorer lifestyle far better than many people I see around me, seeming to have built their self-worth around posessions and silly crazes.
    - fallingfrog 7y ago
      I’ve been thinking about this position today and I don’t see how it makes any sense. Look: would a 10 million dollar salary really induce you to work 10 times harder than a 1 million dollar salary? What about 100 million- would you be working 4000 hours a week instead of 40? You’re going to spend all that money on one person and expect to get your moneys worth? No. Upper executives get that kind of money because they can, not because it makes sense. Imagine you’re a janitor. Every day the boss drives away in a Maserati and every day you wait for the bus. You’ve been working really hard hoping for a 2 dollars an hour raise, but one day the boss brings you into his office and tells you the money is not there. The following day, you find out that executive bonuses have increased by 20 percent and the company has issued 50 billion dollars in stock buybacks. How does this make you feel about the value of hard work?
growlist 7y ago
Gets my vote. I love woodland and can't bear the empty, desolate green spaces that cover most of the UK, and which many British people consider to be 'nature'. And here's an idea: process the wood into a form that can be used for land reclamation without decomposing, cover said land with topsoil, grow trees on said land. Voila: a buffer against worsening coastal erosion due to sea level rise, that also locks in carbon in terms of the trees used to build the footing, and moreover provides extra land for growing trees and locking in even more carbon.
- arethuza 7y ago
  Trees for Life - trying to get the Scottish Highlands back to something approaching their "natural" state: https://treesforlife.org.uk/ https://treesforlife.org.uk/
- ainiriand 7y ago
  I was in shock to discover how empty and barren Ireland is. According to Wikipedia it is one of the most heavily deforested countries in Europe...
  - growlist 7y ago
    If you think that's bad: Ireland are still digging and burning peat to produce energy - Peat! in 2020! Horrifying
    - arethuza 7y ago
      My parents used to burn peat in Scotland when I was growing up - probably why I'm particularly fond of some products flavoured by peat smoke...
    - ainiriand 7y ago
      That's true, you can see the peat farms in Connemara, just by the roadside.
  - fend 7y ago
    Large scale deforestation of Ireland began in the bronze age but present day rural attitudes towards trees, the dynamics of EU farming welfare and a population of 3.7 miilion hill maggots (aka sheep) ensure that woodlands have almost no chance of re-establishing themselves in our time. Its quite sad because much of the land is so wet and compacted now, yet when Ireland had higher tree coverage, as much as 80% of the extensive precipitation that the Atlantic throws at us never even penetrated the soil. Much of the elements that make life harsh today were at one time regulated by forest ecologies to people's benifit. A possible solution would be a long term compensation of farmers in exchange for their grazing rights on the 1,050,000 acres of commonage. With the sheep off the uplands,20 years could be sufficient for natural woodland revival. Given that sheep farming is essentially a subsidised activity the financials could be feasible... But you try saying that in a pub in the west of Ireland and making it out the door with both your arms still attached to your torso.
throwawayhhakdl 7y ago
> It makes very conservative assumptions Uh huh. Good to know this guy has it all figured out. Edit: trying to find the most absurd claim in this. I think it has to be the desalinization idea. That we can “just” scale up desalinization at existing marginal costs to 3 TRILLION cubic meters of water. The entire world currently desalinizes less than a billion each year. So that’s at least a 300x increase in water production! And how do we provide the energy to do this? The article hand waves it off as “solar power”. Yeah sure that would be great. Forget the cost of infrastructure or the transportation or the space for the solar power or whatever Trees are great. By all means, plant trees. But don’t go thinking this poorly reasoned back of the envelope math is going to help.
adreamingsoul 7y ago
I'm burnt out or depressed with my current career (or something else), but at this moment I would happily pivot to spending the rest of my life trying to help nature. How could I create a business or venture that allowed people to make a livable wage while also working to create a balanced ecosystem between human and nature?
- macawfish 7y ago
  Figure out some useful logistics solutions for polyculture producers to complete with monoculture ones. Help foster sustainable ag economy!
- Agenttin 7y ago
  Honestly, tree farming is carbon negative. By continuously growing trees and turning them into lumber you capture carbon and turn it into houses and furniture. Using the profits to buy more land to reforest, then cycling though planting and cutting down trees on a cycle.
  - dpflan 7y ago
    Are there methods of tree farming that are focusing solely on carbon capture? For example, is it known that a species of plant that grows quickly captures carbon very efficiently?
    - bcrosby95 7y ago
      I've heard this tree grows extremely fast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulownia_tomentosa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulownia_tomentosa
      - dpflan 7y ago
        Thanks for this. From the article: > "An acre of empress trees can absorb 103 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year. Once the trees reach maturity, farmers harvest their wood for use in houses or musical instruments.[12]"
triclops200 7y ago
That only "fixes" climate change as long as the trees continue growing and do not die. When dead, trees release their CO_2 that they've sequestered back into the atmosphere due to decomposition. Therefore, assuming those forests stay around, you've only delayed the problem by sinking a fixed amount of CO_2 away into the living biomass of the trees. The only way to make that a permanent sink would be to biochar the trees as soon as they die, which would be a logistical nightmare. Negative rant over, it's still not a bad idea for the fact that it'd slow down the worst effects of climate change for a while, buying time for other solutions like renewable energy and whatnot, but it's not a pancea.
- Ndymium 7y ago
  But when the trees die, new trees will grow in the same area, sequestering more or less that CO2 that was emitted from the dying tree, no? Would this not turn the forests into a permanent CO2 sink, at least on a rough scale? Or do they sequester less than they emit?
  - praptak 7y ago
    Once the forest grows to maximum height and density, it stops being a sink. It keeps being a storage though, which is still a benefit.
  - ulrikrasmussen 7y ago
    I unfortunately can't find a reference, but I heard that it takes about 20 years for a newly planted tree to peak with regards to absorption of carbon, and after about 100 years it reaches equilibrium where the forest emits about the same amount of carbon to the atmosphere as it absorbs (through decaying matter, fallen trees, and whatnot). It of course depends on the type of tree.
    - praptak 7y ago
      I think it's best to look at this as mass preservation problem. Trees absorb CO2 from air and store in their bodies. Once they die, the CO2 gets released. Since there's a limited tree mass per area unit that the ground can support, once you reach that mass the input and output need to zero out, since there's nowhere to store any additional CO2.
harikb 7y ago
For those who don’t know, there was a reforestation done in US west coast in recent history [1]. Also from the details I have read at least a good portion of it was done by a grassroots effort. If you drive through the highway that goes through the forest today, it is unimaginable it was a restoration project. There is even a cool observation desk somewhere in the middle > The forest was replanted from 1949 to 1973 in the largest reforestation project of its kind. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tillamook_State_Forest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tillamook_State_Forest
perfunctory 7y ago
Unfortunately the reality (as always) is much more prosaic. There is no one single clever solution to the climate problem. Fixing climate will require lots and lots of different solutions across the board, including reforestation.
- longtom 7y ago
  Indeed. A good overview is provided by the following blog posts: https://longitudinal.blog/co2-series-part-1-review-of-basics/ https://longitudinal.blog/co2-series-part-1-review-of-basics... https://longitudinal.blog/co2-series-part-2-co2-removal/ https://longitudinal.blog/co2-series-part-2-co2-removal/ https://longitudinal.blog/co2-series-part-3-other-interventions/ https://longitudinal.blog/co2-series-part-3-other-interventi...
ourcat 7y ago
We need more photosynthesis (again). I've often thought that vast swathes of otherwise barren land on this planet could be used for cultivating hemp and Cannabis, for a vast amount of uses (not just getting high). It obviously grows very quickly compared to trees. And like 'a weed'. The 're-greenification' of land would be rapid.
Tade0 7y ago
IIRC a single tree absorbs around 25kg of CO2 annually during its fastest growth stage. That's an equivalent of less than 200km in a compact car or 2kg of beef. I believe it makes more sense to pick the low hanging fruit which is making transportation more efficient and reducing the impact of food production.
- Symmetry 7y ago
  I think an easier to understand way to look at it is that every square meter of forest is enough to offset 1 or 2 watts of carbon based energy consumption if we assume that the trees don't die and decay, no forest fires, etc. We know that's not enough to sustain a modern civilization because past civilizations were dependent on energy from wood and coulndn't sustain a much lower standard of living even with a much lower population density. By contrast solar can sustain on the order of 100 watts per square meter and can do it even in areas without enough rainfall for forests.
- llebttam 7y ago
  The world has a lot of land, though. Before humans came along, there were roughly 6 trillion trees in the world. Now there are about 3 trillion, mainly due to forests being cut down for agriculture, wood, etc. Getting back the other 3 trillion trees would sequester an additional 75 gigatons of CO2 per year using your figure of 25kg/tree/year. Human activity emits 45gt/year according to his article.
davedx 7y ago
Let's get started! https://teamtrees.org/ https://teamtrees.org/ https://projectwren.com/ https://projectwren.com/
revscat 7y ago
Does that series cover eliminating Rupert Murdoch? I know that this is taboo to discuss, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that non-technical solutions to climate change will necessarily include the elimination of those who metaphorically are holding a gun to humanity's head.
- adamsea 7y ago
  While I sympathize with your sentiment a more accurate and less provocative way of saying almost the same thing would be to say that the biggest barriers to dealing with climate change are social and political, and so changing social norms (so corporate behavior as evidenced by Murdoch) becomes unacceptable, and electing politicians who will pass meaningful climate-change laws, is really important.
  - PaulHoule 7y ago
    There are a few groups to consider here. One is the ordinary corporate manager which is not especially ideological. This person might be part of the problem because CO2 emissions help the firm make money, but they'd have no deep problem with making money without CO2 emissions. Another is Rupert Murdoch, the Koch Brothers, and other funders of the "new right" who actively campaign to make governments less responsive to issues such as climate change -- predominantly by spamming the agenda so that politicians never get far past "lowering taxes for the rich". A third is the ordinary people, which makes the problem particularly difficult. In most countries the #1 way to have a riot is to raise the price of fuel. For instance, after Macron destroyed his credibility by cutting the wealth tax, he was unable to ask the "yellowjackets" to make any sacrifices. Now he can't manage pension "reform" for the same reason.
- bergoid 7y ago
  > it is becoming increasingly apparent that non-technical solutions to climate change will necessarily include the elimination of those who metaphorically are holding a gun to humanity's head. I beg your pardon? Who exactly is holding a gun to humanity's head? Are you thinking of entire populations or do you have specific individuals in mind? And what does your plan look like?
MiguelVieira 7y ago
Planting so many trees would destroy so much grassland and shrubland habitat that it would probably kill off more species than climate change.
christiansakai 7y ago
Are there any YC backed startups that tackle these kinds of problems, i.e, climate change, plastic pollution, energy, etc?
jdlyga 7y ago
You can't outrun a bad diet. Sure we can plant a ton of trees to recapture carbon, but we also need to cut down emissions.
- llebttam 7y ago
  I agree, but I still think of this as a useful part of a complete solution. It's something that buys us time to shift away from fossil fuels. With current tech, we could drastically reduce emissions by moving to a mix of nuclear (the modern, safe kind) for baseload plus wind and solar for peak, but it's going to take few decades to build it all out, and during the intervening period we have a lot of excess CO2 we need to sequester.
noiv 7y ago
> There is no one single clever solution to the climate problem. There is. Just stop emitting greenhouse gases.
- hossbeast 7y ago
  Now you have worse problems.
  - noiv 7y ago
    I fail to imagine problems worse than Earth with +4C.
    - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
      A fair amount of greenhouse gas emissions are from growing and transporting food. "Just stop" means that a fair amount of our food production stops. The problem with +4C is a lot of people dying; killing them earlier by starvation is not a solution.
      - noiv 7y ago
        You do realize starvation is already happening because of changing weather pattern?
- koheripbal 7y ago
  We don't even need to STOP entirely. We can just reduce by ~50% of current levels. Greenhouse gases could still be used for numerous applications, as long as we stop using it for power generation, ground transportation, and manufacturing.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait to HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22064741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22064741.
mangecoeur 7y ago
Since deforestation is one of the major contributors to climate change in the first place, this is kinda like saying 'the solution to climate change is to stop causing climate change'
Merrill 7y ago
The core assumption is that 3 billion out of a total of 4.7 billion acres of desert currently existing can be reforested by planting trees and irrigating them for 20 years, after which they will continue growing without irrigation. Is this possible, except for marginal areas bordering the deserts? Aren't most desert areas desert because of very low precipitation? This may be practical for areas such as the example in the article of the Kubuki Desert reforestation project, where desertification due to the encroachment of dunes can be thwarted. But the major deserts such as the Sahara, Gobi, or Arabian Empty Quarter have very low precipitation, below what is needed for grass, desert shrubs, cacti, etc.
- yifanl 7y ago
  Adding sufficient acreage of forest would "artificially" create more precipitation, no?
- OmarIsmail 7y ago
  In the article the claim is that the environment changes due to the presence of the forest and results in more precipitation. i.e. the presence of precipitation and trees are linked. If you remove one you remove the other, and if you add one (trees in this case) you get the other. Pretty amazing if true.
  - Merrill 7y ago
    >But for the past 2,000 years or so, the climate of the Sahara has been fairly stable. The northeastern winds dry out the air over the desert and drive hot winds toward the equator. These winds can reach exceptional speeds and cause severe dust storms that can drop local visibility to zero. Dust from the Sahara travels on trade winds all the way to the opposite side of the globe. >Precipitation in the Sahara ranges from zero to about 3 inches of rain per year, with some locations not seeing rain for several years at a time. Occasionally, snow falls at higher elevations. Daytime summer temperatures are often over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) and can drop to near-freezing temperatures at nighttime. https://www.livescience.com/23140-sahara-desert.html https://www.livescience.com/23140-sahara-desert.html Precipitation is controlled by the humidity in the prevailing wind systems. Prevailing winds from the northeast drop whatever moisture they have on the southern margins of the Mediterranean or on Egypt and Sudan.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Far too little, far too late. It may have helped fix climate if we had stopped deforestation in 1992 after the first UN climate summit, used only sustainable wood from that moment on and cleared no mature forest for pasture or palm oil. Oh, and started migrating to zero carbon economies when it would have taken a percent or two reduction a year, rather than the throw ourselves off a reduction cliff required now. Thanks politicians! Right now we're still clear cutting, legally and illegally, mature scruffy ancient forest that provides carbon store, and massive bio diversity. At the same time tree planting campaigns and forestry mainly create limited diversity, or no-diversity monocrop desert (forestry). Typically neat proof of human interference. How many tens of years growing or thousands of hectares planted to equate the mature wood and stored carbon lost around the world every day? How much biodiversity and how many species compared to mature, "nature hewn" forest? Global reforestation projects will destroy more ecosystems... What will be the unintended consequences of foresting deserts and the necessary human activity, irrigation, even desalination? How many more species will go as a consequence? Now had we created no-development zones around forests, to allow them to expand naturally, in a world not deforesting at ever increasing rate...
- rexpop 7y ago
  > Thanks politicians! Strange that you would indict the State for failing to legislate Industry, as though the latter had no agency and were therefore uniquely blameless.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    States can make regulations, introduce carbon taxes, ban unsafe or unsustainable activity. When was the first international industry emissions reduction summit? How are they doing in comparison to the politicians? Exxon, Shell and BP knew all about the harm they did in the mid 20th century. So they buried it, briefed against it, greenwash us with irrelevant and insignificant adverts. I indict the states, particularly the developed states, for not bringing forth regulation requiring environmental consideration, emissions reduction, sustainability with penalties encompassing delisting, huge fines and exec imprisonment. Companies are quite happy to drive everyone off a cliff for a little more gold. We've known that since the first days of the Dutch East India Company (VOC).
aplummer 7y ago
You wouldn’t need desalination for this, for example, the great artesian basin is barely tapped.
_ph_ 7y ago
At least the article title is quite a bit misleading in my eyes. There is no single silver bullet solution to "fixing" climate change. However, reforestation can play a large role in combating climate change. The first and most important step should be to cut down burning fossil fuels as quickly as possible. The lowest hanging fruit there is stop using coal. It is the worst offender and the most easy to get rid of. Just burning gas instead cuts CO2 emissions by more than 30%. Not counting in that number is, that a lot of gas is burnt on oil producing sites instead of used and that gas plants can have much higher efficiencies, like using the heat also for heating houses. Gas plants can reach up to 90% efficiency this way, basically halving the CO2 emissions vs. coal. Also, flexible gas plants play nicer with renewables as solar and wind. And of course stop using oil e.g. for cars. Having done that would cut down the CO2 emissions drastically, and then the reforestation becomes a more realistic target and would indeed a very practical means to get to net zero emissions. And even if it were only a small part, setting up desalination to green large parts of the desert would be a big net win. But before we use solar cells to produce water for growing trees, we should use the electricity produced to not burn fossil fuels in the first place.
rob74 7y ago
For others who can't quite picture 3 billion acres, that's around 12 million square kilometers (USA - 9.8 million km², Russia - 17.1 million km²)
belorn 7y ago
Sweden have had for several decades a law that require reforestation when landowners harvest timber. Every year a lot of trees get planted, and depending on how you count you can either see it as a massive amount of carbon credits from the last 50 years or so, or as being carbon neutral as it is very likely that the wast majority of the timber end up being burned. If we look at climate research we also see a similar concern. Reforestation only work as a carbon sink if it also accompanies agreements to not harvest the tress and keep the forest as reservations. In simple terms, global reforestation in order to combat climate change has the same challenge as a global initiatives to create more forest reservations. A global reforestation policy without extending the reservations is carbon neutral. It is much better than deforestation, but it won't fix the problem of fossil fuels putting out massive amount of carbon into the air.
PaulHoule 7y ago
In developed countries changing land use policies in the developing world seems to be an easy way out. Nobody asks people in the developing world what they think about it. I suspect many of them would feel the same way about being forced to change their land use the same way the yellowjackets feel about an increase in the price of fuel.
jellicle 7y ago
> A global reforestation project is how we fix climate change It isn't. Besides being inadequate even on its own terms, creating large and flammable forests in a time of increasing droughts is just going to lead to megafires, which will instantly eliminate all gains from years of forestation. We should still plant trees. There's no real downside to doing so except the cost. But you absolutely cannot count on flammable forests locking up carbon forever. Forests burn, they get cut down for firewood, bad things happen to them. Tree-planting is, like, 1% of what needs to be done, not 90%. It's a 1% solution.
bashmelek 7y ago
Trees are the best tool modern technology offers to sequester carbon. As it stands, the largest "crop" we have in america is grass. Lawns, though better than nothing, are a poor substitute in terms of taking in carbon. This and all of our empty parking lots, roads, and other car-enabling infrastructure contribute to urban sprawl that takes land from forests. It's an uphill battle, but changing various zoning laws is a good step
ericmay 7y ago
How can I today, directly add to creating new trees either through helping to plant, or by donating money?
- llebttam 7y ago
  A friend of mine who's studied climate change in detail recommended the following company for voluntary carbon offsets: https://carbonfund.org/product-category/plant-trees/ https://carbonfund.org/product-category/plant-trees/
te_chris 7y ago
I urge people to read The Secret Life of Trees (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28256439-the-hidden-life-of-trees https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28256439-the-hidden-life...). This guy says "This is why we only need to irrigate our forests for about 20 years — once they reach maturity, they will influence their local biome and bring self-sustaining rains.", but, according to the book, most trees are still basically adolescent at 100 years. I love the idea and am an active supporter of rewiliding myself, but you need to understand the timeframes of what you're working with.
DennisP 7y ago
So we need 3 billion acres. There are 4.62 billion acres of cropland in the world: https://blog.neogen.com/new-map-shows-4-62-billion-acres-of-cropland-globally/ https://blog.neogen.com/new-map-shows-4-62-billion-acres-of-... It's looking increasingly likely that lab-grown food will make a lot of that farming obsolete: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/08/lab-grown-food-destroy-farming-save-planet https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/08/lab-gr... Solar Foods estimates their process is 20,000 times more land-efficient than farming. Lab-grown beef also looks at least ten times more efficient on land, energy, and water, according to the book Clean Meat. So if it doesn't take too long before this stuff takes over the market, we could grow our three billion acres of trees on existing arable land and skip most of the desalination. It might seem impossible for agriculture do disappear all that quickly, but whale oil was the fifth-largest industry in the U.S., then kerosene came along and wiped it out in a couple decades. And according to studies, people overwhelmingly eat what's cheap and tastes good; if lab-grown foods can manage to taste good and leverage their low resource use into low prices, things could change very quickly.
- ErotemeObelus 7y ago
  > Lab-grown beef also looks at least ten times more efficient on land, energy, and water, according to the book Clean Meat. Wait until they accidentally create Super Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.
jasonlaramburu 7y ago
The author seems to assume that deserts are lifeless places, which is incorrect. Converting billions of acres of desert to a monocrop forest would kill the billions of plants and animals which have become adapted to that environment, which could also negate the emissions reductions. Monocrops are also ecologically unstable and easily destroyed by disease.
- llebttam 7y ago
  FWIW, I don't think he's creating a monocrop forest -- he's planting a range of species that form an interdependent web. This is also being done in locations that were forests a few hundred years ago before humans cut them down. The mature forest is a self-sustaining ecosystem, but it needs extra water for a few decades until it reaches that point. https://www.westhawaiitoday.com/2020/01/12/hawaii-news/yishan-wong-has-an-ambitious-idea-for-fighting-climate-change-plant-more-trees/ https://www.westhawaiitoday.com/2020/01/12/hawaii-news/yisha...
awb 7y ago
> Thus, to reforest 3 billion acres at current prices will cost the world an investment of $3 trillion/year for 20 years. That sounds like a lot, but the world GDP of 2017 was $80 trillion. Therefore, this plan would require an investment of a little less than 4% of world GDP every year for 20 years. $3T each year (4% of world GDP) for 20 years still sounds like a lot.
- llebttam 7y ago
  Yeah, it's definitely a lot. I think the actual costs will be a lot lower as this will take many years of experimentation before scaling, and by then the cost of the solar panels (which I think is the vast majority of the cost) will likely have continued to ride its exponential downward cost curve. One source: https://earthtechling.com/solar-energy-costs-trends/ https://earthtechling.com/solar-energy-costs-trends/
eluusive 7y ago
People keep talking about how we have no way of removing Co2 from the atmosphere. There are lots of options, and some of them are quite inexpensive. https://projectvesta.org/ https://projectvesta.org/
acvny 7y ago
Although forests have many more other benefits like animal habitat, soil creation, local climate change, cloud generation, ..., a simpler, quicker and cheaper solution would be to invent artificial photosynthesizers (using solar light) or electrosynthesizers (using electricity) - huge installations that would absorb air like big vacuum cleaners, capture the CO2 and decompose the molecule into Carbon products. For example by employing such processes as Reduction of CO2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrochemical_reduction_of_carbon_dioxide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrochemical_reduction_of_c... The only thing that's needed is to incentivize such research. Let's say creating a global fund of 20-30 Billion dollars and encouraging researchers to apply for grants from this fund. Next step after basic research is done and something feasible invented would be to commercialize the solutions. However again here we would need incentives. It is really hard to implement the idea without commercial interest. What would be a good incentive for this? Well, the captured carbon could be sold... Any other ideas?
- rfdave 7y ago
  Option 1 - Plant trees that have been growing for millennia, with skills that are wide spread across all of humanity Option 2 - Invent technology that is currently unknown, scale it to a world wide scale, facing unknown challenges and problems with technology that is today completely unknown. Hmmmmm
  - yishan 7y ago
    I agree and would say the same thing, but slightly less dismissively. :) The key here is that we're out of time. This coming decade is probably the last one we will have where the problem can be solved at a cost less than 10% of world GDP. If we wait another 10 years, I suspect all solutions will require a significant fraction of global GDP and authoritarian-style interventions. As a technologist, I'd love a magical new technology. But I'm also an engineer, and I want to execute the most efficient and low-risk solution in the smallest possible timeframe. After taking all factors into account, that's massive reforestation. If new technologies are developed in the meantime, that's GOOD. Every bit of help that's put into play helps us. It's not a competition, it's a collective race against time, and we can all contribute.
Myrmornis 7y ago
I hope that all reforestation programs in the future will use local native species and will not use fast-growing non-natives such as Eucalyptus. The "woodland" around, for example Berkeley California, is so depressing to contemplate due to the dominance of Eucalyptus and the corresponding lack of fauna.
m0zg 7y ago
And then all those trees dry out because waterbed can't carry this many, and they catch fire. See California, nearly every year. It's a 100% natural process for them to dry out and catch fire from time to time. It's just not very conducive to permanent carbon capture. The proposed solution (irrigation) is the most pie-in-the-sky part of the plan. It's "solar energy, ???, profit" basically. I like the scalability aspects of this. I don't think we have a technical solution that is as scalable as a biological one. I do think that simply "planting trees" is not going to do the trick though.

135 points by apsec112 7y ago

A very interesting proposal. Given the current ultra low interest rates all the costs could be directly monetized by the central banks (via "climate bonds"), rather than making governments pay or introducing helicopter money when the next recession hits. We just need some key to distribute the resulting jobs and manufacturing orders between the countries.

fallingfrog 7y ago

No, ending the extraction and burning of fossil fuels is how we fix climate change. Anything else is just buying time.

growlist 7y ago
An honest question: if a technological solution were found that both solved climate change and allowed us to continue burning fossil fuels, would you accept it?
- earthtolazlo 7y ago
  Having your cake and eating it too sounds like a great option. It just doesn’t have any basis in reality.
  - vorpalhex 7y ago
    Parent as I read it isn't suggesting that having your cake and eating it too is possible, instead they're attempting to establish a dual-scale demarcation of viewpoints with one scale being "Prohibition or allowance of fossil fuels" and the other scale being "Fixes or does not fix climate change". This is useful because polling has discovered many US Republicans will actually vote for climate solutions _if_ they employ new technologies that would result in new industries.
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      The people voting against environmental reforms are doing it because they don't want to reduce their quality of life. And since nothing comes close to the cost to energy density ratio of fossil fuels, there is no solution other than reducing energy usage and reducing quality of life. And so without convincing people they should reduce their quality of life for the benefit of future generations, nothing is going to happen.
      - natch 7y ago
        >The people voting against environmental reforms are doing it because they don't want to reduce their quality of life. No. They're doing it because of tribalism and ignorance. They perceive that by allowing progress on energy sustainability issues, they allow the enemy tribe a victory. And many of them don't care at all about sustainability because they believe the second coming is just around the corner. The ones who think it would reduce their quality of life are just being ignorant. They don't understand the possibilities. >And since nothing comes close to the cost to energy density ratio of fossil fuels... Well, it's not that simple. You can't just look at the energy density without looking at the context. Even dry wood comes close (within an order of magnitude) to fossil fuels. And ethanol is even better. But there are issues with both of these. That's the thing. You need to also account for the issues. And fossil fuels themselves also have issues, namely, the topic at hand, climate change. If you want the highest energy density, you would go with an H-bomb or a high energy laser. But you need to harness the energy in a context so being realistic about it, fossil fuels need to go. Just as we can't power our civilization sustainably with fusion bombs, we also can't do so with fossil fuels. The energy density of fossil fuel is around 40 Megajoules/liter, which is impressive (though not compared to an h-bomb at over 7,500,000 MJ/L), but when you put it in a car, the energy density of the whole system drops to 0.2 on the same scale. Not so great at all. Where things get interesting is if you take batteries, which are an order of magnitude worse energy density on their own compared to fossil fuels on their own, and you make them into an integral structural component of the automobile system, as Tesla has done. So now if you look at the entire system, batteries become much more competitive in context. Your tank of gasoline is not serving any structural or stability enhancing role in your ICE car. But a battery is, thus bringing benefits which on an ICE car have to incur extra weight. >there is no solution other than reducing energy usage and reducing quality of life Not true. We squander so much freely available solar energy by allowing it to heat tar-covered rooftops which could instead be collecting it as solar power. There is plenty of energy for our use. There is no need to reduce quality of life. People are already living this. The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed.
  - growlist 7y ago
    > It just doesn’t have any basis in reality. So you're effectively denying the possibility? I'd say that's a pretty gargantuan assumption to make.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - fallingfrog 7y ago
      It’s very, very, very unlikely that we’ll find a magic bullet solution at this stage. Removing co2 from the atmosphere requires some external energy source, for one thing.
- thrower123 7y ago
  Well, if there's anything that the environmentalists hate more than petroleum, it is nuclear power. So there's the sticky wicket. We have the solution in hand, but no will to embrace it.
- fallingfrog 7y ago
  That would depend on the risks and the side effects, but assuming there was some magic bullet that would restore the atmosphere to a stable state and allow the burning of unlimited fossil fuels- yes, in a heartbeat.
ebiester 7y ago
All of these are "not only but also" solutions. One thing we need to do is end the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, but that only addresses one type of pollution, and it only gets us so far if the alternative doesn't pollute in some way. (For example, solar and the waste that it generates.) We need to solve the whole ecosystem issue.
- growlist 7y ago
  > We need to solve the whole ecosystem issue. Which unless we come up with some pretty smart measures is inevitably going to involve poorer lifestyles for most in the developed world, in effect (and perhaps this explains the keeness on the left for environmental issues) moving us to a more socialist model, wherein hard work offers far less in terms of monetary reward than at present.
  - disgruntledphd2 7y ago
    What does it profit a man to gain monetary reward if he loses his sustaining ecosystem?
    - growlist 7y ago
      Well quite. But that doesn't change the fact that enforcing poorer lifestyles will inevitably affect the incentive to work hard. This website is in no small part about startups and getting rich, isn't it? Personally, I'm forced to compete because I live in a stupidly overpriced part of the world in terms of housing (SE UK) but apart from a nice house I need very little to support my ego apart from my dog and family, so I think I'd cope with the poorer lifestyle far better than many people I see around me, seeming to have built their self-worth around posessions and silly crazes.
  - fallingfrog 7y ago
    I’ve been thinking about this position today and I don’t see how it makes any sense. Look: would a 10 million dollar salary really induce you to work 10 times harder than a 1 million dollar salary? What about 100 million- would you be working 4000 hours a week instead of 40? You’re going to spend all that money on one person and expect to get your moneys worth? No. Upper executives get that kind of money because they can, not because it makes sense. Imagine you’re a janitor. Every day the boss drives away in a Maserati and every day you wait for the bus. You’ve been working really hard hoping for a 2 dollars an hour raise, but one day the boss brings you into his office and tells you the money is not there. The following day, you find out that executive bonuses have increased by 20 percent and the company has issued 50 billion dollars in stock buybacks. How does this make you feel about the value of hard work?

growlist 7y ago

Gets my vote. I love woodland and can't bear the empty, desolate green spaces that cover most of the UK, and which many British people consider to be 'nature'. And here's an idea: process the wood into a form that can be used for land reclamation without decomposing, cover said land with topsoil, grow trees on said land. Voila: a buffer against worsening coastal erosion due to sea level rise, that also locks in carbon in terms of the trees used to build the footing, and moreover provides extra land for growing trees and locking in even more carbon.

arethuza 7y ago
Trees for Life - trying to get the Scottish Highlands back to something approaching their "natural" state: https://treesforlife.org.uk/ https://treesforlife.org.uk/
ainiriand 7y ago
I was in shock to discover how empty and barren Ireland is. According to Wikipedia it is one of the most heavily deforested countries in Europe...
- growlist 7y ago
  If you think that's bad: Ireland are still digging and burning peat to produce energy - Peat! in 2020! Horrifying
  - arethuza 7y ago
    My parents used to burn peat in Scotland when I was growing up - probably why I'm particularly fond of some products flavoured by peat smoke...
  - ainiriand 7y ago
    That's true, you can see the peat farms in Connemara, just by the roadside.
- fend 7y ago
  Large scale deforestation of Ireland began in the bronze age but present day rural attitudes towards trees, the dynamics of EU farming welfare and a population of 3.7 miilion hill maggots (aka sheep) ensure that woodlands have almost no chance of re-establishing themselves in our time. Its quite sad because much of the land is so wet and compacted now, yet when Ireland had higher tree coverage, as much as 80% of the extensive precipitation that the Atlantic throws at us never even penetrated the soil. Much of the elements that make life harsh today were at one time regulated by forest ecologies to people's benifit. A possible solution would be a long term compensation of farmers in exchange for their grazing rights on the 1,050,000 acres of commonage. With the sheep off the uplands,20 years could be sufficient for natural woodland revival. Given that sheep farming is essentially a subsidised activity the financials could be feasible... But you try saying that in a pub in the west of Ireland and making it out the door with both your arms still attached to your torso.

throwawayhhakdl 7y ago

> It makes very conservative assumptions Uh huh. Good to know this guy has it all figured out. Edit: trying to find the most absurd claim in this. I think it has to be the desalinization idea. That we can “just” scale up desalinization at existing marginal costs to 3 TRILLION cubic meters of water. The entire world currently desalinizes less than a billion each year. So that’s at least a 300x increase in water production! And how do we provide the energy to do this? The article hand waves it off as “solar power”. Yeah sure that would be great. Forget the cost of infrastructure or the transportation or the space for the solar power or whatever Trees are great. By all means, plant trees. But don’t go thinking this poorly reasoned back of the envelope math is going to help.

adreamingsoul 7y ago

I'm burnt out or depressed with my current career (or something else), but at this moment I would happily pivot to spending the rest of my life trying to help nature. How could I create a business or venture that allowed people to make a livable wage while also working to create a balanced ecosystem between human and nature?

macawfish 7y ago
Figure out some useful logistics solutions for polyculture producers to complete with monoculture ones. Help foster sustainable ag economy!
Agenttin 7y ago
Honestly, tree farming is carbon negative. By continuously growing trees and turning them into lumber you capture carbon and turn it into houses and furniture. Using the profits to buy more land to reforest, then cycling though planting and cutting down trees on a cycle.
- dpflan 7y ago
  Are there methods of tree farming that are focusing solely on carbon capture? For example, is it known that a species of plant that grows quickly captures carbon very efficiently?
  - bcrosby95 7y ago
    I've heard this tree grows extremely fast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulownia_tomentosa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulownia_tomentosa
    - dpflan 7y ago
      Thanks for this. From the article: > "An acre of empress trees can absorb 103 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year. Once the trees reach maturity, farmers harvest their wood for use in houses or musical instruments.[12]"

triclops200 7y ago

That only "fixes" climate change as long as the trees continue growing and do not die. When dead, trees release their CO_2 that they've sequestered back into the atmosphere due to decomposition. Therefore, assuming those forests stay around, you've only delayed the problem by sinking a fixed amount of CO_2 away into the living biomass of the trees. The only way to make that a permanent sink would be to biochar the trees as soon as they die, which would be a logistical nightmare. Negative rant over, it's still not a bad idea for the fact that it'd slow down the worst effects of climate change for a while, buying time for other solutions like renewable energy and whatnot, but it's not a pancea.

Ndymium 7y ago
But when the trees die, new trees will grow in the same area, sequestering more or less that CO2 that was emitted from the dying tree, no? Would this not turn the forests into a permanent CO2 sink, at least on a rough scale? Or do they sequester less than they emit?
- praptak 7y ago
  Once the forest grows to maximum height and density, it stops being a sink. It keeps being a storage though, which is still a benefit.
- ulrikrasmussen 7y ago
  I unfortunately can't find a reference, but I heard that it takes about 20 years for a newly planted tree to peak with regards to absorption of carbon, and after about 100 years it reaches equilibrium where the forest emits about the same amount of carbon to the atmosphere as it absorbs (through decaying matter, fallen trees, and whatnot). It of course depends on the type of tree.
  - praptak 7y ago
    I think it's best to look at this as mass preservation problem. Trees absorb CO2 from air and store in their bodies. Once they die, the CO2 gets released. Since there's a limited tree mass per area unit that the ground can support, once you reach that mass the input and output need to zero out, since there's nowhere to store any additional CO2.

harikb 7y ago

For those who don’t know, there was a reforestation done in US west coast in recent history [1]. Also from the details I have read at least a good portion of it was done by a grassroots effort. If you drive through the highway that goes through the forest today, it is unimaginable it was a restoration project. There is even a cool observation desk somewhere in the middle > The forest was replanted from 1949 to 1973 in the largest reforestation project of its kind. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tillamook_State_Forest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tillamook_State_Forest

perfunctory 7y ago

Unfortunately the reality (as always) is much more prosaic. There is no one single clever solution to the climate problem. Fixing climate will require lots and lots of different solutions across the board, including reforestation.

longtom 7y ago
Indeed. A good overview is provided by the following blog posts: https://longitudinal.blog/co2-series-part-1-review-of-basics/ https://longitudinal.blog/co2-series-part-1-review-of-basics... https://longitudinal.blog/co2-series-part-2-co2-removal/ https://longitudinal.blog/co2-series-part-2-co2-removal/ https://longitudinal.blog/co2-series-part-3-other-interventions/ https://longitudinal.blog/co2-series-part-3-other-interventi...

ourcat 7y ago

We need more photosynthesis (again). I've often thought that vast swathes of otherwise barren land on this planet could be used for cultivating hemp and Cannabis, for a vast amount of uses (not just getting high). It obviously grows very quickly compared to trees. And like 'a weed'. The 're-greenification' of land would be rapid.

Tade0 7y ago

IIRC a single tree absorbs around 25kg of CO2 annually during its fastest growth stage. That's an equivalent of less than 200km in a compact car or 2kg of beef. I believe it makes more sense to pick the low hanging fruit which is making transportation more efficient and reducing the impact of food production.

Symmetry 7y ago
I think an easier to understand way to look at it is that every square meter of forest is enough to offset 1 or 2 watts of carbon based energy consumption if we assume that the trees don't die and decay, no forest fires, etc. We know that's not enough to sustain a modern civilization because past civilizations were dependent on energy from wood and coulndn't sustain a much lower standard of living even with a much lower population density. By contrast solar can sustain on the order of 100 watts per square meter and can do it even in areas without enough rainfall for forests.
llebttam 7y ago
The world has a lot of land, though. Before humans came along, there were roughly 6 trillion trees in the world. Now there are about 3 trillion, mainly due to forests being cut down for agriculture, wood, etc. Getting back the other 3 trillion trees would sequester an additional 75 gigatons of CO2 per year using your figure of 25kg/tree/year. Human activity emits 45gt/year according to his article.

davedx 7y ago

Let's get started! https://teamtrees.org/ https://teamtrees.org/ https://projectwren.com/ https://projectwren.com/

revscat 7y ago

Does that series cover eliminating Rupert Murdoch? I know that this is taboo to discuss, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that non-technical solutions to climate change will necessarily include the elimination of those who metaphorically are holding a gun to humanity's head.

adamsea 7y ago
While I sympathize with your sentiment a more accurate and less provocative way of saying almost the same thing would be to say that the biggest barriers to dealing with climate change are social and political, and so changing social norms (so corporate behavior as evidenced by Murdoch) becomes unacceptable, and electing politicians who will pass meaningful climate-change laws, is really important.
- PaulHoule 7y ago
  There are a few groups to consider here. One is the ordinary corporate manager which is not especially ideological. This person might be part of the problem because CO2 emissions help the firm make money, but they'd have no deep problem with making money without CO2 emissions. Another is Rupert Murdoch, the Koch Brothers, and other funders of the "new right" who actively campaign to make governments less responsive to issues such as climate change -- predominantly by spamming the agenda so that politicians never get far past "lowering taxes for the rich". A third is the ordinary people, which makes the problem particularly difficult. In most countries the #1 way to have a riot is to raise the price of fuel. For instance, after Macron destroyed his credibility by cutting the wealth tax, he was unable to ask the "yellowjackets" to make any sacrifices. Now he can't manage pension "reform" for the same reason.
bergoid 7y ago
> it is becoming increasingly apparent that non-technical solutions to climate change will necessarily include the elimination of those who metaphorically are holding a gun to humanity's head. I beg your pardon? Who exactly is holding a gun to humanity's head? Are you thinking of entire populations or do you have specific individuals in mind? And what does your plan look like?

MiguelVieira 7y ago

Planting so many trees would destroy so much grassland and shrubland habitat that it would probably kill off more species than climate change.

christiansakai 7y ago

Are there any YC backed startups that tackle these kinds of problems, i.e, climate change, plastic pollution, energy, etc?

jdlyga 7y ago

You can't outrun a bad diet. Sure we can plant a ton of trees to recapture carbon, but we also need to cut down emissions.

llebttam 7y ago
I agree, but I still think of this as a useful part of a complete solution. It's something that buys us time to shift away from fossil fuels. With current tech, we could drastically reduce emissions by moving to a mix of nuclear (the modern, safe kind) for baseload plus wind and solar for peak, but it's going to take few decades to build it all out, and during the intervening period we have a lot of excess CO2 we need to sequester.

noiv 7y ago

> There is no one single clever solution to the climate problem. There is. Just stop emitting greenhouse gases.

hossbeast 7y ago
Now you have worse problems.
- noiv 7y ago
  I fail to imagine problems worse than Earth with +4C.
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    A fair amount of greenhouse gas emissions are from growing and transporting food. "Just stop" means that a fair amount of our food production stops. The problem with +4C is a lot of people dying; killing them earlier by starvation is not a solution.
    - noiv 7y ago
      You do realize starvation is already happening because of changing weather pattern?
koheripbal 7y ago
We don't even need to STOP entirely. We can just reduce by ~50% of current levels. Greenhouse gases could still be used for numerous applications, as long as we stop using it for power generation, ground transportation, and manufacturing.
dang 7y ago
Please don't post unsubstantive comments and/or flamebait to HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22064741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22064741.

mangecoeur 7y ago

Since deforestation is one of the major contributors to climate change in the first place, this is kinda like saying 'the solution to climate change is to stop causing climate change'

Merrill 7y ago

The core assumption is that 3 billion out of a total of 4.7 billion acres of desert currently existing can be reforested by planting trees and irrigating them for 20 years, after which they will continue growing without irrigation. Is this possible, except for marginal areas bordering the deserts? Aren't most desert areas desert because of very low precipitation? This may be practical for areas such as the example in the article of the Kubuki Desert reforestation project, where desertification due to the encroachment of dunes can be thwarted. But the major deserts such as the Sahara, Gobi, or Arabian Empty Quarter have very low precipitation, below what is needed for grass, desert shrubs, cacti, etc.

yifanl 7y ago
Adding sufficient acreage of forest would "artificially" create more precipitation, no?
OmarIsmail 7y ago
In the article the claim is that the environment changes due to the presence of the forest and results in more precipitation. i.e. the presence of precipitation and trees are linked. If you remove one you remove the other, and if you add one (trees in this case) you get the other. Pretty amazing if true.
- Merrill 7y ago
  >But for the past 2,000 years or so, the climate of the Sahara has been fairly stable. The northeastern winds dry out the air over the desert and drive hot winds toward the equator. These winds can reach exceptional speeds and cause severe dust storms that can drop local visibility to zero. Dust from the Sahara travels on trade winds all the way to the opposite side of the globe. >Precipitation in the Sahara ranges from zero to about 3 inches of rain per year, with some locations not seeing rain for several years at a time. Occasionally, snow falls at higher elevations. Daytime summer temperatures are often over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) and can drop to near-freezing temperatures at nighttime. https://www.livescience.com/23140-sahara-desert.html https://www.livescience.com/23140-sahara-desert.html Precipitation is controlled by the humidity in the prevailing wind systems. Prevailing winds from the northeast drop whatever moisture they have on the southern margins of the Mediterranean or on Egypt and Sudan.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago

Far too little, far too late. It may have helped fix climate if we had stopped deforestation in 1992 after the first UN climate summit, used only sustainable wood from that moment on and cleared no mature forest for pasture or palm oil. Oh, and started migrating to zero carbon economies when it would have taken a percent or two reduction a year, rather than the throw ourselves off a reduction cliff required now. Thanks politicians! Right now we're still clear cutting, legally and illegally, mature scruffy ancient forest that provides carbon store, and massive bio diversity. At the same time tree planting campaigns and forestry mainly create limited diversity, or no-diversity monocrop desert (forestry). Typically neat proof of human interference. How many tens of years growing or thousands of hectares planted to equate the mature wood and stored carbon lost around the world every day? How much biodiversity and how many species compared to mature, "nature hewn" forest? Global reforestation projects will destroy more ecosystems... What will be the unintended consequences of foresting deserts and the necessary human activity, irrigation, even desalination? How many more species will go as a consequence? Now had we created no-development zones around forests, to allow them to expand naturally, in a world not deforesting at ever increasing rate...

rexpop 7y ago
> Thanks politicians! Strange that you would indict the State for failing to legislate Industry, as though the latter had no agency and were therefore uniquely blameless.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  States can make regulations, introduce carbon taxes, ban unsafe or unsustainable activity. When was the first international industry emissions reduction summit? How are they doing in comparison to the politicians? Exxon, Shell and BP knew all about the harm they did in the mid 20th century. So they buried it, briefed against it, greenwash us with irrelevant and insignificant adverts. I indict the states, particularly the developed states, for not bringing forth regulation requiring environmental consideration, emissions reduction, sustainability with penalties encompassing delisting, huge fines and exec imprisonment. Companies are quite happy to drive everyone off a cliff for a little more gold. We've known that since the first days of the Dutch East India Company (VOC).

aplummer 7y ago

You wouldn’t need desalination for this, for example, the great artesian basin is barely tapped.

_ph_ 7y ago

At least the article title is quite a bit misleading in my eyes. There is no single silver bullet solution to "fixing" climate change. However, reforestation can play a large role in combating climate change. The first and most important step should be to cut down burning fossil fuels as quickly as possible. The lowest hanging fruit there is stop using coal. It is the worst offender and the most easy to get rid of. Just burning gas instead cuts CO2 emissions by more than 30%. Not counting in that number is, that a lot of gas is burnt on oil producing sites instead of used and that gas plants can have much higher efficiencies, like using the heat also for heating houses. Gas plants can reach up to 90% efficiency this way, basically halving the CO2 emissions vs. coal. Also, flexible gas plants play nicer with renewables as solar and wind. And of course stop using oil e.g. for cars. Having done that would cut down the CO2 emissions drastically, and then the reforestation becomes a more realistic target and would indeed a very practical means to get to net zero emissions. And even if it were only a small part, setting up desalination to green large parts of the desert would be a big net win. But before we use solar cells to produce water for growing trees, we should use the electricity produced to not burn fossil fuels in the first place.

rob74 7y ago

For others who can't quite picture 3 billion acres, that's around 12 million square kilometers (USA - 9.8 million km², Russia - 17.1 million km²)

belorn 7y ago

Sweden have had for several decades a law that require reforestation when landowners harvest timber. Every year a lot of trees get planted, and depending on how you count you can either see it as a massive amount of carbon credits from the last 50 years or so, or as being carbon neutral as it is very likely that the wast majority of the timber end up being burned. If we look at climate research we also see a similar concern. Reforestation only work as a carbon sink if it also accompanies agreements to not harvest the tress and keep the forest as reservations. In simple terms, global reforestation in order to combat climate change has the same challenge as a global initiatives to create more forest reservations. A global reforestation policy without extending the reservations is carbon neutral. It is much better than deforestation, but it won't fix the problem of fossil fuels putting out massive amount of carbon into the air.

PaulHoule 7y ago

In developed countries changing land use policies in the developing world seems to be an easy way out. Nobody asks people in the developing world what they think about it. I suspect many of them would feel the same way about being forced to change their land use the same way the yellowjackets feel about an increase in the price of fuel.

jellicle 7y ago

> A global reforestation project is how we fix climate change It isn't. Besides being inadequate even on its own terms, creating large and flammable forests in a time of increasing droughts is just going to lead to megafires, which will instantly eliminate all gains from years of forestation. We should still plant trees. There's no real downside to doing so except the cost. But you absolutely cannot count on flammable forests locking up carbon forever. Forests burn, they get cut down for firewood, bad things happen to them. Tree-planting is, like, 1% of what needs to be done, not 90%. It's a 1% solution.

bashmelek 7y ago

Trees are the best tool modern technology offers to sequester carbon. As it stands, the largest "crop" we have in america is grass. Lawns, though better than nothing, are a poor substitute in terms of taking in carbon. This and all of our empty parking lots, roads, and other car-enabling infrastructure contribute to urban sprawl that takes land from forests. It's an uphill battle, but changing various zoning laws is a good step

ericmay 7y ago

How can I today, directly add to creating new trees either through helping to plant, or by donating money?

llebttam 7y ago
A friend of mine who's studied climate change in detail recommended the following company for voluntary carbon offsets: https://carbonfund.org/product-category/plant-trees/ https://carbonfund.org/product-category/plant-trees/

te_chris 7y ago

I urge people to read The Secret Life of Trees (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28256439-the-hidden-life-of-trees https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28256439-the-hidden-life...). This guy says "This is why we only need to irrigate our forests for about 20 years — once they reach maturity, they will influence their local biome and bring self-sustaining rains.", but, according to the book, most trees are still basically adolescent at 100 years. I love the idea and am an active supporter of rewiliding myself, but you need to understand the timeframes of what you're working with.

DennisP 7y ago

So we need 3 billion acres. There are 4.62 billion acres of cropland in the world: https://blog.neogen.com/new-map-shows-4-62-billion-acres-of-cropland-globally/ https://blog.neogen.com/new-map-shows-4-62-billion-acres-of-... It's looking increasingly likely that lab-grown food will make a lot of that farming obsolete: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/08/lab-grown-food-destroy-farming-save-planet https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/08/lab-gr... Solar Foods estimates their process is 20,000 times more land-efficient than farming. Lab-grown beef also looks at least ten times more efficient on land, energy, and water, according to the book Clean Meat. So if it doesn't take too long before this stuff takes over the market, we could grow our three billion acres of trees on existing arable land and skip most of the desalination. It might seem impossible for agriculture do disappear all that quickly, but whale oil was the fifth-largest industry in the U.S., then kerosene came along and wiped it out in a couple decades. And according to studies, people overwhelmingly eat what's cheap and tastes good; if lab-grown foods can manage to taste good and leverage their low resource use into low prices, things could change very quickly.

ErotemeObelus 7y ago
> Lab-grown beef also looks at least ten times more efficient on land, energy, and water, according to the book Clean Meat. Wait until they accidentally create Super Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.

jasonlaramburu 7y ago

The author seems to assume that deserts are lifeless places, which is incorrect. Converting billions of acres of desert to a monocrop forest would kill the billions of plants and animals which have become adapted to that environment, which could also negate the emissions reductions. Monocrops are also ecologically unstable and easily destroyed by disease.

llebttam 7y ago
FWIW, I don't think he's creating a monocrop forest -- he's planting a range of species that form an interdependent web. This is also being done in locations that were forests a few hundred years ago before humans cut them down. The mature forest is a self-sustaining ecosystem, but it needs extra water for a few decades until it reaches that point. https://www.westhawaiitoday.com/2020/01/12/hawaii-news/yishan-wong-has-an-ambitious-idea-for-fighting-climate-change-plant-more-trees/ https://www.westhawaiitoday.com/2020/01/12/hawaii-news/yisha...

awb 7y ago

> Thus, to reforest 3 billion acres at current prices will cost the world an investment of $3 trillion/year for 20 years. That sounds like a lot, but the world GDP of 2017 was $80 trillion. Therefore, this plan would require an investment of a little less than 4% of world GDP every year for 20 years. $3T each year (4% of world GDP) for 20 years still sounds like a lot.

llebttam 7y ago
Yeah, it's definitely a lot. I think the actual costs will be a lot lower as this will take many years of experimentation before scaling, and by then the cost of the solar panels (which I think is the vast majority of the cost) will likely have continued to ride its exponential downward cost curve. One source: https://earthtechling.com/solar-energy-costs-trends/ https://earthtechling.com/solar-energy-costs-trends/

eluusive 7y ago

People keep talking about how we have no way of removing Co2 from the atmosphere. There are lots of options, and some of them are quite inexpensive. https://projectvesta.org/ https://projectvesta.org/

acvny 7y ago

Although forests have many more other benefits like animal habitat, soil creation, local climate change, cloud generation, ..., a simpler, quicker and cheaper solution would be to invent artificial photosynthesizers (using solar light) or electrosynthesizers (using electricity) - huge installations that would absorb air like big vacuum cleaners, capture the CO2 and decompose the molecule into Carbon products. For example by employing such processes as Reduction of CO2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrochemical_reduction_of_carbon_dioxide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrochemical_reduction_of_c... The only thing that's needed is to incentivize such research. Let's say creating a global fund of 20-30 Billion dollars and encouraging researchers to apply for grants from this fund. Next step after basic research is done and something feasible invented would be to commercialize the solutions. However again here we would need incentives. It is really hard to implement the idea without commercial interest. What would be a good incentive for this? Well, the captured carbon could be sold... Any other ideas?

rfdave 7y ago
Option 1 - Plant trees that have been growing for millennia, with skills that are wide spread across all of humanity Option 2 - Invent technology that is currently unknown, scale it to a world wide scale, facing unknown challenges and problems with technology that is today completely unknown. Hmmmmm
- yishan 7y ago
  I agree and would say the same thing, but slightly less dismissively. :) The key here is that we're out of time. This coming decade is probably the last one we will have where the problem can be solved at a cost less than 10% of world GDP. If we wait another 10 years, I suspect all solutions will require a significant fraction of global GDP and authoritarian-style interventions. As a technologist, I'd love a magical new technology. But I'm also an engineer, and I want to execute the most efficient and low-risk solution in the smallest possible timeframe. After taking all factors into account, that's massive reforestation. If new technologies are developed in the meantime, that's GOOD. Every bit of help that's put into play helps us. It's not a competition, it's a collective race against time, and we can all contribute.

Myrmornis 7y ago

I hope that all reforestation programs in the future will use local native species and will not use fast-growing non-natives such as Eucalyptus. The "woodland" around, for example Berkeley California, is so depressing to contemplate due to the dominance of Eucalyptus and the corresponding lack of fauna.

m0zg 7y ago

And then all those trees dry out because waterbed can't carry this many, and they catch fire. See California, nearly every year. It's a 100% natural process for them to dry out and catch fire from time to time. It's just not very conducive to permanent carbon capture. The proposed solution (irrigation) is the most pie-in-the-sky part of the plan. It's "solar energy, ???, profit" basically. I like the scalability aspects of this. I don't think we have a technical solution that is as scalable as a biological one. I do think that simply "planting trees" is not going to do the trick though.