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Stopping and even reversing deforestation is the single most efficient form of CO2 reduction/capture we have available. Deforestation rivals fossil fossil fuel

Stopping and even reversing deforestation is the single most efficient form of CO2 reduction/capture we have available. Deforestation rivals fossil fossil fuels for greenhouse gas emissions (up to 30% of anthropic emissions) yet it rarely gets talked about. Could it be because there is no money to be made in halting deforestation? https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/deforestation-and-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/deforestation-and-greenhous... https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo671 https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo671 On the fossil fuel side what we need is a large scale industrial use of CO2 that is not hopelessly energy inefficient. If such a breakthrough happens we could build gas turbine farms at gas fields and pipe the CO2 to industrial centers. Modern gas turbines are the most efficient form of electricity generation. The emissions consist almost entirely of H2O and CO2, some collateral NO2, and trace amounts of other stuff from combusted impurities.

api 6y ago
There's not much money to be made in fossil fuel phase out either... some, but overall it is a cost. Halting deforestation and reforesting aggressively would be a lot cheaper at the macroeconomic level.
- beervirus 6y ago
  Green energy is big business. There isn’t really a corresponding industry that would profit from halting/reversing deforestation.
- MiroF 6y ago
  > overall it is a cost What does this mean? Seems like it is a cost from some perspectives and a positive from other perspectives. From the perspective of green businesses, likely a positive. From the perspective of society, removing the negative externality is likely a positive. The only cost it imposes is on those who were previously externalizing their costs on to society.
topher515 6y ago
My understanding is that reforestation, while being wonderful and helpful, simply doesn’t address the scale of the problem. All forests today contain ~200 gigatons of carbon. Humans release ~25 gigatons of carbon per year. So DOUBLING the size of forests on Earth would just absorb 8 years of greenhouse gas emissions. This made no intuitive sense to me until I began to think of the fossil fuels we’ve got underground as representing millions of years of forests “compressed” into oil / gas.
- jackfoxy 6y ago
  > Humans release ~25 gigatons of carbon per year ~30% of which is from ongoing deforestation, unless the quoted ~25 gigatons is from fossil fuels only?
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    There are 200 gigatons of forest in the world. We net 8 gigatons each year. So in 25 years we will have no forest if all this is true. That conclusion is absurd.
    - eanzenberg 6y ago
      These models are about as good as the covid ones!
      - renewiltord 6y ago
        Yeah, just through sheer arithmetic not all the parent comments can be right.
  - mrosett 6y ago
    My understanding is that we’ve been net reforesting worldwide for the last few decades.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
Someone 6y ago
Generalizing/ignoring details/bluntly, the people using the fossil fuels are rich and do it to buy more stuff/go on holidays more often. The people doing the deforestation are poor and do it to survive (sometimes in order to make stuff for the rich) It doesn’t help telling poor people to stop deforestation, because they have no choice. The way to get there is by having the rich consume less.
- claudeganon 6y ago
  ...or the rich people could just pay the poor people so they don’t have to engage in deforestation? That money could be invested into other sectors of their economy, raising the overall standard of living?
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    That sounds like a solution that would slow deforestation and increase fossil fuel consumption. It also sounds a bit like having your cake and eating it too; the relative poverty of the people doing the deforestation enables the wealth of the people overconsuming. Maybe resources should be heavily transferred from the rich to the poor, removing the ability of the rich to overconsume, and enabling the former poor to stop deforesting while living as efficiently as possible (although their carbon output would probably net go up.) Maybe our economies could focus on delivering the most comfort and security at the highest energy efficiency, rather than on tricking the wealthy into throwing things away as quickly as possible after purchase and on maximizing the burning of gasoline and jet fuel.
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    Ideally yes but jn practice unfortunately it often is effectively pocketted by corrupt local government officals while trees are poached by the poor people. Tourism gets shit on for its travel miles but a nature tourist economy gives incentives to keep it clean and provides some local jobs even if they aren't the best ones.
  - dwiel 6y ago
    How about a carbon tax which once collected is redistributed evenly amongst everyone. This way people who use the most carbon will be paying the people who use the least carbon for the priviledge. It also prices in the externality through the entire market so every individual doesnt need to keep track of the co2 use of every product and service they purchase which is extremely difficult.
semi-extrinsic 6y ago
> what we need is a large scale industrial use of CO2 that is not hopelessly energy inefficient Unfortunately this is somewhere between hopelessly improbable and impossible, for two reasons: First, our CO2 storage needs are in the tens of gigatonnes per year. At the highest practical storage density of pure CO2, one gigatonne is about 10^9 cubic meters - 400 times the volume of the Hoover Dam. There are simply no existing human product streams that are within even a couple orders of magnitude of being able to absorb that. Second, CO2 is a waste product. Turning it into any other useful product will demand not just the energy gained from burning the fuel, but quite a bit more due to thermodynamic inefficiency. There absolutely ain't no free lunch with regards to CO2 capture. It's perfectly doable but it's a pure cost that should just be government regulated everywhere ASAP.
- zoomablemind 6y ago
  > ...CO2 is a waste product. If we could turn it to become a resource, perhaps it will be consumed out, just like the rest of resources we humans discover. One possibility maybe applying photosynthesis, if we knew how to do it in a practical manner. We know that plants can do it, we know generally how they do it, but still can't replicate it. With photosynthesis, the CO2 ends up in some form of sugar among other things. Where the hydrogen comes from water, and we want that hydrogen for energy. Of course, as with anything done by humans, there's a danger of abuse. In such case, we could 'overharvest' the CO2 such that it could starve the plants, leading to oxygen shortage... And that's another doomsday scenario. All in all, the problems point at the humans, so far Earth tolerates us.
  - semi-extrinsic 6y ago
    The O2 content of the atmosphere is 21%. The CO2 content is 0.04%. If you removed 0.04 percentage points of the O2 from the atmosphere, nobody and nothing would bat an eye. And photosynthesis, as well as any other capture process from air, has negative feedback. If CO2 content (technically, CO2 partial pressure) goes down, the efficiency of the capture process goes down faster.
    - 6y ago
unchocked 6y ago
The problem is that it doesn't address the root cause. Broadly speaking, there's two places carbon can be: in the biosphere or locked up geologically. Our fossil fuel emissions - by definition - came from geological deposits. We need to put them back into geological formations, otherwise when the trees we've planted die their carbon will just go back into the atmosphere.
- hansvm 6y ago
  Putting aside any quips about how our oil fields used to be part of the biosphere, I do think the current view is that forests are net carbon sinks, even accounting for decomposition. Regardless, the time scale for growing and decomposing a forest is enormous and would buy a lot of flexibility in solving the problem more permanently if additional research shows them to not be efficient sinks long-term.
- fiblye 6y ago
  I hear this a lot, but does every bit of that really just go up into the air? Don’t trees often break down and become soil, and new trees grow on top of them?
- mNovak 6y ago
  Clearly dead trees have some carbon storage capacity, otherwise there would be no fossil fuels in the first place.
  - hnick 6y ago
    The research I've seen in popular media says a lot of the carbon from old trees comes from an era before microbes could digest them - so dead trees just piled up for a long time and got buried. That doesn't happen anymore. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2016/01/07/the-fantastically-strange-origin-of-most-coal-on-earth/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2016/01... "Ward and Kirschvink say that 90 percent—yup, 90 percent!—of the coal we burn today (and the coal dust we see flying about Beijing and New Delhi) comes from that single geological period, the Carboniferous period."
quotemstr 6y ago
> Stopping and even reversing deforestation is the single most efficient form of CO2 reduction/capture we have available. No it isn't. Reforestation might be the most aesthetically and ideologically pleasing option, but it's not the most physically effective one. Trees get you $25-$50/ton-CO2 removal costs; accelerated weathering gets you around $8/ton-CO2 [2]. Iron enrichment of the ocean can get you down to around $1/ton-CO2 removed. Focusing on pretty solutions in harmony with nature will lead us down the wrong path. Every great thing mankind has done has been the result of science, technology, and industry. We don't fly around the world by stupidly copying birds, and we won't get control of the climate by sowing plants. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0485-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0485-x [2] https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/22/1004218/how-green-sand-could-capture-billions-of-tons-of-carbon-dioxide/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/22/1004218/how-gree... [3] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/300/5616/67.full?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=Buesseler&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT&__cf_chl_jschl_tk__=8aa9081f2dd212f5bb8bdaae73561ce0662dc41f-1595789593-0-ATvAYTGEsnb5WKpZdvOr1UQu5Hic4loL0Fm2mj4CBEo3lcQ4uhN_KO9CjOlnMBmKI3QP5Bwr1dU_xjn4CuKfMPxCTzkusRvrEFmg9jdM_dXKSHZMPRgcQBsAgmIk2KRpHz2ygCWK1yn1yp8COyfintM1osG8xc7ICoal-csp5Ea23D7kCTVQfP32dm8cF6LJ-Id3uvMIW7QoLMJgTex5a5NhSkMeHcYqB_jC9sKO-tT-DWWwC-xmOshMy_KAs7ton5VPCs6DhNwXcahZeSJ_HeLif3p_BjO93qi3GADVyiQ6xLNlOYL2Vopi0BJbJhHmwcaL79GBNYE1domvEEomwly_T23hOs4y-9c5MDGlTafmYOvkjXJgXfqeHb-po0u1IgWZwbhR4S-hfaRm4xPmlRqZoBM2qBlxIAXHFji6O3JjKmuQvL6VdR7oU6UDOMAk4A https://science.sciencemag.org/content/300/5616/67.full?maxt...
- drewm1980 6y ago
  Cheeky human! Human technology is not great, it is childish and destructive. I say this as a fellow technologist dedicated to improving it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_tern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_tern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_swift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_swift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frigatebird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frigatebird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoiadendron_giganteum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoiadendron_giganteum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinus_longaeva https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinus_longaeva That 5k year old tree wants us to get out of the way and let the adults clean up the mess before everything dies.
vbezhenar 6y ago
Do you have any numbers? How many square kilometers of forests should we grow to compensate for all CO₂ emissions? Here's some hypothetical numbers. Correct me, if they are way off. 1 tree = 0.5 m³ of wood = 250 kg of CO₂. 1 ha = 10 000 m² = 500 trees = 125000 kg of CO₂. Humanity CO₂ emissions at 2018 year are 33 100 000 000 000 kg. So you would need 264.8 millions of hectares (2.6 millions of km²) of forests to compensate for those emissions. There are 38 millions of km² of forests on Earth right now. So even if we would double our forests (and that would be a truly tremendous task), that would buy us 14 more years of emissions (and that would not get back all the produced CO₂, by far). It's not even clear if we would be able to keep CO₂ emissions not increasing in the future. And there are only so much of land to plant forests. I have more trust in some kind of phytoplankton. Oceans are vast. Those organisms can capture CO₂. Some of them will be eaten and some of them will die and submerge to depths where they'll keep that carbon forever. If they won't work well enough, future bio-engineering might fix that.
jvanderbot 6y ago
Go here: https://www.drawdown.org/solutions https://www.drawdown.org/solutions Top are: 1. Reduced Food Waste Food, Agriculture, and Land Use / Land Sinks 87.45 94.56 2. Health and Education Health and Education 85.42 85.42 3. Plant-Rich Diets Food, Agriculture, and Land Use / Land Sinks 65.01 91.72 4. Refrigerant Management Industry / Buildings 57.75 57.75 5. Tropical Forest Restoration Land Sinks 54.45 85.14 The book / website consistently points out that the best reduction / capture mechanisms are related to food and industry first. Though being top 5 is no joke.

api 6y ago

There's not much money to be made in fossil fuel phase out either... some, but overall it is a cost. Halting deforestation and reforesting aggressively would be a lot cheaper at the macroeconomic level.

beervirus 6y ago
Green energy is big business. There isn’t really a corresponding industry that would profit from halting/reversing deforestation.
MiroF 6y ago
> overall it is a cost What does this mean? Seems like it is a cost from some perspectives and a positive from other perspectives. From the perspective of green businesses, likely a positive. From the perspective of society, removing the negative externality is likely a positive. The only cost it imposes is on those who were previously externalizing their costs on to society.

topher515 6y ago

My understanding is that reforestation, while being wonderful and helpful, simply doesn’t address the scale of the problem. All forests today contain ~200 gigatons of carbon. Humans release ~25 gigatons of carbon per year. So DOUBLING the size of forests on Earth would just absorb 8 years of greenhouse gas emissions. This made no intuitive sense to me until I began to think of the fossil fuels we’ve got underground as representing millions of years of forests “compressed” into oil / gas.

jackfoxy 6y ago
> Humans release ~25 gigatons of carbon per year ~30% of which is from ongoing deforestation, unless the quoted ~25 gigatons is from fossil fuels only?
- renewiltord 6y ago
  There are 200 gigatons of forest in the world. We net 8 gigatons each year. So in 25 years we will have no forest if all this is true. That conclusion is absurd.
  - eanzenberg 6y ago
    These models are about as good as the covid ones!
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      Yeah, just through sheer arithmetic not all the parent comments can be right.
- mrosett 6y ago
  My understanding is that we’ve been net reforesting worldwide for the last few decades.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

Someone 6y ago

Generalizing/ignoring details/bluntly, the people using the fossil fuels are rich and do it to buy more stuff/go on holidays more often. The people doing the deforestation are poor and do it to survive (sometimes in order to make stuff for the rich) It doesn’t help telling poor people to stop deforestation, because they have no choice. The way to get there is by having the rich consume less.

claudeganon 6y ago
...or the rich people could just pay the poor people so they don’t have to engage in deforestation? That money could be invested into other sectors of their economy, raising the overall standard of living?
- pessimizer 6y ago
  That sounds like a solution that would slow deforestation and increase fossil fuel consumption. It also sounds a bit like having your cake and eating it too; the relative poverty of the people doing the deforestation enables the wealth of the people overconsuming. Maybe resources should be heavily transferred from the rich to the poor, removing the ability of the rich to overconsume, and enabling the former poor to stop deforesting while living as efficiently as possible (although their carbon output would probably net go up.) Maybe our economies could focus on delivering the most comfort and security at the highest energy efficiency, rather than on tricking the wealthy into throwing things away as quickly as possible after purchase and on maximizing the burning of gasoline and jet fuel.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Ideally yes but jn practice unfortunately it often is effectively pocketted by corrupt local government officals while trees are poached by the poor people. Tourism gets shit on for its travel miles but a nature tourist economy gives incentives to keep it clean and provides some local jobs even if they aren't the best ones.
- dwiel 6y ago
  How about a carbon tax which once collected is redistributed evenly amongst everyone. This way people who use the most carbon will be paying the people who use the least carbon for the priviledge. It also prices in the externality through the entire market so every individual doesnt need to keep track of the co2 use of every product and service they purchase which is extremely difficult.

semi-extrinsic 6y ago

> what we need is a large scale industrial use of CO2 that is not hopelessly energy inefficient Unfortunately this is somewhere between hopelessly improbable and impossible, for two reasons: First, our CO2 storage needs are in the tens of gigatonnes per year. At the highest practical storage density of pure CO2, one gigatonne is about 10^9 cubic meters - 400 times the volume of the Hoover Dam. There are simply no existing human product streams that are within even a couple orders of magnitude of being able to absorb that. Second, CO2 is a waste product. Turning it into any other useful product will demand not just the energy gained from burning the fuel, but quite a bit more due to thermodynamic inefficiency. There absolutely ain't no free lunch with regards to CO2 capture. It's perfectly doable but it's a pure cost that should just be government regulated everywhere ASAP.

zoomablemind 6y ago
> ...CO2 is a waste product. If we could turn it to become a resource, perhaps it will be consumed out, just like the rest of resources we humans discover. One possibility maybe applying photosynthesis, if we knew how to do it in a practical manner. We know that plants can do it, we know generally how they do it, but still can't replicate it. With photosynthesis, the CO2 ends up in some form of sugar among other things. Where the hydrogen comes from water, and we want that hydrogen for energy. Of course, as with anything done by humans, there's a danger of abuse. In such case, we could 'overharvest' the CO2 such that it could starve the plants, leading to oxygen shortage... And that's another doomsday scenario. All in all, the problems point at the humans, so far Earth tolerates us.
- semi-extrinsic 6y ago
  The O2 content of the atmosphere is 21%. The CO2 content is 0.04%. If you removed 0.04 percentage points of the O2 from the atmosphere, nobody and nothing would bat an eye. And photosynthesis, as well as any other capture process from air, has negative feedback. If CO2 content (technically, CO2 partial pressure) goes down, the efficiency of the capture process goes down faster.
  - 6y ago

unchocked 6y ago

The problem is that it doesn't address the root cause. Broadly speaking, there's two places carbon can be: in the biosphere or locked up geologically. Our fossil fuel emissions - by definition - came from geological deposits. We need to put them back into geological formations, otherwise when the trees we've planted die their carbon will just go back into the atmosphere.

hansvm 6y ago
Putting aside any quips about how our oil fields used to be part of the biosphere, I do think the current view is that forests are net carbon sinks, even accounting for decomposition. Regardless, the time scale for growing and decomposing a forest is enormous and would buy a lot of flexibility in solving the problem more permanently if additional research shows them to not be efficient sinks long-term.
fiblye 6y ago
I hear this a lot, but does every bit of that really just go up into the air? Don’t trees often break down and become soil, and new trees grow on top of them?
mNovak 6y ago
Clearly dead trees have some carbon storage capacity, otherwise there would be no fossil fuels in the first place.
- hnick 6y ago
  The research I've seen in popular media says a lot of the carbon from old trees comes from an era before microbes could digest them - so dead trees just piled up for a long time and got buried. That doesn't happen anymore. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2016/01/07/the-fantastically-strange-origin-of-most-coal-on-earth/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2016/01... "Ward and Kirschvink say that 90 percent—yup, 90 percent!—of the coal we burn today (and the coal dust we see flying about Beijing and New Delhi) comes from that single geological period, the Carboniferous period."

quotemstr 6y ago

> Stopping and even reversing deforestation is the single most efficient form of CO2 reduction/capture we have available. No it isn't. Reforestation might be the most aesthetically and ideologically pleasing option, but it's not the most physically effective one. Trees get you $25-$50/ton-CO2 removal costs; accelerated weathering gets you around $8/ton-CO2 [2]. Iron enrichment of the ocean can get you down to around $1/ton-CO2 removed. Focusing on pretty solutions in harmony with nature will lead us down the wrong path. Every great thing mankind has done has been the result of science, technology, and industry. We don't fly around the world by stupidly copying birds, and we won't get control of the climate by sowing plants. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0485-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0485-x [2] https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/22/1004218/how-green-sand-could-capture-billions-of-tons-of-carbon-dioxide/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/22/1004218/how-gree... [3] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/300/5616/67.full?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=Buesseler&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT&__cf_chl_jschl_tk__=8aa9081f2dd212f5bb8bdaae73561ce0662dc41f-1595789593-0-ATvAYTGEsnb5WKpZdvOr1UQu5Hic4loL0Fm2mj4CBEo3lcQ4uhN_KO9CjOlnMBmKI3QP5Bwr1dU_xjn4CuKfMPxCTzkusRvrEFmg9jdM_dXKSHZMPRgcQBsAgmIk2KRpHz2ygCWK1yn1yp8COyfintM1osG8xc7ICoal-csp5Ea23D7kCTVQfP32dm8cF6LJ-Id3uvMIW7QoLMJgTex5a5NhSkMeHcYqB_jC9sKO-tT-DWWwC-xmOshMy_KAs7ton5VPCs6DhNwXcahZeSJ_HeLif3p_BjO93qi3GADVyiQ6xLNlOYL2Vopi0BJbJhHmwcaL79GBNYE1domvEEomwly_T23hOs4y-9c5MDGlTafmYOvkjXJgXfqeHb-po0u1IgWZwbhR4S-hfaRm4xPmlRqZoBM2qBlxIAXHFji6O3JjKmuQvL6VdR7oU6UDOMAk4A https://science.sciencemag.org/content/300/5616/67.full?maxt...

drewm1980 6y ago
Cheeky human! Human technology is not great, it is childish and destructive. I say this as a fellow technologist dedicated to improving it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_tern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_tern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_swift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_swift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frigatebird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frigatebird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoiadendron_giganteum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoiadendron_giganteum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinus_longaeva https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinus_longaeva That 5k year old tree wants us to get out of the way and let the adults clean up the mess before everything dies.

vbezhenar 6y ago

Do you have any numbers? How many square kilometers of forests should we grow to compensate for all CO₂ emissions? Here's some hypothetical numbers. Correct me, if they are way off. 1 tree = 0.5 m³ of wood = 250 kg of CO₂. 1 ha = 10 000 m² = 500 trees = 125000 kg of CO₂. Humanity CO₂ emissions at 2018 year are 33 100 000 000 000 kg. So you would need 264.8 millions of hectares (2.6 millions of km²) of forests to compensate for those emissions. There are 38 millions of km² of forests on Earth right now. So even if we would double our forests (and that would be a truly tremendous task), that would buy us 14 more years of emissions (and that would not get back all the produced CO₂, by far). It's not even clear if we would be able to keep CO₂ emissions not increasing in the future. And there are only so much of land to plant forests. I have more trust in some kind of phytoplankton. Oceans are vast. Those organisms can capture CO₂. Some of them will be eaten and some of them will die and submerge to depths where they'll keep that carbon forever. If they won't work well enough, future bio-engineering might fix that.

jvanderbot 6y ago

Go here: https://www.drawdown.org/solutions https://www.drawdown.org/solutions Top are: 1. Reduced Food Waste Food, Agriculture, and Land Use / Land Sinks 87.45 94.56 2. Health and Education Health and Education 85.42 85.42 3. Plant-Rich Diets Food, Agriculture, and Land Use / Land Sinks 65.01 91.72 4. Refrigerant Management Industry / Buildings 57.75 57.75 5. Tropical Forest Restoration Land Sinks 54.45 85.14 The book / website consistently points out that the best reduction / capture mechanisms are related to food and industry first. Though being top 5 is no joke.