5 ms·

Before I sign up for this feel good thing, does anyone know whether it makes any meaningful difference/is enough to make any kind of impact? From looking at CO2

Before I sign up for this feel good thing, does anyone know whether it makes any meaningful difference/is enough to make any kind of impact? From looking at CO2 levels, we will be reaching 1000 ug/m^3 in my lifetime (threshold for headaches and other health problems). At 2000 it becomes a serious health hazard. Would money be better spent lobbying for abolishing coal burning power plants and making agriculture more carbon friendly (from what I gather, the biggest contributors to atmospheric CO2)?

protontypes 6y ago
Avoiding greenhouse gases from the outset is certainly the better alternative. However, it is unavoidable that we will continue to emit massive amounts of greenhouse gases for the next few years. Reforestation is the simplest and most cost-effective "carbon capture technology". At the same time, this restores lost habitat and thus averts another catastrophe: The loss of biodiversity.
lstodd 6y ago
No. It's just lining up the pockets of some shady "reforestation" orgs that has zero to do with actual reforestation except maybe the name. Plant and ocean response to rising CO2 is unknown at this time. The only mostly certain thing is that it is highly non-linear. Any world-ending projections of CO2 content in thousands of ppm are wild guesses and scaremongering.
dangoor 6y ago
I recently listened to the audiobook of How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates. It was a fine tour of the landscape of solutions. My main takeaway is that we're going to need to do a wide variety of things in a wide variety of sectors. He gets into stuff like concrete, which is very important in growth but also big on emissions. With respect to reforestation: Gates says it would help, but possibly not as much as you'd think and he's a bigger proponent of stopping the deforestation. Yishan Wong thinks that growing forests (as opposed to just planting trees) is an important tool for carbon sequestration: https://www.terraformation.com/about https://www.terraformation.com/about
- DigitalHumani 6y ago
  Hi, Jonathan here, founder of the RaaS (Reforestation as a Service) at DigitalHumani.com I totally agree that we need to do a wide variety of things. Stopping deforestation, reforestation, less meat, electric cars, etc. We need to do it all.
sooheon 6y ago
> From looking at CO2 levels, we will be reaching 1000 ug/m^3 in my lifetime How did you arrive at this number? climate.gov article from last year estimates 900ppm by the end of the century if energy demand continues to increase at same rate and it is all met by fossil fuels. https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  900ppm by volume is about 1000micrograms per cubic meter. The density of air at sea level is 1.2 kilograms/m^3.
Robotbeat 6y ago
I think there’s been some misleading discussion of agriculture’s contributions to global emission. For a while, agriculture was ignored, but now that has been over-compensated for, and many people have the mistaken impression it’s most of the problem. Agriculture and forestry is still just 18.2% of emissions. Energy is still 73.2%. If you want to change the course of emissions, you need to change Energy. Luckily, we have the technology and understanding to decarbonize all energy. (The challenge is just to do it quickly and cost-effectively.) You’re right about coal being the biggest emitter for energy. But... Energy is not just coal but oil and natural gas. https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/09/Emissions-by-sector-%E2%80%93-pie-charts.png https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/09/Emissions-by-sect... https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector Oil is nearly as big of an emitter as coal, and gas plus oil is now bigger than coal itself. https://ourworldindata.org/exports/CO2-by-source_v16_850x600.svg https://ourworldindata.org/exports/CO2-by-source_v16_850x600... Based on that data, oil is a much higher emitter than agriculture and gas emissions are about the same as agriculture emissions (but will soon be higher). So as of 2021 it’s likely primarily coal and then oil that are the biggest emitter, followed by gas and then agriculture.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  > Oil is nearly as big of an emitter as coal, and gas plus oil is now bigger than coal itself. That's correct and everything, but I do think that for a while the best strategy is to focus on coal. Yeah, some electrifying of transportation won't harm either, but the largest short term gains and the largest long term opportunities all start on replacing coal. If replacing coal leads to lots of peaking natgas plants, so be it. It is still a gain on the short term, and it creates clear target for storage on the long term.
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    Yup, absolutely true. And I think people underestimate how good electric cars are. They have about half the emissions of conventional cars even if all their electricity comes from gas (but about 40% of electricity in the US is carbonfree—about half nuclear and the rest wind, hydro, solar, and geothermal). Each new conventional car sold is a locked-in 100 tons of CO2 (lower if we we crush them sooner). Electric cars are much smaller (half to start with), and depending on how fast we transition the electric grid could be only like 10-25 tons and then next to nothing (as even manufacture becomes decarbonized).
NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
Things are so dire that even if we use all "guns" in our disposal it will be difficult. There is no single solutions that can help, amount of CO2 is so huge that if we would turn CO2 we need to sequester into graphite bricks we could build a wall 10 meters high and 5 meters wide encircling the Earth around Equator 32 times. So, we need all we can think at same time, now. :/ Simply, current amount of carbon in the atmosphere has been released from sources that were not there, and we are still cutting trees more than we plant. Some calculation say we need between 1-2 trillion trees. But even then trees need a quite some time to grow and become effective.
- hedora 6y ago
  Also, the carbon those trees sequester needs to be somehow captured permanently. I imagine a solution where people grow stands of fast growing trees, clear cut every $optimal years, use (magic?) chemistry to separate the harvest into carbon and not carbon, then dump the not carbon back onto the soil, and replant. Even with that, I’m not convinced there are enough acres of land on earth. I haven’t seen anyone do the math, and suspect direct carbon capture plants and olivine reactions will scale better.
  - Panino 6y ago
    You'll be happy to know that what you describe exists and it has a name: pyrolysis. Pyrolysis is the thermal anaerobic decomposition of biomass. Basically, you heat up organic material without oxygen at temperatures attainable from a relatively small fire. During this process, volatiles such as hydrogen and oxygen separate from the carbon in the biomass feedstock (dry untreated wood, bones, old cotton tshirts, whatever) and get released as syngas, leaving more or less pure fixed carbon that is very stable, safely sequestered in soil for thousands of years. The resulting carbon, called biochar, can be co-composted to prepare it for use in soil, where it protects the soil from drought and flood alike. Plants grown in soil with higher carbon content are bigger and healthier, and these soils can produce more of whatever you're growing. I make biochar at home but there are companies that do it on an industrial scale. Humanity has been pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at an epic scale for decades. In addition to going carbon neutral with more wind, solar and nuclear, we need to draw CO2 back out of the atmosphere on an epic scale. And biochar resulting from pyrolysis is one of the major tools since it has synergistic effects with other tools, like mass tree plantings. Biochar production can also offset other energy uses, for example by either directly burning the syngas on-site for heating purposes, or for capturing it and using it later as a fuel in an application that would otherwise use fossil fuel.
NoOneNew 6y ago
TLDR, you're right. Here's the math to prove it. I did some research into this a few years ago. Here's what I remember. Most of it is easy to search for to verify, just slightly time consuming. Broad brush strokes here to get you started. Your average "big" tree (oak, pine, maple) will absorb about 10-20 pounds of CO2 every year once it's about 10 years old, on average. Lots of variables obviously. From what I saw, and there's debate, but the rate of CO2 absorption doesn't seem to speed up as much as we'd expect as they get older. I don't know how true that is, but at the same time, I could never find hard numbers to disagree. I have to work with what I got. According to the US Forestry, per acre, you can have 100 really big trees or 500 really small trees. The problem with higher density is the increased wildfire hazard. It was something like 150-250 trees is the most they like to manage an area. This allows enough space to slow fires and ability to easily clean debris (if it's a managed forest) to choke out the fire. For this, let's say we want 150 big trees per acre and on the best case scenario, once these trees are 10 years old, they're sucking up 20 pounds of CO2. That's about 3,000 pounds of CO2 being absorbed from the air with the hopes and prayers that a wide fire doesn't come through and undo that work. Back in the day, I did this to figure out how bad Bitcoin was to the environment. Let's do Ethereum since NFTs are so hot right now: https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption. Every Ethereum transaction puts out roughly 29 kgCO2 (63lbs). That's an energy usage that truly never has to happen, but does out of vanity for the idea of saving the world from the 1% so it can create a different, new set of 1%ers. I'll get off my soap box now. That's 3, 10 year old trees needed to be carbon neutral for the average Ethereum transaction. Bitcoin is far worse, 367kg(800 pounds) per transaction. That's 40 trees needed per bitcoin transaction for carbon neutral. According to https://bitinfocharts.com/ethereum/ https://bitinfocharts.com/ethereum/, there were 49,000 Ethereum transactions yesterday, 250,000 for bitcoin (same site). So that's 147,000 trees or 980 acres of 10 year old trees needed to be planted every day to offset Ethereum. 66,666 acres, per day, to offset Bitcoin. Hopefully a wildfire doesn't come by and fuck up everything. Forcing you to replant to catch up on an amount of space that's incredibly unrealistic. Not to mention the CO2 of the logistics to move that many personnel around to plant that many trees. Moral of the story, you're right. The impact of planting a handful of trees is shit. And don't get me wrong, I think we should be planting trees and trying to bring back forests. Rehabilitate destroyed and distressed ecosystems is a fantastic idea. But let's not suck each other's dicks that we're going to save the planet with YET ANOTHER PIECE OF DIGITAL TECH that is "going to solve the world's problems". Go buy a fucking tree, some seeds and a shovel. Get off the computer and go get your hands dirty. Anyways, it's far better to just cut the bullshit out of the planet instead. I just focused on the 2 largest cryptocoins. They're a drop in the bucket compared to everything else, coal, gas, etc. Cutting the CO2 producers will do more than you can realistically replant.
ubuwaits 6y ago
Bill Gates wrote about the impact of planting trees recently: > It sounds like a simple fix and it has obvious appeal for all of us who love trees, but its impact on climate change is overblown. Although trees absorb some carbon, they can never take in enough to offset the damage from our modern lifestyle. To absorb the lifetime emissions that will be produced by every American alive today — just 4 per cent of the global population — you’d need to plant and permanently maintain trees on more than 16bn acres, roughly half the landmass of the world. From: https://www.ft.com/content/c11bb885-1274-4677-ba05-fcbac67dc808 https://www.ft.com/content/c11bb885-1274-4677-ba05-fcbac67dc...
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  Well fuck. Anyone know of a lobby as a service project?
  - sterlind 6y ago
    Any APIs hosted by major cloud providers are LaaS, if you think about it.
    - darkerside 6y ago
      Thought about it, still not getting it. I like the idea.
  - therealdrag0 6y ago
    The Coalition for Rainforest Nations might be good. This is recommended by this report: https://founderspledge.com/research/fp-climate-change https://founderspledge.com/research/fp-climate-change
- atleta 6y ago
  Sounds logical. We're burning fossils of past creatures that have lived over a period of hundreds of millions of years on the surface of the Earth.
- adflux 6y ago
hyko 6y ago
in my lifetime How long are you expecting to live? Just wondering as we’re not really expected to breach 950ppm by 2100: https://skepticalscience.com/rcp.php?t=3#concentrations https://skepticalscience.com/rcp.php?t=3#concentrations Edited to add: ignore me, looking at ppm and not ug/m^3

protontypes 6y ago

Avoiding greenhouse gases from the outset is certainly the better alternative. However, it is unavoidable that we will continue to emit massive amounts of greenhouse gases for the next few years. Reforestation is the simplest and most cost-effective "carbon capture technology". At the same time, this restores lost habitat and thus averts another catastrophe: The loss of biodiversity.

lstodd 6y ago

No. It's just lining up the pockets of some shady "reforestation" orgs that has zero to do with actual reforestation except maybe the name. Plant and ocean response to rising CO2 is unknown at this time. The only mostly certain thing is that it is highly non-linear. Any world-ending projections of CO2 content in thousands of ppm are wild guesses and scaremongering.

dangoor 6y ago

I recently listened to the audiobook of How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates. It was a fine tour of the landscape of solutions. My main takeaway is that we're going to need to do a wide variety of things in a wide variety of sectors. He gets into stuff like concrete, which is very important in growth but also big on emissions. With respect to reforestation: Gates says it would help, but possibly not as much as you'd think and he's a bigger proponent of stopping the deforestation. Yishan Wong thinks that growing forests (as opposed to just planting trees) is an important tool for carbon sequestration: https://www.terraformation.com/about https://www.terraformation.com/about

DigitalHumani 6y ago
Hi, Jonathan here, founder of the RaaS (Reforestation as a Service) at DigitalHumani.com I totally agree that we need to do a wide variety of things. Stopping deforestation, reforestation, less meat, electric cars, etc. We need to do it all.

sooheon 6y ago

> From looking at CO2 levels, we will be reaching 1000 ug/m^3 in my lifetime How did you arrive at this number? climate.gov article from last year estimates 900ppm by the end of the century if energy demand continues to increase at same rate and it is all met by fossil fuels. https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

Robotbeat 6y ago
900ppm by volume is about 1000micrograms per cubic meter. The density of air at sea level is 1.2 kilograms/m^3.

Robotbeat 6y ago

I think there’s been some misleading discussion of agriculture’s contributions to global emission. For a while, agriculture was ignored, but now that has been over-compensated for, and many people have the mistaken impression it’s most of the problem. Agriculture and forestry is still just 18.2% of emissions. Energy is still 73.2%. If you want to change the course of emissions, you need to change Energy. Luckily, we have the technology and understanding to decarbonize all energy. (The challenge is just to do it quickly and cost-effectively.) You’re right about coal being the biggest emitter for energy. But... Energy is not just coal but oil and natural gas. https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/09/Emissions-by-sector-%E2%80%93-pie-charts.png https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/09/Emissions-by-sect... https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector Oil is nearly as big of an emitter as coal, and gas plus oil is now bigger than coal itself. https://ourworldindata.org/exports/CO2-by-source_v16_850x600.svg https://ourworldindata.org/exports/CO2-by-source_v16_850x600... Based on that data, oil is a much higher emitter than agriculture and gas emissions are about the same as agriculture emissions (but will soon be higher). So as of 2021 it’s likely primarily coal and then oil that are the biggest emitter, followed by gas and then agriculture.

marcosdumay 6y ago
> Oil is nearly as big of an emitter as coal, and gas plus oil is now bigger than coal itself. That's correct and everything, but I do think that for a while the best strategy is to focus on coal. Yeah, some electrifying of transportation won't harm either, but the largest short term gains and the largest long term opportunities all start on replacing coal. If replacing coal leads to lots of peaking natgas plants, so be it. It is still a gain on the short term, and it creates clear target for storage on the long term.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  Yup, absolutely true. And I think people underestimate how good electric cars are. They have about half the emissions of conventional cars even if all their electricity comes from gas (but about 40% of electricity in the US is carbonfree—about half nuclear and the rest wind, hydro, solar, and geothermal). Each new conventional car sold is a locked-in 100 tons of CO2 (lower if we we crush them sooner). Electric cars are much smaller (half to start with), and depending on how fast we transition the electric grid could be only like 10-25 tons and then next to nothing (as even manufacture becomes decarbonized).

NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago

Things are so dire that even if we use all "guns" in our disposal it will be difficult. There is no single solutions that can help, amount of CO2 is so huge that if we would turn CO2 we need to sequester into graphite bricks we could build a wall 10 meters high and 5 meters wide encircling the Earth around Equator 32 times. So, we need all we can think at same time, now. :/ Simply, current amount of carbon in the atmosphere has been released from sources that were not there, and we are still cutting trees more than we plant. Some calculation say we need between 1-2 trillion trees. But even then trees need a quite some time to grow and become effective.

hedora 6y ago
Also, the carbon those trees sequester needs to be somehow captured permanently. I imagine a solution where people grow stands of fast growing trees, clear cut every $optimal years, use (magic?) chemistry to separate the harvest into carbon and not carbon, then dump the not carbon back onto the soil, and replant. Even with that, I’m not convinced there are enough acres of land on earth. I haven’t seen anyone do the math, and suspect direct carbon capture plants and olivine reactions will scale better.
- Panino 6y ago
  You'll be happy to know that what you describe exists and it has a name: pyrolysis. Pyrolysis is the thermal anaerobic decomposition of biomass. Basically, you heat up organic material without oxygen at temperatures attainable from a relatively small fire. During this process, volatiles such as hydrogen and oxygen separate from the carbon in the biomass feedstock (dry untreated wood, bones, old cotton tshirts, whatever) and get released as syngas, leaving more or less pure fixed carbon that is very stable, safely sequestered in soil for thousands of years. The resulting carbon, called biochar, can be co-composted to prepare it for use in soil, where it protects the soil from drought and flood alike. Plants grown in soil with higher carbon content are bigger and healthier, and these soils can produce more of whatever you're growing. I make biochar at home but there are companies that do it on an industrial scale. Humanity has been pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at an epic scale for decades. In addition to going carbon neutral with more wind, solar and nuclear, we need to draw CO2 back out of the atmosphere on an epic scale. And biochar resulting from pyrolysis is one of the major tools since it has synergistic effects with other tools, like mass tree plantings. Biochar production can also offset other energy uses, for example by either directly burning the syngas on-site for heating purposes, or for capturing it and using it later as a fuel in an application that would otherwise use fossil fuel.

NoOneNew 6y ago

TLDR, you're right. Here's the math to prove it. I did some research into this a few years ago. Here's what I remember. Most of it is easy to search for to verify, just slightly time consuming. Broad brush strokes here to get you started. Your average "big" tree (oak, pine, maple) will absorb about 10-20 pounds of CO2 every year once it's about 10 years old, on average. Lots of variables obviously. From what I saw, and there's debate, but the rate of CO2 absorption doesn't seem to speed up as much as we'd expect as they get older. I don't know how true that is, but at the same time, I could never find hard numbers to disagree. I have to work with what I got. According to the US Forestry, per acre, you can have 100 really big trees or 500 really small trees. The problem with higher density is the increased wildfire hazard. It was something like 150-250 trees is the most they like to manage an area. This allows enough space to slow fires and ability to easily clean debris (if it's a managed forest) to choke out the fire. For this, let's say we want 150 big trees per acre and on the best case scenario, once these trees are 10 years old, they're sucking up 20 pounds of CO2. That's about 3,000 pounds of CO2 being absorbed from the air with the hopes and prayers that a wide fire doesn't come through and undo that work. Back in the day, I did this to figure out how bad Bitcoin was to the environment. Let's do Ethereum since NFTs are so hot right now: https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption. Every Ethereum transaction puts out roughly 29 kgCO2 (63lbs). That's an energy usage that truly never has to happen, but does out of vanity for the idea of saving the world from the 1% so it can create a different, new set of 1%ers. I'll get off my soap box now. That's 3, 10 year old trees needed to be carbon neutral for the average Ethereum transaction. Bitcoin is far worse, 367kg(800 pounds) per transaction. That's 40 trees needed per bitcoin transaction for carbon neutral. According to https://bitinfocharts.com/ethereum/ https://bitinfocharts.com/ethereum/, there were 49,000 Ethereum transactions yesterday, 250,000 for bitcoin (same site). So that's 147,000 trees or 980 acres of 10 year old trees needed to be planted every day to offset Ethereum. 66,666 acres, per day, to offset Bitcoin. Hopefully a wildfire doesn't come by and fuck up everything. Forcing you to replant to catch up on an amount of space that's incredibly unrealistic. Not to mention the CO2 of the logistics to move that many personnel around to plant that many trees. Moral of the story, you're right. The impact of planting a handful of trees is shit. And don't get me wrong, I think we should be planting trees and trying to bring back forests. Rehabilitate destroyed and distressed ecosystems is a fantastic idea. But let's not suck each other's dicks that we're going to save the planet with YET ANOTHER PIECE OF DIGITAL TECH that is "going to solve the world's problems". Go buy a fucking tree, some seeds and a shovel. Get off the computer and go get your hands dirty. Anyways, it's far better to just cut the bullshit out of the planet instead. I just focused on the 2 largest cryptocoins. They're a drop in the bucket compared to everything else, coal, gas, etc. Cutting the CO2 producers will do more than you can realistically replant.

ubuwaits 6y ago

Bill Gates wrote about the impact of planting trees recently: > It sounds like a simple fix and it has obvious appeal for all of us who love trees, but its impact on climate change is overblown. Although trees absorb some carbon, they can never take in enough to offset the damage from our modern lifestyle. To absorb the lifetime emissions that will be produced by every American alive today — just 4 per cent of the global population — you’d need to plant and permanently maintain trees on more than 16bn acres, roughly half the landmass of the world. From: https://www.ft.com/content/c11bb885-1274-4677-ba05-fcbac67dc808 https://www.ft.com/content/c11bb885-1274-4677-ba05-fcbac67dc...

IgorPartola 6y ago
Well fuck. Anyone know of a lobby as a service project?
- sterlind 6y ago
  Any APIs hosted by major cloud providers are LaaS, if you think about it.
  - darkerside 6y ago
    Thought about it, still not getting it. I like the idea.
- therealdrag0 6y ago
  The Coalition for Rainforest Nations might be good. This is recommended by this report: https://founderspledge.com/research/fp-climate-change https://founderspledge.com/research/fp-climate-change
atleta 6y ago
Sounds logical. We're burning fossils of past creatures that have lived over a period of hundreds of millions of years on the surface of the Earth.
adflux 6y ago

hyko 6y ago

in my lifetime How long are you expecting to live? Just wondering as we’re not really expected to breach 950ppm by 2100: https://skepticalscience.com/rcp.php?t=3#concentrations https://skepticalscience.com/rcp.php?t=3#concentrations Edited to add: ignore me, looking at ppm and not ug/m^3