7 ms·
How is the answer to “carbon removal” not just “turn deserts into plant areas” or “encourage algae blooms” or something? It seems implausible to me that any che
by wyager 5y ago
How is the answer to “carbon removal” not just “turn deserts into plant areas” or “encourage algae blooms” or something? It seems implausible to me that any chemical carbon extraction process has superior externalities to just planting more trees or something.
- krastanov 5y agoI do not have a complete well-sourced answer, but the common argument against your suggestion is that such a carbon sink would work for only a couple of decades until it reaches a steady state, and these couple of decades do not seem to be enough to make a dent. Also, it is difficult to plant trees in a desert. Also, algae blooms are dangerous for other life forms. However, there are some startups working with super-fast-growing (ugly) trees that are then used as construction material, which would be a longer-term-functioning sink. Not very clear whether that scales.
- nostromo 5y agoProductive forests in the US are a carbon sink. The trees grow. We cut them down. We make houses out of them, which are wrapped to prevent deterioration. The sunk carbon becomes our buildings. Other uses of the wood are also usually carbon sinks. Paper either gets recycled (the carbon is preserved) or it gets buried in a sealed landfill where is takes decades or longer to break down. It'd be cool to calculate how much carbon Weyerhaeuser sucks out of the atmosphere each year.
- soperj 5y agoWouldn't it break down into methane instead though? I doubt that building buildings are carbon neutral, let alone a carbon sink.
- krastanov 5y agoDried up wooden building material is pretty stable and a fairly common (even commercialized) suggestion for a carbon sink. If you let it rot/burn, then no, it is not a carbon sink.
- soperj 5y agoSure, but the way we build buildings, there's no way that's actually the case. Transport alone to the sawmill, then the lumber yard, then the job site might actually release more carbon than the tree is storing. A 25 year old maple will sequester 400 pounds of co2 in it's lifetime. An average commuter car will emit that in 2 weeks. Hauling all that carbon out of the forest will likely emit far more than that.
- cesarb 5y ago> Transport alone to the sawmill, then the lumber yard, then the job site might actually release more carbon than the tree is storing. If we're building the buildings anyway, we have to compare with alternative building materials. That is, how much more would transporting that lumber emit, compared to transporting for instance brick?
- Nydhal 5y agoIt's not going to be "anyway". Once you add incentive for wood you will also create incentive for building. Complex systems 101.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wyager 5y agoAll fossil fuels were eventually living biomass. I don’t see any reason we wouldn’t “resuscitate” that biomass back into living organisms. It would take a long time for the living biomass to be re-interred into fossil fuels.
- prox 5y agoBeyond carbon capture, trees cool an area, which is good in its own right.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoYes, everyone here seems to think CO2 is the most important thing to reduce, but we're not suffering from CO2 (2*C never hurt anybody), we're suffering from increased weather volatility as the homeostatic influence of the biosphere has been destroyed, slash and burned for cow pasture, drained for corn and soy farms, overfished and trawled until nothing is left. But since CO2 is easier to measure than biomass and ecosystem complexity, everyone is focused on sucking carbon out of the air when we need to be restoring grasslands, forests, and coral reefs. Source: Charles Eisenstein's "Climate: A New Story"
- blamestross 5y agoI'm scared of "climate change" not because of temperature rise, not because of dangerous weather, not even because of ocean acidification. We have practice in handling all those things. I'm scared of C02 directly. It sure as hell does hurt people, we are looking a 685 ppm in 2050[1], over 1000 ppm in 2100[2], spiraling worse than that for the next 5000 years. The problem is that c02 makes us dumber, even small amounts.[3] Carbon Sequestration technology, on a globally ubiquitous and household scale is an overriding priority simply because we might be too dumb to fix it later. If we don't head off this escalation of c02, we are looking at a 5000 year dark age from the cognitive results alone. [1]https://www.oecd.org/env/cc/Outlook%20to%202050_Climate%20Change%20Chapter_HIGLIGHTS-FINA-8pager-UPDATED%20NOV2012.pdf https://www.oecd.org/env/cc/Outlook%20to%202050_Climate%20Ch... [2]https://www.acer-acre.ca/resources/climate-change-in-context/introduction-2/global/scientific-projections/projections-for-carbon-dioxide https://www.acer-acre.ca/resources/climate-change-in-context... [3]https://www.businessinsider.com/carbon-dioxide-indoors-could-reduce-cognitive-abilities-2019-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/carbon-dioxide-indoors-could...
- prox 5y agoWhat if we build co2 scrubbers in every home?
- BitwiseFool 5y agoAll the fossil fuels we've been burning is introducing carbon back into the biosphere. The key to carbon removal is to sequester it back somewhere where it won't be circulating in nature. It's not enough to plant more trees, as those new trees' carbon will just continue to cycle through the environment.
- wyager 5y agoWhy do I want to prevent carbon from circulating in nature? I like plants and animals and I want more of them.
- BitwiseFool 5y agoThe main problem is that we've released so much, so fast, that there really isn't a productive place for it to go. The other problem is that humanity keeps expanding and there's not much free space left for nature preserves. If you wanted to plant a new rainforest, where would you possibly put it? We're already cutting down swathes of existing ones just to feed and house our expanding populations. So sadly, most of that extra carbon just remains in the air.
- Voloskaya 5y ago> not just “turn deserts into plant areas” or “encourage algae blooms” or something? That might be slightly more tricky (and less efficient) than you seem to imagine. Also, the prize is not exclusively for "chemical" carbon extraction, if you can find a way to scale algae bloom to be a long term carbon sink without ruining the environment in other ways you are eligible: > Any carbon negative solution is eligible: nature-based, direct air capture, oceans, mineralization, or anything else that achieves net negative emissions, sequesters CO2 durably, and show a sustainable path to achieving low cost at gigatonne scale.
- danuker 5y agoPlanting trees it is very difficult to keep up with global production. TL; DW: planting 20 million trees would equal roughly the CO2 emissions of the USA for half a day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqht2bIQXIY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqht2bIQXIY
- sevenf0ur 5y agoJust one of the many problems of fundraisers like Team Trees: 1. Trees will eventually die and release their CO2 through rot or burning 2. Consequences of changing the ecosystem so rapidly
- wyager 5y agoIf you can increase arable land then other trees will grow there. I would prefer to create as much biomass as possible. Surely the net biomass stored in fossil fuels could be completely resuscitated, so to speak.
- PeterisP 5y agoThe usual way to increase arable land is by cutting down a forest. "Surely the net biomass stored in fossil fuels could be completely resuscitated, so to speak." - that's a strong no - fossil fuels have accumulated over millions of years, having all that carbon become biomass all at once would not be returning to something that existed earlier but something completely unprecedented, it would require many times more biomass than the Earth has now or has had at any particular moment of history.
- wyager 5y agoA quick google search suggests there are about 500 trillion pounds of oil left and about 1000 trillion pounds of living biomass. Assuming 5:1 mass:carbon ratio, it shouldn’t more than ~quadruple the total biomass. We could definitely fit that by turning the Sahara into a rainforest or something.
- Tuna-Fish 5y agoAt least for terrestrial plants, the math just doesn't work out. Plants are really not fast or efficient enough to suck up carbon in meaningful quantities. Algae can be >100 times as efficient at that than terrestrial plants, so there might be a there there, but even still, fracking basalt probably beats that by a couple of orders of magnitude.
- quaintdev 5y agoI understand this concern but I was blown away when I heard this fact which I wanted to share with you. > Certain species of bamboo can grow 910 mm (36 in) within a 24-hour period, at a rate of almost 40 mm (11⁄2 in) an hour (a growth around 1 mm every 90 seconds, or 1 inch {2.54 centimeters} every 40 minutes). At least it's better than no trees at all.
- lostlogin 5y agoWhile it makes for impenetrable forest (scrub? Bush) when mature, you’d have to imagine that the acreage requires to sequester meaningful amounts of carbon would be absolutely vast. Bamboo just isn’t that dense.
- mikeg8 5y agoMy personal experience of having bamboo on my property is that it seems incredibly dense. Bamboo is a actually a grass and has root systems similar to grasses, it grows very close together. here is another resource about the carbon sequestration of bamboo: https://drawdown.org/solutions/bamboo-production https://drawdown.org/solutions/bamboo-production
- mikeg8 5y agoAnother interesting tidbit: bamboo is actually a grass, not a tree.
- kisamoto 5y agoThat's really cool. As long as we don't end up with monocultures (also bad for the environment) they should be part of the solution! We could plant fast growing bamboo and turn it into biochar/bio-oil? Or use it for sustainable housing?
- anfractuosity 5y agoYou might find this interesting: 'What the heroin industry can teach us about solar power' - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-53450688 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-53450688 The satellite images show the green areas over the desert increasing. They're pumping water from underground to irrigate the poppies using electric pumps and solar panels. I wonder how quickly the water table will be depleted though.
- kisamoto 5y agoThere is no silver bullet. It has to be a combination of: 1) Reduce emissions to zero (will take some time). 2) Use more natural solutions (trees, algae, kelp etc. - will also take time). 3) Enhance natural solutions with tech (enhanced weathering). 4) Develop carbon capture tech to reverse the damage done by the fossil-fuel burning tech.
- blacksmith_tb 5y agoPresumably entrants will skew towards #4 as we don't have as many solutions there, and depending on how quickly you could scale up a good one, it would be quicker than 1-3, you'd expect.
- wyager 5y agoWhy do we have to reduce emissions to zero? I prefer freeing up carbon from the ground as long as it’s not causing greenhouse heating.
- PeterisP 5y agoWell, it is causing greenhouse heating, that's the whole point, any freeing up carbon is inherently linked to that. But it is more appropriate to say that we have to reduce net emissions to zero; there would be no problem with emissions if there's a compensating carbon capture of equal amount. At least after we've "paid back the debt" by recapturing the excess emissions of earlier decades - there needs to be some period of negative net emissions before zero net emissions would be okay. Why do you prefer "freeing up carbon from the ground" ? Usually that's just a sideeffect that happens only because we want some other thing e.g. extract energy from oil or manufacture cement by calcinating limestone; and if we want a stable atmosphere then we can't be freeing up carbon from the ground without putting it back.
- vkou 5y ago> 1) Reduce emissions to zero (will take some time). How many centuries is it going to take to reduce global emissions to... Half of their current levels?