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There's no reason not to plant trees in addition to everything else we'll need to do to fix this problem. The advantage of planting trees is that we know it wor

There's no reason not to plant trees in addition to everything else we'll need to do to fix this problem. The advantage of planting trees is that we know it works, it's cheap, and we can do it right now. So some people should be doing that, and others should be doing R&D on other means of carbon removal. No need to pit one against the other.

kisamoto 5y ago
I totally agree and I'm sorry if I gave the impression that trees should not be part of a solution. Trees (and other nature based methods) should definitely not be neglected. I merely wanted to try and raise some awareness to those who question the need for technological removal methods as there is a bit of a toxic "trees will save us" attitude when things like this get mentioned.
- elevaet 5y ago
  This kind of civil discourse is what makes HN such a gem on the internet.
  - foota 5y ago
    You're sure it's not comments like these? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27826277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27826277 I thought it was funny to see similar sentiments back to back :)
  - flingo 5y ago
    Meta-warning; I'm more into the juxtapositions of interactions between idiots vs experts, specialists vs generalists, startup-billionaire vs unemployed-drug-addict-hacker, and the level of insight that can be gained from these conversations. I believe that the civility, and desire for unfettered conversation (avoiding ad-hominem, flame-wars. etc···) are more of an instrumental-goal of this process, than the true goal. I don't really know why the comments on hn are the way they are, and I doubt anyone ever will. But that's what keeps me coming back here. It's the only place on the internet I can get this kind of thing, whatever it is. I do have to say, there's something special and unique here. Like the userbases of wikipedia, stack overflow, 4chan, or twitter, there's something here that's impossible to recreate and worth preserving.
  - justshowpost 5y ago
    > discourse Hardly a discourse. Both gents above might have a negligible disagreement but they are sticking firmly to radical green agenda shadow-officially endorsed and promoted by Yahoo Combinator. Also, good for karma income. Just the same for praising comments.
    - elevaet 5y ago
      > radical green agenda What is this radical green agenda that you identify? I'm not disputing that exists, I'm certainly part of it, and I intend to continue leaning into it. I'm just curious how it looks from the outside.
- shadilay 5y ago
  Trees are nature's best solution after millions of years of evolution. The R&D cost is low as well as the complexity. The problem is that dead trees turn back into CO2 so there will need to be some kind of sequestration like burying lumber.
  - statusanxiety 5y ago
    Trees did not evolve solely for the purposes of carbon sequestration. Similarly, it would be silly to say that mammals are nature's best solution at sequestering oxygen.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - randomswede 5y ago
    Even burying the lumber doesn't remove the coal from the cycle, just delays it by a few years. You'd need to get the carbon into a "not readily accessible to biological processes" form. Charcoal is probably an OK start, but something like calcium carbonate would be even more stable. And you can (probably) do better than trees, in terms of carbon captured per time unit. But I guess you'd have to run comparative studies between birch and bamboo for biomass grown per time unit and area. Hm, that means that a sensible unit for carbon capture would be "kg / (m * m * s)".
    - shadilay 5y ago
      There's always some local maximum most efficient process. If you take into account process inputs trees would likely come out on top. A lot of carbon capture tech can capture lots of carbon but consumes a huge amount of power/energy intense resources. My unit would be kg / (W * m^2 * s)
      - randomswede 5y ago
        IIRC, bamboo ends up as "less wasted" when you turn it into charcoal than most woods. And you'd need to do a lot more energy-intensive processing of the tree to get it into a for suitable for turning into coal. With bamboo, it's mostly "cut into suitable length". With wood, it's at least "cut into suitable length", but may also require splitting. But, yes, my main reason for thinking bamboo is that it is pretty fast-growing under the right conditions. And with a Watt actually being "kg * m^2 / s^3", your unit ends up being s^2 / m^4, which dimensionally looks less pleasant.
fooker 5y ago
>There's no reason not to plant trees in addition to everything else we'll need to do to fix this problem. Yes, there is. Trees take a up valuable real estate. As long as people can do something even remotely profitable with land they own, this can not work.
- jnosCo 5y ago
  With carbon credits, planting trees can be a profitable land use.
- schiffern 5y ago
  Trees are valuable too. The problem is we don't understand and/or appreciate that value. For instance, trees essentially power the entire terrestrial water cycle. Without trees all the water rains out within a few hundred km of the coast. Trees (far moreso than simple evaporation) are responsible for pushing that water back into the air-stream. Isotopic analysis confirms that 80% of the rainfall on land is caused by transpiration, and most of that is trees. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11983 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11983 This explains why deforestation causes desertification. Cut down the trees and you get a continent-wide desert. These dynamics aren't well-captured by the present economic system, which only sees "valuable real estate" being "taken up" by trees.
  - lovemenot 5y ago
    >> Anyone still think it's a good idea to utilize all that "valuable real estate" being "taken up" by trees? As long as plantation owners and/or illegal loggers do, then all your argumentation is moot.
    - schiffern 5y ago
      Correct, thanks. Incidentally before seeing your post I just edited that part for clarity. Since I already made the edit, I'll leave it as-is.
    - xvilka 5y ago
      Just up the ante for illegal logging and equate it to terrorism. Life sentence for anyone involved. I am sure it will make anyone think twice before doing illegal logging with such punishment.
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
Yes, the "magic bullet" mentality typical of media, politicians, and dumb Americans just isn't going to cut it. BEVs + wind + solar + storage. Tree planting. Efficiency. Insulation. Nuclear power. Synthetic fuels. Carbon taxes. Sequestration. Olivine. Seeding the ocean. Vegetarianism/cultured meat/fake meat. We don't need to wait 100 years for maturation of the wood in forests, the nice thing about wood is that you can use it for paper and construction, and that effectively sequesters the carbon.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
belorn 5y ago
> The advantage of planting trees is that we know it works, it's cheap, and we can do it right now Here in Sweden it is the law that if you cut down a forest you replant it. We have been doing it for a century. All forests here is basically in a constant plant-grow-cut cycle unless the land is claimed for new buildings (farm land has been steady declining every year). It is debatable if the practice is carbon negative or carbon neutral. Most of wood product do get burned sooner or later, or turned into bio gas which then get burned. Almost nothing remain as stable carbon sink. A planted forest is an future investment to be cut, processed and burned. The only exception is forest reservations and those are much more expensive to make than planting trees. The advocacy behind replanting might be better invested into a political action of bringing similar replanting laws to other countries. Sweden mostly did it because it looked ugly to have wast areas cut down without regrowth, and because it hurt biodiversity. It also make sense economically in the long run.

kisamoto 5y ago

I totally agree and I'm sorry if I gave the impression that trees should not be part of a solution. Trees (and other nature based methods) should definitely not be neglected. I merely wanted to try and raise some awareness to those who question the need for technological removal methods as there is a bit of a toxic "trees will save us" attitude when things like this get mentioned.

elevaet 5y ago
This kind of civil discourse is what makes HN such a gem on the internet.
- foota 5y ago
  You're sure it's not comments like these? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27826277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27826277 I thought it was funny to see similar sentiments back to back :)
- flingo 5y ago
  Meta-warning; I'm more into the juxtapositions of interactions between idiots vs experts, specialists vs generalists, startup-billionaire vs unemployed-drug-addict-hacker, and the level of insight that can be gained from these conversations. I believe that the civility, and desire for unfettered conversation (avoiding ad-hominem, flame-wars. etc···) are more of an instrumental-goal of this process, than the true goal. I don't really know why the comments on hn are the way they are, and I doubt anyone ever will. But that's what keeps me coming back here. It's the only place on the internet I can get this kind of thing, whatever it is. I do have to say, there's something special and unique here. Like the userbases of wikipedia, stack overflow, 4chan, or twitter, there's something here that's impossible to recreate and worth preserving.
- justshowpost 5y ago
  > discourse Hardly a discourse. Both gents above might have a negligible disagreement but they are sticking firmly to radical green agenda shadow-officially endorsed and promoted by Yahoo Combinator. Also, good for karma income. Just the same for praising comments.
  - elevaet 5y ago
    > radical green agenda What is this radical green agenda that you identify? I'm not disputing that exists, I'm certainly part of it, and I intend to continue leaning into it. I'm just curious how it looks from the outside.
shadilay 5y ago
Trees are nature's best solution after millions of years of evolution. The R&D cost is low as well as the complexity. The problem is that dead trees turn back into CO2 so there will need to be some kind of sequestration like burying lumber.
- statusanxiety 5y ago
  Trees did not evolve solely for the purposes of carbon sequestration. Similarly, it would be silly to say that mammals are nature's best solution at sequestering oxygen.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- randomswede 5y ago
  Even burying the lumber doesn't remove the coal from the cycle, just delays it by a few years. You'd need to get the carbon into a "not readily accessible to biological processes" form. Charcoal is probably an OK start, but something like calcium carbonate would be even more stable. And you can (probably) do better than trees, in terms of carbon captured per time unit. But I guess you'd have to run comparative studies between birch and bamboo for biomass grown per time unit and area. Hm, that means that a sensible unit for carbon capture would be "kg / (m * m * s)".
  - shadilay 5y ago
    There's always some local maximum most efficient process. If you take into account process inputs trees would likely come out on top. A lot of carbon capture tech can capture lots of carbon but consumes a huge amount of power/energy intense resources. My unit would be kg / (W * m^2 * s)
    - randomswede 5y ago
      IIRC, bamboo ends up as "less wasted" when you turn it into charcoal than most woods. And you'd need to do a lot more energy-intensive processing of the tree to get it into a for suitable for turning into coal. With bamboo, it's mostly "cut into suitable length". With wood, it's at least "cut into suitable length", but may also require splitting. But, yes, my main reason for thinking bamboo is that it is pretty fast-growing under the right conditions. And with a Watt actually being "kg * m^2 / s^3", your unit ends up being s^2 / m^4, which dimensionally looks less pleasant.

fooker 5y ago

>There's no reason not to plant trees in addition to everything else we'll need to do to fix this problem. Yes, there is. Trees take a up valuable real estate. As long as people can do something even remotely profitable with land they own, this can not work.

jnosCo 5y ago
With carbon credits, planting trees can be a profitable land use.
schiffern 5y ago
Trees are valuable too. The problem is we don't understand and/or appreciate that value. For instance, trees essentially power the entire terrestrial water cycle. Without trees all the water rains out within a few hundred km of the coast. Trees (far moreso than simple evaporation) are responsible for pushing that water back into the air-stream. Isotopic analysis confirms that 80% of the rainfall on land is caused by transpiration, and most of that is trees. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11983 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11983 This explains why deforestation causes desertification. Cut down the trees and you get a continent-wide desert. These dynamics aren't well-captured by the present economic system, which only sees "valuable real estate" being "taken up" by trees.
- lovemenot 5y ago
  >> Anyone still think it's a good idea to utilize all that "valuable real estate" being "taken up" by trees? As long as plantation owners and/or illegal loggers do, then all your argumentation is moot.
  - schiffern 5y ago
    Correct, thanks. Incidentally before seeing your post I just edited that part for clarity. Since I already made the edit, I'll leave it as-is.
  - xvilka 5y ago
    Just up the ante for illegal logging and equate it to terrorism. Life sentence for anyone involved. I am sure it will make anyone think twice before doing illegal logging with such punishment.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

Yes, the "magic bullet" mentality typical of media, politicians, and dumb Americans just isn't going to cut it. BEVs + wind + solar + storage. Tree planting. Efficiency. Insulation. Nuclear power. Synthetic fuels. Carbon taxes. Sequestration. Olivine. Seeding the ocean. Vegetarianism/cultured meat/fake meat. We don't need to wait 100 years for maturation of the wood in forests, the nice thing about wood is that you can use it for paper and construction, and that effectively sequesters the carbon.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

belorn 5y ago

> The advantage of planting trees is that we know it works, it's cheap, and we can do it right now Here in Sweden it is the law that if you cut down a forest you replant it. We have been doing it for a century. All forests here is basically in a constant plant-grow-cut cycle unless the land is claimed for new buildings (farm land has been steady declining every year). It is debatable if the practice is carbon negative or carbon neutral. Most of wood product do get burned sooner or later, or turned into bio gas which then get burned. Almost nothing remain as stable carbon sink. A planted forest is an future investment to be cut, processed and burned. The only exception is forest reservations and those are much more expensive to make than planting trees. The advocacy behind replanting might be better invested into a political action of bringing similar replanting laws to other countries. Sweden mostly did it because it looked ugly to have wast areas cut down without regrowth, and because it hurt biodiversity. It also make sense economically in the long run.