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The growing market of not cutting down trees
- askvictor 5y agoMaybe a better solution here would be laws and regulations to prevent the cutting down of trees. Seems like this obsession to make everything into a market doesn't always make sense.
- tailius 5y agoAs a survivor of the 2018 Paradise Camp Fire, I find this story one-sided and tone-deaf in the face of climate change. California just had and has its biggest forest fire ever. Chopping down trees is absolutely necessary in urban-wildlife interface when it creates a conduit to catastrophic fires. Furthermore, other than minor points of appearances and ecological reasons, trees aren't carbon sinks, they're waiting match sticks. Also, in the town of Paradise within Butte county, loggers engaged in widespread resource extraction and theft by taking trees without land-owners' consent and pocketing the money. 10k's of trees sold for logs $1000+ each.
- mgarfias 5y agoI just sent this to my buddy, who owns a few thousands of acres of forestry land. I wonder how much I could get for my 5 acres of big ass trees?
- greenie_beans 5y agoi don't think this is a good solution for climate change. it doesn't make sense to offset a major polluter, so they can continue polluting.
- goatlover 5y agoIt does make sense until renewable power, cleaner manufacturing tech and electric vehicles are able to replace the polluters. Would have been easier if more nuclear plants were ready to go.
- unyttigfjelltol 5y agoNeither growing forests nor any other approach I've heard is carbon-negative on a scale of more than a few decades. Maybe someone could usefully deploy the credits to fund the science necessary to know how to properly use them.
- marcosdumay 5y agoHumanity does not do large scale fundamental change in less than a few decades. We are actually changing very quickly. Now that solar is cheaper than coal, we are simply turning coal plants down, even on the middle of their lifetime. Transport electrification is basically bounded by supply, we are just not able to do it faster. The one thing that could be better is grid storage. It doesn't help that there is a patent minefield around battery chemistries, and it also doesn't help that it's only economically viable after the grid has a large share of renewables. A government could intervene on both of those problems right now, but if they are left for markets, it will take another decade after we start working really hard on them (what is still quick, by the way, and it helps that we can solve basically half of the emissions on the previous paragraph alone).
- toast0 5y ago> it also doesn't help that it's only economically viable after the grid has a large share of renewables. There's certainly already wholesale price variability throughout the day, so buy at night, sell during the day arbitrage is at least conceptially valid, although real world ROI is going to depend on capital costs, full cycle efficiency, etc, and it doesn't seem like things are quite there outside of a few installations.
- xyzzy21 5y agoChemistry is pretty much DONE for batteries. The only advancements possible are fairly limited and have to do with nanostructure of electrodes and electrolytes which won't give more than 2x-5x. There are NO 10x, 100x, 1000x futures with batteries. If you want 10x-100x, the answer is hydrocarbon fuels and nuclear energy. Period. Otherwise you are living in a fantasy bubble disconnected from STEM and factual reality.
- SuoDuanDao 5y agoIt seems like a much better solution to think in terms of continuous material flows, rather than trying to stop all flows of a material humans consider waste.
- gizmondo 5y agoIt would've made sense if it was a true offset, i.e. carbon capture in various forms. But "offsetting" carbon-positive activity with carbon-neutral is just bizarre. Where is my money for sitting on a couch instead of taking a plane to Australia?
- modriano 5y agoThat would be hard to sell. Trees actually pull CO2 out of the air and lock it away in wood fibers. That produces an actual (albeit infinitesimal) reduction in the net atmospheric CO2. Choosing to not take a flight to Australia, on the other hand, is just deciding to produce CO2, just less. That makes it categorically different, as it can't negate any amount of CO2 production. Also, the supply of "not flying to Australia" is unbounded, and without scarcity, the price will naturally go to $0. If you only focus on potential fliers, that would have the perverse effect of incentivizing people to take actions intended to convince the regulators of this market that they were planning on flying to Australia, which would likely result in empty seats on flights to Australia and a net increase in the number of chartered flights to Australia.
- notatoad 5y agotrees pull CO2 out of the air, so planting more trees is carbon-negative. but how is just allowing the trees that are already there to continue existing carbon-negative? it can't be less CO2 that the status quo if it's literally the status quo.
- peteradio 5y agoPerhaps there are methods to maximize forest yield, it would probably be appropriate to bake that into the value I would think. I think forests that burn may leave behind char in the soil layers and on small time scales it would be insignificant but maybe it becomes significant over millennia?
- gizmondo 5y agoIn addition to mature forests being carbon neutral, not negative, the scheme in question has exactly the same problem you described - the supply of "not cutting trees" is huge if not unbounded, and it has very little to do with CO2 in the atmosphere. This is indulgence trading, in my opinion.
- notatoad 5y agodon't think of it as offsetting a polluter, think of it as charging a polluter. requiring the purchase of offsets equal to the amount of pollution is essentially a tax on pollution. assuming it's fairly priced, it should create a market for non-polluting alternatives to the pollution-causers and lead to the eventual decline of pollution-causing processes as they're replaced with alternatives that don't require offsetting.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago“assuming it's fairly priced, “ From what I know we are far away from that. It would need to be priced much higher to effect change.
- spaetzleesser 5y agoThis also rubs me the wrong way and feels like something that can be gamed too easily. It also feels like something rich people can throw some money at a problem to make it go away for themselves. Some years I remember an article about Paul Allen’s super yacht and the enormous amounts of fuel it was consuming. But they quickly added that he had offset this by planting a few trees somewhere… In my mind it would better we didn’t have 100m yachts ship around a few people for leisure.
- 55555 5y agoOh boy, I'm huge into trees and boy could I talk about this. Not cutting down trees is way more lucrative than cutting down trees. You can only cut a tree down once, but you can not cut it down as many times as you like. And then, once you're done not cutting it down, you can cut it down and sell it to a sawmill.
- gizmondo 5y ago> And then, once you're done not cutting it down, you can cut it down and sell it to a sawmill. The only logical solution is to force you to buy some carbon offsets from coal miners. In the form of obligation not to mine some coal.
- MomoXenosaga 5y agoTrue obviously but the poor man working for a logging company in Brazil needs to feed his kids today. He's not concerned about what happens in 20 years.
- cven714 5y agoReminds me of the man who became wealthy by not growing alfalfa. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/771699-his-specialty-was-alfalfa-and-he-made-a-good-thing https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/771699-his-specialty-was-al...
- greenie_beans 5y agoyeah, this will only become part of a forest management plan. i bet that everybody will do it eventually, and the market will have too many credits for sale. and the polluters will continue to pollute, and use their carbon credits as a marketing gimmick.
- datavirtue 5y agoSame here. The dang things literally convert scorching sunlight into shade.
- ineedasername 5y agoAn interesting question would be "How many times per second could you not cut down a tree?" I'm guessing the throughput on that is incredibly fast.
- Gustomaximus 5y agoWouldn't a better solution be to encourage more things built of wood? Cut the trees down and use them, while replacing with more. E.g. Encourage more wooden houses and your not only capturing carbon but storing it separately so more can be captured in that same place. While there are probably many better solutions, you would think whatever they are we need something that can continue to capture carbon ongoing. A forest, as great as they are for a plethora of reasons, is fairly finite in terms of carbon capture.
- wodow 5y agoOne group working on this is the Natural Material Innovation group at Cambridge: https://www.natmat.group.cam.ac.uk/research/natmat https://www.natmat.group.cam.ac.uk/research/natmat "Timber Towers" London proposal: https://www.natmat.group.cam.ac.uk/news/timber-towers-could-transform-london2019s-skyline https://www.natmat.group.cam.ac.uk/news/timber-towers-could-... (2019) (encountered via the easy-listening of BBC Radio 4's 39 Ways to Save the Planet: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000qy43 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000qy43 )
- cf100clunk 5y agoSimilarly, see the University of British Columbia's Wood Building Design & Construction Centre: https://wbdc.ubc.ca/ https://wbdc.ubc.ca/ and the Province Of British Columbia's Wood First Initiative: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/industry/forestry/supporting-innovation/wood-first-initiative https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/industry/forestry/support...
- entangledqubit 5y agoFor those familiar with American building practices, it's interesting to see some stark contrasts. This video discusses solid timber walls (among other interesting features) in a Swiss building project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlplalGNfFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlplalGNfFM
- Cycl0ps 5y ago
- slang800 5y agoIn the event of a forest fire, does the land owner have to pay back the carbon-offset buyers?
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 5y agoRyan and Kate have no apparent interest in that subject.
- sytse 5y agoSee https://twitter.com/bodiecabiyo/status/1427683107788845056?s=27 https://twitter.com/bodiecabiyo/status/1427683107788845056?s... TLDR; there is a percentage set aside for fires but it seems way too little.
- kgwgk 5y agohttps://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-21/you-can-sell-the-trees-you-don-t-cut https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-21/you-ca... "The other reason to love this story is that it is about getting paid not to do things. That is always complicated. If you are paid to do things, it is relatively easy to measure how much you did and how much you should get paid. If I want you to cut down trees for my sawmill, we might agree on a price of $5 per tree. You will cut down the trees and deliver them to me, and I will count them. If you deliver 100 trees then I’ll pay you $500. "But if I want you not to cut down trees for my carbon capture program, it is harder to measure how many trees you didn’t cut down. Just sitting here right now, typing this column on my computer, I have cut down zero trees,[1] which means in theory that there are absolutely billions of trees that I have not cut down. Where is my check? A landowner might have planned to cut down only a few trees this year, but she will have incentives to say “I was planning to cut down all my trees,” in order to get paid for not cutting down all of them. She might have trees that are impossibly un-economic to cut down, but it’s easy enough for her not to cut them down. "Similarly, if I agree to buy 100 trees from you, and you sell me the trees, you can’t sell them to anyone else: I have the trees. If I agree to pay you not to cut down 100 trees, though, what’s to stop you from getting paid by someone else not to cut down the same trees? The trees stay there; you can sell the concept of them staying there as many times as you like."
- pintxo 5y agoI have to - don’t do it - say it: put your trees on a NFT blockchain - he said it, sorry!!1!
- gibspaulding 5y agoSeems reasonable - We have proof of work, proof of stake, proof of storage. Why not proof of trees!
- isaacimagine 5y agoWe could have proof of air too! https://www.gwern.net/CO2-Coin https://www.gwern.net/CO2-Coin
- Biologist123 5y agoI work in an adjacent space, and have been encouraged by an investor to push into the reduced emissions and avoided emissions sector. I’m yet to decide, but a few factors are currently dissuading me: 1. The assumptions behind forestry and soil offsets on closer inspection can seem a bit stretched. 2. An offset creates revenue for the person creating the offsets - which money is then spent on things which have their own carbon intensity - eg fuel or a vehicle or whatever. So there’s ultimately no offset. 3. Being able to offset your carbon emissions has unpredictable consequences. I remember seeing some study which showed people who bought a Macdonald’s salad were likely to reward themselves with a burger. I can see how I’d offset a flight and then piously reward myself with a steak later. 4. Companies buying offsets open themselves to reputational risk associated with the quality of the offsets. Is it worth the risk? There seem to be a bunch of other reasons why offsets are questionable but those are my four reasons for not going into this space. [Edit: I added reason 4].
- contingencies 5y agoI looked relatively deeply in to this area when starting an asset exchange ~2011. My conclusion at that time was that existing carbon trading / offsets tokens were basically non-fungible due to disparate definitions from different regulators. Nominal assets ranged from honor-system self-declarations to heavily audited. The resulting asset types were found to be effectively illiquid, despite a rush to open exchange platforms and media talk of trading schemes, owing to lack of buy-side demand. Individually the systems were mostly only useful for gaming local regulators. I doubt their primary purpose today has changed from multinationals greenwashing their dirty operations with suitably distracting levels of misdirection.
- iav 5y agoCalifornia and Quebec carbon allowances markets are now linked (trading as CCA), and Washington State is expected to join. I researched that market thoroughly and it’s not perfect but very well structured. It’s mostly carbon allowances, not offsets (offsets don’t really reduce total emissions). CCAs trade on the ICE exchange and there are regular scheduled auctions. Arguably more liquid than most stocks.
- NonContro 5y agoIf we want to avoid carbon emissions and save the environment then we should be paying poor people in the 3rd world not to have children. Offering vasectomies to 25 million young males across Africa in return for $200 in goods or cash would cost less than the USA's annual aid to the continent but do far more for poverty and development.
- dang 5y agoSince you have a history of posting slurs to HN and getting banned for it, I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned on HN, stop veering in that direction in particular, and stop posting flamebait generally. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- s1artibartfast 5y agoLess extreme would be offering family planning in the form of condoms and birth control globally. You don't have to incentivize people to change their behavior, but help them achieve what they already want.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> If we want to avoid carbon emissions and save the environment then we should be paying poor people in the 3rd world not to have children. Impact is far from obvious; the immediate result you'd expect would be that someone else has the children instead.
- s1artibartfast 5y agoI can't think of a reason why that would be the case. Who would be having more kids and what in their lives and circumstances is changing?
- thaumasiotes 5y agoWhat's changing is that someone else is having fewer kids. https://www.straightdope.com/21341212/if-i-hadn-t-killed-52-flies-as-a-child-how-many-descendants-would-they-have-had-by-now https://www.straightdope.com/21341212/if-i-hadn-t-killed-52-...
- neonate 5y agohttps://archive.is/zSCV1 https://archive.is/zSCV1
- zug_zug 5y agoI suppose to align incentives you should only get paid if you grow a tree cut it down and then bury the carbon [trunk] somehow. Anything less isn't permanently removing carbon from the atmosphere For example just growing a tree is no net carbon reduction - the tree dies naturally the carbon is released at some point.
- elihu 5y agoYeah, that sounds more reasonable. Pay people for the quantity of carbon they sequestered at the point it's turned into biochar and buried (or whatever technology is used), and maybe have financial instruments set up so that investors can buy the rights to future carbon from the people growing the trees, so the growers don't have to wait fifty years to get paid. If there's a forest fire, the investors lose their investment, and that's just part of the built-in risk. On the micro-scale, I wonder if towns and cities could start incentivizing people to dispose of more yard waste. For instance, you get a rebate on your garbage bill based on how many hundreds of pounds of lawn clippings and branches you stuff in your yard waste bins each year (assuming that yard waste is processed in a way that sequesters the carbon, and people don't try to game the system by filling their bins with dirt or trash). You could also have something like a free service for people in rural areas to request a dumpster that they can fill with organic material and have hauled away as an alternative to just burning it.
- sdenton4 5y agoI see this point brought out often. Some counter points: a) Trees can live for hundreds of years. We're in the midst of transforming how we produce energy and improving energy efficiency all around... A good CO2 'battery' to smooth out the problem can still be very helpful. Think of it as a low-pass filter to help reduce a shock. b) Forests have a massive number of positive effects beside co2 sequestration, including local cooling and aiding the water cycle. A world with more forests is a healthier world. (See also: riding a bike instead of driving. It saves CO2, and has numerous health benefits.)
- slavik81 5y agoEven dead trees take decades to decay. It varies by climate, but a typical tree in the Boreal Forest might take a century to rot away.
- elihu 5y ago> "There are companies out there that are endeavoring to use satellites and computers, that are artificial intelligence and machine learning to replace the boots on the ground foresters that have to go out and do these very precise measurements of trees by using satellite imagery to size up the trees and tell you how many trees there are, how big they are, how much they've grown over time. And the thinking is that by doing that and removing a lot of the upfront costs, you can start doing smaller and smaller tracts of woods." It seems like having a national or a global database of trees would be a useful and interesting public data set to have. For instance, you could have the location, approximate age, approximate mass and height, and probable species for all the known trees in your region of interest. I wonder what the technical limitations on collecting this data are? I mean, the imagery and metadata Google Maps uses probably could be used to find most of the full-grown trees, as long as they aren't clustered too tight to each other to distinguish. Maybe you'd need radar scans or close-up imagery for dense forests. Most young trees would probably be missed unless you had some very precise way to detect them. (Drones flying through forests, maybe? Or miniaturized Google-streetview-type cameras affixed to wild deer?)
- CommieBobDole 5y agoThere was an interesting article a while back about how pine tree farmers have moved away from cutting cutting timber and are instead selling pinestraw for landscaping because it's more lucrative. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/03/31/pine-needle-mulch-north-carolina/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/03/31/pine-need...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- robto 5y agoI once worked as a data analyst in the EM&V industry (Evaluation, Measurement, and Verification). I worked for a small group of consultants and our primary customer would be energy utilities across the United States. You see, an energy company, all things equal, would prefer to sell more energy rather than less. More energy sold == more profit, for the most part - coops and other, smaller scale operations aside. Now, society has decided that incentivizing growth in energy consumption isn't a winning strategy in the long run. Or, at least, politicians have signed into law various incentive programs to change the business calculus of energy companies, wherein an energy company can get reimbursed for energy efficiency campaigns that it runs and, if total energy consumption is less than a certain rate year over year, the energy company can claim a prize to offset the profit forgone by promoting energy efficiency. However, it is not so straightforward to account for how much energy _isn't_ being used on account of a specific intervention. Enter here the entire EM&V industry! We would run studies to account for this missing energy, and it was a very thorough business - comparing lists of equipment replaced under industrial efficiency programs, measuring Watt-hours offset, surveying households to figure out how many of them actually installed those complementary LED lightbulbs. Every year we would run through the same process with the same energy companies and then they'd find out how much energy they saved. At times it felt surreal to be a part of this giant industry competing for a chance to count how much of something wasn't used, but it looks like that industry is only going to grow as carbon caps and offsets become a bigger deal. I don't think it's a bad thing, just a profoundly weird one. In 50 years I wonder how many people will derive their income from counting things that don't exist :)