11 ms·

Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

122 points by hhs 4y ago

colechristensen 4y ago
Yes you need to build ecosystems not just plant trees. Monoculture tree stands are often mostly empty of other life. You need to plant a variety of native species keeping track of keystone species and year round food production so that your forest supports other life.
- TSiege 4y ago
  Absolutely. Our ways of thinking about the environment are trapped in the past. Where we focus on one variable and miss the importance and resilience that comes from a holistic approach. We need to be encouraging the right ecosystems for the right environment. For example, we need to be encouraging native grassland ecosystems in the great plains, not forests. Native grasses can have root systems 8 feet deep to deal with droughts and erosion, a forest just doesn't make sense there
  - wikfwikf 4y ago
    I think this way of thinking is trapped in the past. The reality of atmospheric carbon is that we have to get rid of it or face mass extinction. Trying to build some nostalgic idea of a untouched ecosystem in tune with 'nature' is just a feelgood ideology. We're actually faced with an engineering project - the first planet that our species will terraform.
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  There is a grove of red pine near where I grew up that was planted row on row about 15 feet apart. These trees are 70+ years old but most of them are only 7-8 inches in diameter. The floor of this grove is just red with pine needles, nothing else can grow and any animals are just passing through. Whenever I hear about planting trees for "carbon sequestration", I immediately remember walking through that forest and thinking how quiet and dead it felt.
- goda90 4y ago
  A "keystone species" that is important for a lot of ecosystems but on the surface seems contradictory to the goal of carbon sequestration is wild fires. A stand of coniferous trees can block out light year round, limiting all other species of plants from growing underneath, but a fire will make the holes in the canopy that they need to spring up. Likewise, grasslands, which sequester a lot of carbon in their roots/soil, depend on fire to keep out trees and letting prairie plants thrive.
- adolph 4y ago
  From Ch 1, Seeing Like a State By James C. Scott: The great simplification of the forest into a "one-commodity machine" was precisely the step that allowed German forestry science to become a rigorous technical and commercial discipline that could be codified and taught. A condition of its rigor was that it severely bracketed, or assumed to be constant, all variables except those bearing directly on the yield of the selected species and on the cost of growing and extracting them. As we shall see with urban planning, revolutionary theory, collectivization, and rural resettlement, a whole world lying "outside the brackets" returned to haunt this technical vision. In the German case, the negative biological and ultimately commercial consequences of the stripped-down forest became painfully obvious only after the second rotation of conifers had been planted. "It took about one century for them [the negative consequences] to show up clearly. Many of the pure stands grew excellently in the first generation but already showed an amazing retrogression in the second generation. The reason for this is a very complex one and only a simplified explanation can be given.... Then the whole nutrient cycle got out of order and eventually was nearly stopped.... Anyway, the drop of one or two site classes [used for grading the quality of timber] during two or three generations of pure spruce is a well known and frequently observed fact. This represents a production loss of 20 to 30 percent." A new term, Waldsterben (forest death), entered the German vocabulary to describe the worst cases. An exceptionally complex process involving soil building, nutrient uptake, and symbiotic relations among fungi, insects, mammals, and flora--which were, and still are, not entirely understood--was apparently disrupted, with serious consequences. Most of these consequences can be traced to the radical simplicity of the scientific forest. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/scott-state.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/sc... Azn link for HN Books: https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/dp/0300078153 https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/d...
- wikfwikf 4y ago
  Why do you care about the forest supporting other life? Isn't the goal just to take carbon out of the atmosphere?
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    Ecosystems grow, maintain themselves, and can be better at sequestering carbon. Random example: blue jays plant oak trees. They like acorns, pick them off trees and bury them for later, and forget some. If you have an ecosystem that supports blue jays your forest will expand without fundraisers and government programs. Ecosystems fix carbon in more active biomass than just tree trunks. If you get soil building ecosystems and ecosystems that put more carbon in living creatures, you have less carbon in the atmosphere. The extra CO2 in the atmosphere is like fertilizer, and you can get life to utilize it more and grab more of it out of the atmosphere by supporting it in small ways so it can go on to support itself.
    - wikfwikf 4y ago
      In a forest full of large trees, the carbon in the non-tree biomass is a rounding error. If you can pack the trees slightly closer and almost everything else now finds the environment too hostile to survive, it's probably a net win from a carbon point of view.
  - monknomo 4y ago
    The more life a forest supports, generally, the more carbon gets removed and the longer the forest lives.
    - quixoticelixer- 4y ago
      That's not necessarily true
  - pastacacioepepe 4y ago
    > Isn't the goal just to take carbon out of the atmosphere? I disagree. We also want to avoid ecological cascade effects in our ecosystems.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
  Look into permaculture; It is all about restoring natural forest floors! Geoff Lawton and Sepp Holzer are good people to look into.
_8j50 4y ago
Why isn't there more focus on phytoplankton since it produces more O2? Maybe have a device that seeds/catalyzes their growth on every boat?
- lapetitejort 4y ago
  There's been talk of dumping iron particles into the ocean to to spur phytoplankton growth [0]. [0]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/iron-dumping-ocean-experiment-sparks-controversy/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/iron-dumping-ocea...
- gumby 4y ago
  This is an area of active research but at the moment essentially all such efforts are banned by the London Protocol. The ocean is 70% of the planet’s surface and, I think, is where a lot of the work should go on.
  - smallerfish 4y ago
    > essentially all such efforts are banned by the London Protocol. Interesting, why? Plankton != dumping, right? Could there be contained plankton "farms" that are similar to fish farms?
    - shagie 4y ago
      https://www.whoi.edu/fileserver.do?id=24744&pt=2&p=28442 https://www.whoi.edu/fileserver.do?id=24744&pt=2&p=28442 is specifically on the deliberate introduction of iron into the ocean ecology to stimulate plankton growth.
- shagie 4y ago
  This is known as the "Geritol solution" and was an idea that was debated back in the early 90s.
- TheBlight 4y ago
  I don't think you can treat phytoplankton as having this singular property of O2 production. The ocean and its food chain is a complex system.
westurner 4y ago
"Hemp twice as effective at capturing carbon as trees, UK researcher says" (2021) https://hempindustrydaily.com/hemp-twice-as-effective-at-capturing-carbon-than-trees-uk-researcher-says/ https://hempindustrydaily.com/hemp-twice-as-effective-at-cap... : > “Industrial hemp absorbs between 8 to 15 tonnes of CO2 per hectare (3 to 6 tonnes per acre) of cultivation.” > Comparatively, forests capture 2 to 6 tonnes of carbon per hectare (0.8 to 2.4 tonnes per acre), depending on the region, number of years of growth, type of trees and other factors, Shah said. > Shah, who studies engineered wood, bamboo, natural fiber composites and hemp [at Cambridge, UK], said hemp “offers an incredible scope to grow a better future” while producing fewer emissions than conventional crops and more usable fibers per hectare than forestry. "Cities of the future may be built with algae-grown limestone" (2022) https://www.colorado.edu/today/2022/06/23/cities-future-may-be-built-algae-grown-limestone https://www.colorado.edu/today/2022/06/23/cities-future-may-... : > And limestone isn’t the only product microalgae can create: microalgae’s lipids, proteins, sugars and carbohydrates can be used to produce biofuels, food and cosmetics, meaning these microalgae could also be a source of other, more expensive co-products—helping to offset the costs of limestone production. Carbon sequestration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration
- i5heu 4y ago
  tonnes of carbon per hectare is not relevant. What you need is tonnes of carbon per hectare per year. We don't have enough space to let these plants be there, we need to convert them into coal and throw it back into the mines.
  - samatman 4y ago
    The efficient thing to do is render them into charcoal, yes. Biochar is a great soil amendment, and doesn't oxidize over decades or even centuries, depending. Putting it back in the mines is an option, if we ever need to stop rebuilding topsoil, which is itself getting urgent.
    - dec0dedab0de 4y ago
remote_phone 4y ago
This looks like an article that wanted to give a particular outcome (that trees are not enough) and backed into that out with a study that “proved” it. However I can’t find a link to the actual study in the article. Has there ever been a study that linked the increase in CO2 to the increased logging efforts in places around the world?
- advisedwang 4y ago
  It's linked at the bottom: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gcb.16351 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gcb.16351
- foobarian 4y ago
  It's alarming how much ignorance there is about forests being carbon neutral in steady state. The sooner we can get cars and power plants off fossil fuels the better.
sp332 4y ago
Perennial grasses are a great option for CO2 capture, and one that has been removed across large areas of the Midwest for farms and pastures. But I don't know if it would perform better in poor soil?
Klapaucius 4y ago
Sequestring CO2 is a huge scale problem, and all solutions have significant flaws. Forests require vasts amounts of land, and storage is only assured as long as nobody decides to chop down the forest for other more pressing purposes (looking at you, Brazil). Storing CO2 in oceans (either in the form of "ocean fertilization" or by directly dissolving CO2 in seawater) could have huge and unknown consequences for marine ecosystems. Other solutions such as biochar and enhanced weathering of minerals have limited scalability. As I see it, Geological CO2 storage (CCS) may be the only large-scale practical way going forward, despite all the bad rap it gets due to its historical association with the fossile fuel industry. After all, the excess C in the system came from the ground, and the ground may be the only place able to re-absorb it without significant environmental consequences.
- kokojie 4y ago
  Is it possible to vent the CO2 into space?
  - mplewis 4y ago
    No.
  - sam-s 4y ago
    Everything is possible. Feasible is a different issue. It is hugely expensive (give CO2 escape velocity) and wasteful (CO2 is a valuable substance, containing 2 important elements).
  - gonzo41 4y ago
    Short answer is no. CO2 is sitting at about 400ppm( parts per million(. So take a million things, say golf balls, and paint 400 of them red. The rest white. Put them in a container, then search for the red balls. The goal is to get at least ~150 to 200 before you have to look at the next batch. There's not really a quick way to do that. Green house gas is such a hard problem because it's a dispersed problem. This is where we need to stop removing plant life from the earth, and start seriously considering a little bit of CRISPR to tweak plants to grow fast and absorb as much co2 as possible. It'd also be great if we started iron seeding the southern ocean to kick that ecosystem into gear as we really need evertying to start sequestering carbon.
danans 4y ago
Biochar [1] is a potential approach to long term carbon sequestration using waste biomass that has the positive side effect of enriching agriculture soils and producing biofuels, and it does not require special caverns like CCS. There are potential unknown negative side effects of reducing environmental plant residues from current levels, however, so the choice of feedstock biomass shouldn't be taken lightly. Perhaps it should be made from human waste streams or fast growing grasses from areas that have high regeneration potential. Then again, agriculture itself has fundamentally modified ecosystems for centuries, so there's not much that is timeless or sacred about the current state of industrial agricultural land. If it's a question of whether the leftover crop matter rots and CO2 is released, or is captured long term in biochar, then its compelling to consider it. https://www.patch.io/blog/biochar https://www.patch.io/blog/biochar
debacle 4y ago
Trees are enduring. Certain trees take forever to decay. It's "slow sequestration" but it lasts a long time. Hardwood is very valuable, and growing more valuable, and trees are pretty. Everything else might sequester the carbon faster, but a tree is "forever." And you wouldn't just plant trees on that piece of land. You could interplant other sequestration for probably 15 years before it was no longer viable, or raise livestock, whatever.
photochemsyn 4y ago
The biosphere is essentially in steady-state on human lifetime scales. Estimates are that 100 gigatons of carbon are released to the atmosphere as CO2 by fungal and animal and bacterial action on plant material, and an equivalent 100 gigatons are taken up by photosynthesis. There were periods in the geological timeline where photosynthesis >> respiration and the result was massive accumulation of coal and oil deposits, such as the during the Carboniferous era (~350 million years ago). Of course there are many good reasons to do reforestation - prevention of erosion, a supply of timber, habitat for wildlife, retention of water, etc. Offsetting fossil fuel emissions is not one of those reasons. [edit: on medium length (10K year) timescales, there is an effect of storage of photosynthesis products, one that's involved in the past ~2 million year ice age cycle (with periods of around 100K years). There are two processes: storage of photosynthetic products in the deep ocean, related to decreased circulation, and storage in permafrost, related to growth of permanent ice, that slowly decrease atmospheric CO2 during the descent into ice ages.]
- Gravityloss 4y ago
  While it's a good point that plant sequestration of CO2 is slow compared to digging up coal, oil or methane and burning it, it's not meaningless.
  - photochemsyn 4y ago
    The point is, plant matter is not geologically sequestrated in the present world. The oceans are oxygenated and circulation is pretty strong, and permafrost is decreasing, not increasing. Hence, any photosynthesized carbon material will be returned to the atmosphere as CO2 relatively quickly. The only way to sequester carbon is to make something like limestone (Ca/Mg + CO2 + H2O -> (Ca/Mg)CO3) and that requires calcium or magnesium ions. There are some sources of those ions, but not that many. Another option is production of something like carbon fiber material, or even better, blocks of diamond.
    - wikfwikf 4y ago
      Why can't you just create oil or coal or similar products?
tluyben2 4y ago
‘Not always’. Sure, trees are enduring, nice to look at, make things cooler and might help with carbon dioxide. Let’s plant them anyway.
- baryphonic 4y ago
  I found the arguments in the article rather weak. One was that trees die. True enough. But if you plant 100 trees and 10 die within ten years, that's still quite a bit of CO2 converted into O2. It may not scale so well, sure. But as far as I can tell, neither do wind & solar. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make the best use of them.
  - soperj 4y ago
    Nearly all the trees we plant are planted to cut down eventually.
    - quixoticelixer- 4y ago
      Even so you still have 30-100 years of carbon sequestration.
  - Floegipoky 4y ago
    And for those that die, something else will grow. I found myself thinking "they're literally missing the forest for the trees".
olivermarks 4y ago
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/OceanCarbon https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/OceanCarbon 'Oceans take up carbon dioxide through photosynthesis by plant-like organisms (phytoplankton), as well as by simple chemistry: carbon dioxide dissolves in water. It reacts with seawater, creating carbonic acid. Carbonic acid releases hydrogen ions, which combine with carbonate in seawater to form bicarbonate, a form of carbon that doesn’t escape the ocean easily'. We need to be doing more to enhance the performance of the half of the planet that is covered by water and which is the primary source of carbon dioxide processing imo
oliwary 4y ago
I recently looked up the difference in CO2 emissions between burning 1kg wood vs 1kg petrol. Surprisingly, the values are relatively close: Burning 1kg wood releases 1.65 - 1.8 kg of CO2. [0] Burning 1kg of crude oil releases 3.16 kg of CO2. [1][2] I would have expected the carbon density of oil to be much higher! To me, this suggests that a very naïve approach of growing trees and storing them in the places where we obtained the oil would be a hypothetically feasible way of significantly reducing the CO2 content in the air. And that is before the wood has been turned into charcoal etc. What am I missing? [0] https://www.kaltimber.com/blog/2017/6/19/how-much-co2-is-stored-in-1-kg-of-wood https://www.kaltimber.com/blog/2017/6/19/how-much-co2-is-sto... [1] https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-calculator-calculations-and-references https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-ca... [2] https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Barrels_of_oil_equivalent https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Barrels_of_oil_equiv...
- tlb 4y ago
  Oil doesn’t come from huge caverns that we could drop trees into. Oil is often deep underground, soaked into porous rock. So wood would have to be liquified before attempting to pump it into oil wells, and it ruins the well for future use. Wood is valuable and other plant material is similar carbon/kg, so the low-hanging fruit is to take agricultural waste (currently burned or left to rot) and bury it. Hauling all that straw around burns a lot of fuel, so it’s not clear how well it scales compared to other approaches.
  - vkou 4y ago
    > so the low-hanging fruit is to take agricultural waste (currently burned or left to rot) and bury it. Which would, as in the case with 'cut and bury trees' deplete the soil of non-carbon nutrients. There's a reason farmers leave that waste 'to rot'.
    - quixoticelixer- 4y ago
      You can pretty easily replace those nutrients though.
mountaintimefrm 4y ago
So having read the article summary, then the research paper, then reading the article summary again... it seems that the summary isn't at all an accurate summary of the research paper, but rather a narrow focus on the suboptimal cases where tree growing isn't super effective at sequestering carbon. It sort of completely ignores the cases where they observed enhanced carbon sequestration, increases in soil organic carbon, enhanced soil nitrogen availability, etc. The emphatic message of the research paper is basically like, "tree growing to sequester carbon is very complicated, there's a lot we don't know, and there are a ton of different outcomes depending on how/where the tree growing is carried out." One part of the paper I found most interesting was the section on nitrogen fixing microorganisms; they made it seem like the nitrogen fixation occurs via microbes pulling nitrogen from the soil and making it available to the plants. However my understanding is that those nitrogen fixing microbes pull N from the air, not the soil. Even good ol' wikipedia says "The bacteria are filamentous and convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia via the enzyme nitrogenase, a process known as nitrogen fixation." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankia) ... Undoubtedly there are microbes that can mine nitrogen from the soil, but why focus on those when the real bang-for-your-buck nitrogen fixation occurs when pulling nitrogen from the atmosphere. Anyhow, great research paper, crappy summary.
- frazbin 4y ago
  hm not sure but I think at high growth rates the majority of soil N does come from decomposition even when nitrogen fixation is present.
- OJFord 4y ago
  Regarding nitrogen fixing, my understanding is that 'green manure' & cover crops take from the air, leave in the soil - but microorganisms sounds like it's more in the context of composting, where whatever waste material is 'broken down'. So not 'soil' in the sense of 'it was already there anyway', but rather.. 'in the ground but needing to be made smaller and more available'.
  - shagie 4y ago
    Cover crops have a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen fixing bacteria that they maintain in their roots. When the crop is harvested (and the roots die), the nitrogen that was fixed by the bacteria in the roots remains in the soil. Free living, nitrogen fixing bacteria are free living and have a protein that allows them to fix nitrogen to allow faster growth than the bacteria that need to get their nitrogen through other processes. They are often anaerobic (or functionally anaerobic) and so flourish in areas that are oxygen poor (like soil and decomposing organic matter) and by fixing the nitrogen present they enable other organisms to live there (their nitrogen fixing allows fungus to become established in the decomposing organic matter - the bacteria themselves aren't doing the decomposition). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paenibacillus_polymyxa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paenibacillus_polymyxa is one such species of nitrogen fixing bacteria that forms a biofilm on plant roots, fixes nitrogen, and produces a substance that makes the plant roots more resistant to other pathogens.
Tyndale 4y ago
TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
Now lets find a way to sequester volcanic CO2!
Floegipoky 4y ago
> The researchers also warn that the actual planting of trees can have major negative effects. A heath or tundra-like land is a good carbon sink as it is. If machines roll in to prepare the soil for planting, there is a high risk that the carbon bound in the soil will be released into the atmosphere. X is harmful if you go out of your way to do X in the most harmful way. How insightful! /s
known 4y ago
knoebber 4y ago
A redwood tree can live for more than 2000 years. That seems plenty long for carbon sequestration. We should pay the logging companies to save a certain number of trees instead of cutting them every 30 or so years.
- toast0 4y ago
  When the trees are logged for use as lumber, the carbon is sequestered into structures and new trees are typically planted (or allowed to grow) for future logging, capturing carbon in the meantime.
  - knoebber 4y ago
    Good point! I wonder if a 1000 year old tree would gather more or less carbon over it's lifetime than 20 separate 50 year old trees?
    - zbrozek 4y ago
      I recall reading somewhere that trees follow a sigmoid growth pattern, reaching a maturity where they no longer create a whole lot more biomass. I think the 20 separate trees would do better.
    - quixoticelixer- 4y ago
      Depends on the trees but if we are talking about redwoods its certainly more for the 1000 year old tree.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
  Giant Sequoias need forrest fires to reproduce. Their pine cones won't open without sufficient heat. This makes sense, if you consider the dense forests these trees create.
  - knoebber 4y ago
    Older / larger redwoods can survive intense fires. Their bark is fire resistant.
Floegipoky 4y ago
We need to plant trees to "ride the wave" of climate change by mitigating ecological collapse and desertification. Carbon sequestration is just gravy; from the estimates I've seen the time scale is, IMO, beyond the scope of our species.
VBprogrammer 4y ago
Planting monocultures of trees is probably not ideal for plenty of reasons. Maybe there is some argument for re-wilding, allowing land to return to its natural (or as natural as it can given the proliferation of non-native species in the adjacent area).
- quixoticelixer- 4y ago
  Planting monoculture also has big advantages
anon291 4y ago
Planting tree in Savannah is a terrible idea that no one is suggesting However planting new forests in forested areas, and harvesting trees periodically to encourage new growth is a great idea
simple10 4y ago
Trees need to be cut and buried to effectively sequester carbon. Here's a detailed article on the technique https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0680-3-1 https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0...
- vkou 4y ago
  Won't this result in soil depletion, as you bury vital non-carbon nutrients?
  - simple10 4y ago
    Good question. Maybe it depends on how deep they're buried and how far the nutrients leach into the surrounding soil.
jokoon 4y ago
I wonder if there are plants/trees that grow fast and capture a lot of CO2, that you could just cut early, bury, plant another and repeat. Maybe a GMO kind of tree that just grows fast? I've read that it's the young trees that capture a lot of CO2. I guess one could imagine large areas dedicated for this kind of operation, but it's really difficult to know if it would really be effective, and those plants could become invasive. The best solution is still to stop using cars and airplanes, ban plastics, force companies to make durable and repairable products, degrowing the economy and enforce sobriety everywhere. I know most americans refuse to listen to de-growth, but they need to change their mind quickly.
- quixoticelixer- 4y ago
  There are those trees but the difficult bit it finding a cheap was to bury thousands of tonnes of wood so that it won't decompose.
ThinkBeat 4y ago
Trees absorb while growing. Reach "max CO2" At which point you need to cut down the trees and plant the next generation. You somehow store the trees so they will not have any risk of releasing the CO2 again.(like if they burn) or at least that is was Neal Stephenson wrote in his latest book. (fiction is always great for scientific knowledge)
- arbuge 4y ago
  Building with the lumber from them is one way of storing them. Even that is not infinite though, though it could buy you a lot more time until renewables and possibly CCS become more viable.
  - ThinkBeat 4y ago
    True. As long as you can keep the houses from catching fire. I do admit we have a lot of new knowledge and technologyy that radically improves fire security
- quixoticelixer- 4y ago
  Most trees take >100 years to reach "max CO2"
hinkley 4y ago
My native plant friend has a rant I've heard twice and I gather he's given countless times. The logistics of a wetland restoration are that you get a lump of money to get a group to go out and stick plants in the ground, but the problem is that in an intact habitat plants compliment each other. Some won't grow next to tall plants, others will only grow next to tall plants. So a restoration should ideally be a series of planting events over three or four years, but that's either not 'sexy' enough for the financial and public policy people, or doesn't have the sense of closure they're chasing. Mass tree plantings aren't fundamentally different, and doing mass anything means disturbing the soil. The current wisdom is that there's a point of no return with soil compaction, where if you cross it, there are only two solutions: One is to raise the surface area of the soil to increase the distance, the other is is to wait for the next ice age to scrape it all up and precipitate it back out. Those compaction layers also affect the flow of groundwater, so building upward only solves part of your problem. And it's heavy work, so you're again tromping the ecosystem you're trying to save. The moral of the story is that if you disturb an area and end up with 90% dead trees, you may have done more harm than good.
- Floegipoky 4y ago
  I bet your friend would be into mass "Earl comes by every year with a few buckets of native seed"- no closure, and definitely not sexy
  - thechao 4y ago
    I've been doing this to my lawn (central Texas): putting in a turf varietal of the native Texas Buffalo grass. This year, we had a 5ish month drought with a couple months of 105° daytime temps. My Buffalo went dormant; all of my neighbors' Bermuda died: the soil temp went too high for it. Soil temp death is something I've been warning people about for years. It started raining, again, a couple weeks ago: my lawn is a lush, bright green, native surface (with Butterflies, again!); the rest of the street is gray mush.
    - Floegipoky 4y ago
      Hopefully your neighbors see the difference and a few decide to take your lead!
michaelwww 4y ago
I don't understand people who like to point out the planting trees is not always as green as people think it is. Planting trees is always good in my book. We can plant trees and do the better thing. "quitting smoking is not always an effective way of avoiding cancer" "walking in nature is not always effective in preventing heart attack" "quitting gambling is not always an effective way of avoiding bankruptcy"
- Night_Thastus 4y ago
  If done incorrectly, it can cause ecological harm and provide little benefit. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, just that it should be done carefully.
  - michaelwww 4y ago
    That's just common sense. You don't waste your time planting trees where they won't grow or will crowd out existing plants.
    - Night_Thastus 4y ago
      Something something about common sense isn't all that common. :) China has had some issues with planting absolutely massive monocultures that end up looking nice on paper but being bad in the long run.
      - michaelwww 4y ago
        The CCP aren't exactly experts on the environment. They are quite careless about disposing toxic waste in rivers. A friend of mine told me this story recently. While he was working for Apple, he visited a factory and the owner started crying in his presence how Apple was telling them they would be dropped if they didn't stop polluting and he said it was too late, that the land they were on was toxic and Apple dropping them would put hundreds out of work.
ajuc 4y ago
My main problem with planting trees is - you're not planting seeds, but seedlings. These seedlings were already growing elsewhere, you just burned some fuel to transport them to another place. Additionally at least in my region whenever I leave a plot of land unattended for a few years - tree appear on it. If you leave it for more than a decade it becomes a forest. So - it seems the important part is assigning land for forests and not bothering the trees that will grow there. The tree-planting is optional.
- quixoticelixer- 4y ago
  The amount of fuel used by transporting 10,000 seedlings is easily sequestered by just one of them growing.
  - ajuc 4y ago
    But it was growing already. The bottleneck is land allocated for trees, not the tree-planting procedure (in fact it's automatic once you have some trees in vicinity).
    - quixoticelixer- 4y ago
      No, you get trees for planting from a nursery, not from the wild. And tree planting is not "automatic"
      - ajuc 4y ago
        Are you sure? A forest grew on my grandpa's field automatically about 15 years after he stopped using it (mostly as a cow pasture). Nobody planted anything, we just left it be. In 2008 this was a grass field, we made campfires there. Now it's a forest: https://goo.gl/maps/rSeprtz7orYAwVPY8 https://goo.gl/maps/rSeprtz7orYAwVPY8 In fact if you don't mow a lawn for a few months saplings start appearing :) Forests are perfectly good at spreading by themselves, they evolved for millions of years to do that. If you want more trees you just need to let them grow.
DayDollar 4y ago
Ironically, ice fracking large amounts of stone and filtering atmosphere gas rich water through that is more effective. But you goto expell large amounts of energy to turn the rock "spongy".
Storeblog 4y ago
Storeblog 4y ago
throwaway12388 4y ago
No matter what the paper says. Growing trees is good for the environment in large. It caputures some carbon and gives shade as a result you are required to run AC less and they can also become homes for birds and ants
elmolino89 4y ago
If the nitrogen is the factor limiting the growth then there is a simple trick: plant trees able to fix nitrogen. Like plenty of tree species from the Fabaceae (pea) family. Probably using species with low water rquirements.
egberts1 4y ago
Great research paper; absolutely crappy and disingenuous summary in HN post by the FOP.
onetokeoverthe 4y ago

122 points by hhs 4y ago

Yes you need to build ecosystems not just plant trees. Monoculture tree stands are often mostly empty of other life. You need to plant a variety of native species keeping track of keystone species and year round food production so that your forest supports other life.

TSiege 4y ago
Absolutely. Our ways of thinking about the environment are trapped in the past. Where we focus on one variable and miss the importance and resilience that comes from a holistic approach. We need to be encouraging the right ecosystems for the right environment. For example, we need to be encouraging native grassland ecosystems in the great plains, not forests. Native grasses can have root systems 8 feet deep to deal with droughts and erosion, a forest just doesn't make sense there
- wikfwikf 4y ago
  I think this way of thinking is trapped in the past. The reality of atmospheric carbon is that we have to get rid of it or face mass extinction. Trying to build some nostalgic idea of a untouched ecosystem in tune with 'nature' is just a feelgood ideology. We're actually faced with an engineering project - the first planet that our species will terraform.
Ensorceled 4y ago
There is a grove of red pine near where I grew up that was planted row on row about 15 feet apart. These trees are 70+ years old but most of them are only 7-8 inches in diameter. The floor of this grove is just red with pine needles, nothing else can grow and any animals are just passing through. Whenever I hear about planting trees for "carbon sequestration", I immediately remember walking through that forest and thinking how quiet and dead it felt.
goda90 4y ago
A "keystone species" that is important for a lot of ecosystems but on the surface seems contradictory to the goal of carbon sequestration is wild fires. A stand of coniferous trees can block out light year round, limiting all other species of plants from growing underneath, but a fire will make the holes in the canopy that they need to spring up. Likewise, grasslands, which sequester a lot of carbon in their roots/soil, depend on fire to keep out trees and letting prairie plants thrive.
adolph 4y ago
From Ch 1, Seeing Like a State By James C. Scott: The great simplification of the forest into a "one-commodity machine" was precisely the step that allowed German forestry science to become a rigorous technical and commercial discipline that could be codified and taught. A condition of its rigor was that it severely bracketed, or assumed to be constant, all variables except those bearing directly on the yield of the selected species and on the cost of growing and extracting them. As we shall see with urban planning, revolutionary theory, collectivization, and rural resettlement, a whole world lying "outside the brackets" returned to haunt this technical vision. In the German case, the negative biological and ultimately commercial consequences of the stripped-down forest became painfully obvious only after the second rotation of conifers had been planted. "It took about one century for them [the negative consequences] to show up clearly. Many of the pure stands grew excellently in the first generation but already showed an amazing retrogression in the second generation. The reason for this is a very complex one and only a simplified explanation can be given.... Then the whole nutrient cycle got out of order and eventually was nearly stopped.... Anyway, the drop of one or two site classes [used for grading the quality of timber] during two or three generations of pure spruce is a well known and frequently observed fact. This represents a production loss of 20 to 30 percent." A new term, Waldsterben (forest death), entered the German vocabulary to describe the worst cases. An exceptionally complex process involving soil building, nutrient uptake, and symbiotic relations among fungi, insects, mammals, and flora--which were, and still are, not entirely understood--was apparently disrupted, with serious consequences. Most of these consequences can be traced to the radical simplicity of the scientific forest. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/scott-state.html https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/sc... Azn link for HN Books: https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/dp/0300078153 https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/d...
wikfwikf 4y ago
Why do you care about the forest supporting other life? Isn't the goal just to take carbon out of the atmosphere?
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Ecosystems grow, maintain themselves, and can be better at sequestering carbon. Random example: blue jays plant oak trees. They like acorns, pick them off trees and bury them for later, and forget some. If you have an ecosystem that supports blue jays your forest will expand without fundraisers and government programs. Ecosystems fix carbon in more active biomass than just tree trunks. If you get soil building ecosystems and ecosystems that put more carbon in living creatures, you have less carbon in the atmosphere. The extra CO2 in the atmosphere is like fertilizer, and you can get life to utilize it more and grab more of it out of the atmosphere by supporting it in small ways so it can go on to support itself.
  - wikfwikf 4y ago
    In a forest full of large trees, the carbon in the non-tree biomass is a rounding error. If you can pack the trees slightly closer and almost everything else now finds the environment too hostile to survive, it's probably a net win from a carbon point of view.
- monknomo 4y ago
  The more life a forest supports, generally, the more carbon gets removed and the longer the forest lives.
  - quixoticelixer- 4y ago
    That's not necessarily true
- pastacacioepepe 4y ago
  > Isn't the goal just to take carbon out of the atmosphere? I disagree. We also want to avoid ecological cascade effects in our ecosystems.
TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
Look into permaculture; It is all about restoring natural forest floors! Geoff Lawton and Sepp Holzer are good people to look into.

_8j50 4y ago

Why isn't there more focus on phytoplankton since it produces more O2? Maybe have a device that seeds/catalyzes their growth on every boat?

lapetitejort 4y ago
There's been talk of dumping iron particles into the ocean to to spur phytoplankton growth [0]. [0]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/iron-dumping-ocean-experiment-sparks-controversy/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/iron-dumping-ocea...
gumby 4y ago
This is an area of active research but at the moment essentially all such efforts are banned by the London Protocol. The ocean is 70% of the planet’s surface and, I think, is where a lot of the work should go on.
- smallerfish 4y ago
  > essentially all such efforts are banned by the London Protocol. Interesting, why? Plankton != dumping, right? Could there be contained plankton "farms" that are similar to fish farms?
  - shagie 4y ago
    https://www.whoi.edu/fileserver.do?id=24744&pt=2&p=28442 https://www.whoi.edu/fileserver.do?id=24744&pt=2&p=28442 is specifically on the deliberate introduction of iron into the ocean ecology to stimulate plankton growth.
shagie 4y ago
This is known as the "Geritol solution" and was an idea that was debated back in the early 90s.
TheBlight 4y ago
I don't think you can treat phytoplankton as having this singular property of O2 production. The ocean and its food chain is a complex system.

westurner 4y ago

"Hemp twice as effective at capturing carbon as trees, UK researcher says" (2021) https://hempindustrydaily.com/hemp-twice-as-effective-at-capturing-carbon-than-trees-uk-researcher-says/ https://hempindustrydaily.com/hemp-twice-as-effective-at-cap... : > “Industrial hemp absorbs between 8 to 15 tonnes of CO2 per hectare (3 to 6 tonnes per acre) of cultivation.” > Comparatively, forests capture 2 to 6 tonnes of carbon per hectare (0.8 to 2.4 tonnes per acre), depending on the region, number of years of growth, type of trees and other factors, Shah said. > Shah, who studies engineered wood, bamboo, natural fiber composites and hemp [at Cambridge, UK], said hemp “offers an incredible scope to grow a better future” while producing fewer emissions than conventional crops and more usable fibers per hectare than forestry. "Cities of the future may be built with algae-grown limestone" (2022) https://www.colorado.edu/today/2022/06/23/cities-future-may-be-built-algae-grown-limestone https://www.colorado.edu/today/2022/06/23/cities-future-may-... : > And limestone isn’t the only product microalgae can create: microalgae’s lipids, proteins, sugars and carbohydrates can be used to produce biofuels, food and cosmetics, meaning these microalgae could also be a source of other, more expensive co-products—helping to offset the costs of limestone production. Carbon sequestration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration

i5heu 4y ago
tonnes of carbon per hectare is not relevant. What you need is tonnes of carbon per hectare per year. We don't have enough space to let these plants be there, we need to convert them into coal and throw it back into the mines.
- samatman 4y ago
  The efficient thing to do is render them into charcoal, yes. Biochar is a great soil amendment, and doesn't oxidize over decades or even centuries, depending. Putting it back in the mines is an option, if we ever need to stop rebuilding topsoil, which is itself getting urgent.
  - dec0dedab0de 4y ago

remote_phone 4y ago

This looks like an article that wanted to give a particular outcome (that trees are not enough) and backed into that out with a study that “proved” it. However I can’t find a link to the actual study in the article. Has there ever been a study that linked the increase in CO2 to the increased logging efforts in places around the world?

advisedwang 4y ago
It's linked at the bottom: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gcb.16351 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gcb.16351
foobarian 4y ago
It's alarming how much ignorance there is about forests being carbon neutral in steady state. The sooner we can get cars and power plants off fossil fuels the better.

sp332 4y ago

Perennial grasses are a great option for CO2 capture, and one that has been removed across large areas of the Midwest for farms and pastures. But I don't know if it would perform better in poor soil?

Klapaucius 4y ago

Sequestring CO2 is a huge scale problem, and all solutions have significant flaws. Forests require vasts amounts of land, and storage is only assured as long as nobody decides to chop down the forest for other more pressing purposes (looking at you, Brazil). Storing CO2 in oceans (either in the form of "ocean fertilization" or by directly dissolving CO2 in seawater) could have huge and unknown consequences for marine ecosystems. Other solutions such as biochar and enhanced weathering of minerals have limited scalability. As I see it, Geological CO2 storage (CCS) may be the only large-scale practical way going forward, despite all the bad rap it gets due to its historical association with the fossile fuel industry. After all, the excess C in the system came from the ground, and the ground may be the only place able to re-absorb it without significant environmental consequences.

kokojie 4y ago
Is it possible to vent the CO2 into space?
- mplewis 4y ago
  No.
- sam-s 4y ago
  Everything is possible. Feasible is a different issue. It is hugely expensive (give CO2 escape velocity) and wasteful (CO2 is a valuable substance, containing 2 important elements).
- gonzo41 4y ago
  Short answer is no. CO2 is sitting at about 400ppm( parts per million(. So take a million things, say golf balls, and paint 400 of them red. The rest white. Put them in a container, then search for the red balls. The goal is to get at least ~150 to 200 before you have to look at the next batch. There's not really a quick way to do that. Green house gas is such a hard problem because it's a dispersed problem. This is where we need to stop removing plant life from the earth, and start seriously considering a little bit of CRISPR to tweak plants to grow fast and absorb as much co2 as possible. It'd also be great if we started iron seeding the southern ocean to kick that ecosystem into gear as we really need evertying to start sequestering carbon.

danans 4y ago

Biochar [1] is a potential approach to long term carbon sequestration using waste biomass that has the positive side effect of enriching agriculture soils and producing biofuels, and it does not require special caverns like CCS. There are potential unknown negative side effects of reducing environmental plant residues from current levels, however, so the choice of feedstock biomass shouldn't be taken lightly. Perhaps it should be made from human waste streams or fast growing grasses from areas that have high regeneration potential. Then again, agriculture itself has fundamentally modified ecosystems for centuries, so there's not much that is timeless or sacred about the current state of industrial agricultural land. If it's a question of whether the leftover crop matter rots and CO2 is released, or is captured long term in biochar, then its compelling to consider it. https://www.patch.io/blog/biochar https://www.patch.io/blog/biochar

debacle 4y ago

Trees are enduring. Certain trees take forever to decay. It's "slow sequestration" but it lasts a long time. Hardwood is very valuable, and growing more valuable, and trees are pretty. Everything else might sequester the carbon faster, but a tree is "forever." And you wouldn't just plant trees on that piece of land. You could interplant other sequestration for probably 15 years before it was no longer viable, or raise livestock, whatever.

photochemsyn 4y ago

The biosphere is essentially in steady-state on human lifetime scales. Estimates are that 100 gigatons of carbon are released to the atmosphere as CO2 by fungal and animal and bacterial action on plant material, and an equivalent 100 gigatons are taken up by photosynthesis. There were periods in the geological timeline where photosynthesis >> respiration and the result was massive accumulation of coal and oil deposits, such as the during the Carboniferous era (~350 million years ago). Of course there are many good reasons to do reforestation - prevention of erosion, a supply of timber, habitat for wildlife, retention of water, etc. Offsetting fossil fuel emissions is not one of those reasons. [edit: on medium length (10K year) timescales, there is an effect of storage of photosynthesis products, one that's involved in the past ~2 million year ice age cycle (with periods of around 100K years). There are two processes: storage of photosynthetic products in the deep ocean, related to decreased circulation, and storage in permafrost, related to growth of permanent ice, that slowly decrease atmospheric CO2 during the descent into ice ages.]

Gravityloss 4y ago
While it's a good point that plant sequestration of CO2 is slow compared to digging up coal, oil or methane and burning it, it's not meaningless.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  The point is, plant matter is not geologically sequestrated in the present world. The oceans are oxygenated and circulation is pretty strong, and permafrost is decreasing, not increasing. Hence, any photosynthesized carbon material will be returned to the atmosphere as CO2 relatively quickly. The only way to sequester carbon is to make something like limestone (Ca/Mg + CO2 + H2O -> (Ca/Mg)CO3) and that requires calcium or magnesium ions. There are some sources of those ions, but not that many. Another option is production of something like carbon fiber material, or even better, blocks of diamond.
  - wikfwikf 4y ago
    Why can't you just create oil or coal or similar products?

tluyben2 4y ago

‘Not always’. Sure, trees are enduring, nice to look at, make things cooler and might help with carbon dioxide. Let’s plant them anyway.

baryphonic 4y ago
I found the arguments in the article rather weak. One was that trees die. True enough. But if you plant 100 trees and 10 die within ten years, that's still quite a bit of CO2 converted into O2. It may not scale so well, sure. But as far as I can tell, neither do wind & solar. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make the best use of them.
- soperj 4y ago
  Nearly all the trees we plant are planted to cut down eventually.
  - quixoticelixer- 4y ago
    Even so you still have 30-100 years of carbon sequestration.
- Floegipoky 4y ago
  And for those that die, something else will grow. I found myself thinking "they're literally missing the forest for the trees".

olivermarks 4y ago

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/OceanCarbon https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/OceanCarbon 'Oceans take up carbon dioxide through photosynthesis by plant-like organisms (phytoplankton), as well as by simple chemistry: carbon dioxide dissolves in water. It reacts with seawater, creating carbonic acid. Carbonic acid releases hydrogen ions, which combine with carbonate in seawater to form bicarbonate, a form of carbon that doesn’t escape the ocean easily'. We need to be doing more to enhance the performance of the half of the planet that is covered by water and which is the primary source of carbon dioxide processing imo

oliwary 4y ago

I recently looked up the difference in CO2 emissions between burning 1kg wood vs 1kg petrol. Surprisingly, the values are relatively close: Burning 1kg wood releases 1.65 - 1.8 kg of CO2. [0] Burning 1kg of crude oil releases 3.16 kg of CO2. [1][2] I would have expected the carbon density of oil to be much higher! To me, this suggests that a very naïve approach of growing trees and storing them in the places where we obtained the oil would be a hypothetically feasible way of significantly reducing the CO2 content in the air. And that is before the wood has been turned into charcoal etc. What am I missing? [0] https://www.kaltimber.com/blog/2017/6/19/how-much-co2-is-stored-in-1-kg-of-wood https://www.kaltimber.com/blog/2017/6/19/how-much-co2-is-sto... [1] https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-calculator-calculations-and-references https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-ca... [2] https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Barrels_of_oil_equivalent https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Barrels_of_oil_equiv...

tlb 4y ago
Oil doesn’t come from huge caverns that we could drop trees into. Oil is often deep underground, soaked into porous rock. So wood would have to be liquified before attempting to pump it into oil wells, and it ruins the well for future use. Wood is valuable and other plant material is similar carbon/kg, so the low-hanging fruit is to take agricultural waste (currently burned or left to rot) and bury it. Hauling all that straw around burns a lot of fuel, so it’s not clear how well it scales compared to other approaches.
- vkou 4y ago
  > so the low-hanging fruit is to take agricultural waste (currently burned or left to rot) and bury it. Which would, as in the case with 'cut and bury trees' deplete the soil of non-carbon nutrients. There's a reason farmers leave that waste 'to rot'.
  - quixoticelixer- 4y ago
    You can pretty easily replace those nutrients though.

mountaintimefrm 4y ago

So having read the article summary, then the research paper, then reading the article summary again... it seems that the summary isn't at all an accurate summary of the research paper, but rather a narrow focus on the suboptimal cases where tree growing isn't super effective at sequestering carbon. It sort of completely ignores the cases where they observed enhanced carbon sequestration, increases in soil organic carbon, enhanced soil nitrogen availability, etc. The emphatic message of the research paper is basically like, "tree growing to sequester carbon is very complicated, there's a lot we don't know, and there are a ton of different outcomes depending on how/where the tree growing is carried out." One part of the paper I found most interesting was the section on nitrogen fixing microorganisms; they made it seem like the nitrogen fixation occurs via microbes pulling nitrogen from the soil and making it available to the plants. However my understanding is that those nitrogen fixing microbes pull N from the air, not the soil. Even good ol' wikipedia says "The bacteria are filamentous and convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia via the enzyme nitrogenase, a process known as nitrogen fixation." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankia) ... Undoubtedly there are microbes that can mine nitrogen from the soil, but why focus on those when the real bang-for-your-buck nitrogen fixation occurs when pulling nitrogen from the atmosphere. Anyhow, great research paper, crappy summary.

frazbin 4y ago
hm not sure but I think at high growth rates the majority of soil N does come from decomposition even when nitrogen fixation is present.
OJFord 4y ago
Regarding nitrogen fixing, my understanding is that 'green manure' & cover crops take from the air, leave in the soil - but microorganisms sounds like it's more in the context of composting, where whatever waste material is 'broken down'. So not 'soil' in the sense of 'it was already there anyway', but rather.. 'in the ground but needing to be made smaller and more available'.
- shagie 4y ago
  Cover crops have a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen fixing bacteria that they maintain in their roots. When the crop is harvested (and the roots die), the nitrogen that was fixed by the bacteria in the roots remains in the soil. Free living, nitrogen fixing bacteria are free living and have a protein that allows them to fix nitrogen to allow faster growth than the bacteria that need to get their nitrogen through other processes. They are often anaerobic (or functionally anaerobic) and so flourish in areas that are oxygen poor (like soil and decomposing organic matter) and by fixing the nitrogen present they enable other organisms to live there (their nitrogen fixing allows fungus to become established in the decomposing organic matter - the bacteria themselves aren't doing the decomposition). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paenibacillus_polymyxa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paenibacillus_polymyxa is one such species of nitrogen fixing bacteria that forms a biofilm on plant roots, fixes nitrogen, and produces a substance that makes the plant roots more resistant to other pathogens.

Tyndale 4y ago

TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago

Now lets find a way to sequester volcanic CO2!

Floegipoky 4y ago

> The researchers also warn that the actual planting of trees can have major negative effects. A heath or tundra-like land is a good carbon sink as it is. If machines roll in to prepare the soil for planting, there is a high risk that the carbon bound in the soil will be released into the atmosphere. X is harmful if you go out of your way to do X in the most harmful way. How insightful! /s

known 4y ago

knoebber 4y ago

A redwood tree can live for more than 2000 years. That seems plenty long for carbon sequestration. We should pay the logging companies to save a certain number of trees instead of cutting them every 30 or so years.

toast0 4y ago
When the trees are logged for use as lumber, the carbon is sequestered into structures and new trees are typically planted (or allowed to grow) for future logging, capturing carbon in the meantime.
- knoebber 4y ago
  Good point! I wonder if a 1000 year old tree would gather more or less carbon over it's lifetime than 20 separate 50 year old trees?
  - zbrozek 4y ago
    I recall reading somewhere that trees follow a sigmoid growth pattern, reaching a maturity where they no longer create a whole lot more biomass. I think the 20 separate trees would do better.
  - quixoticelixer- 4y ago
    Depends on the trees but if we are talking about redwoods its certainly more for the 1000 year old tree.
TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
Giant Sequoias need forrest fires to reproduce. Their pine cones won't open without sufficient heat. This makes sense, if you consider the dense forests these trees create.
- knoebber 4y ago
  Older / larger redwoods can survive intense fires. Their bark is fire resistant.

Floegipoky 4y ago

We need to plant trees to "ride the wave" of climate change by mitigating ecological collapse and desertification. Carbon sequestration is just gravy; from the estimates I've seen the time scale is, IMO, beyond the scope of our species.

VBprogrammer 4y ago

Planting monocultures of trees is probably not ideal for plenty of reasons. Maybe there is some argument for re-wilding, allowing land to return to its natural (or as natural as it can given the proliferation of non-native species in the adjacent area).

quixoticelixer- 4y ago
Planting monoculture also has big advantages

anon291 4y ago

Planting tree in Savannah is a terrible idea that no one is suggesting However planting new forests in forested areas, and harvesting trees periodically to encourage new growth is a great idea

simple10 4y ago

Trees need to be cut and buried to effectively sequester carbon. Here's a detailed article on the technique https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0680-3-1 https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0...

vkou 4y ago
Won't this result in soil depletion, as you bury vital non-carbon nutrients?
- simple10 4y ago
  Good question. Maybe it depends on how deep they're buried and how far the nutrients leach into the surrounding soil.

jokoon 4y ago

I wonder if there are plants/trees that grow fast and capture a lot of CO2, that you could just cut early, bury, plant another and repeat. Maybe a GMO kind of tree that just grows fast? I've read that it's the young trees that capture a lot of CO2. I guess one could imagine large areas dedicated for this kind of operation, but it's really difficult to know if it would really be effective, and those plants could become invasive. The best solution is still to stop using cars and airplanes, ban plastics, force companies to make durable and repairable products, degrowing the economy and enforce sobriety everywhere. I know most americans refuse to listen to de-growth, but they need to change their mind quickly.

quixoticelixer- 4y ago
There are those trees but the difficult bit it finding a cheap was to bury thousands of tonnes of wood so that it won't decompose.

ThinkBeat 4y ago

Trees absorb while growing. Reach "max CO2" At which point you need to cut down the trees and plant the next generation. You somehow store the trees so they will not have any risk of releasing the CO2 again.(like if they burn) or at least that is was Neal Stephenson wrote in his latest book. (fiction is always great for scientific knowledge)

arbuge 4y ago
Building with the lumber from them is one way of storing them. Even that is not infinite though, though it could buy you a lot more time until renewables and possibly CCS become more viable.
- ThinkBeat 4y ago
  True. As long as you can keep the houses from catching fire. I do admit we have a lot of new knowledge and technologyy that radically improves fire security
quixoticelixer- 4y ago
Most trees take >100 years to reach "max CO2"

hinkley 4y ago

My native plant friend has a rant I've heard twice and I gather he's given countless times. The logistics of a wetland restoration are that you get a lump of money to get a group to go out and stick plants in the ground, but the problem is that in an intact habitat plants compliment each other. Some won't grow next to tall plants, others will only grow next to tall plants. So a restoration should ideally be a series of planting events over three or four years, but that's either not 'sexy' enough for the financial and public policy people, or doesn't have the sense of closure they're chasing. Mass tree plantings aren't fundamentally different, and doing mass anything means disturbing the soil. The current wisdom is that there's a point of no return with soil compaction, where if you cross it, there are only two solutions: One is to raise the surface area of the soil to increase the distance, the other is is to wait for the next ice age to scrape it all up and precipitate it back out. Those compaction layers also affect the flow of groundwater, so building upward only solves part of your problem. And it's heavy work, so you're again tromping the ecosystem you're trying to save. The moral of the story is that if you disturb an area and end up with 90% dead trees, you may have done more harm than good.

Floegipoky 4y ago
I bet your friend would be into mass "Earl comes by every year with a few buckets of native seed"- no closure, and definitely not sexy
- thechao 4y ago
  I've been doing this to my lawn (central Texas): putting in a turf varietal of the native Texas Buffalo grass. This year, we had a 5ish month drought with a couple months of 105° daytime temps. My Buffalo went dormant; all of my neighbors' Bermuda died: the soil temp went too high for it. Soil temp death is something I've been warning people about for years. It started raining, again, a couple weeks ago: my lawn is a lush, bright green, native surface (with Butterflies, again!); the rest of the street is gray mush.
  - Floegipoky 4y ago
    Hopefully your neighbors see the difference and a few decide to take your lead!

michaelwww 4y ago

I don't understand people who like to point out the planting trees is not always as green as people think it is. Planting trees is always good in my book. We can plant trees and do the better thing. "quitting smoking is not always an effective way of avoiding cancer" "walking in nature is not always effective in preventing heart attack" "quitting gambling is not always an effective way of avoiding bankruptcy"

Night_Thastus 4y ago
If done incorrectly, it can cause ecological harm and provide little benefit. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, just that it should be done carefully.
- michaelwww 4y ago
  That's just common sense. You don't waste your time planting trees where they won't grow or will crowd out existing plants.
  - Night_Thastus 4y ago
    Something something about common sense isn't all that common. :) China has had some issues with planting absolutely massive monocultures that end up looking nice on paper but being bad in the long run.
    - michaelwww 4y ago
      The CCP aren't exactly experts on the environment. They are quite careless about disposing toxic waste in rivers. A friend of mine told me this story recently. While he was working for Apple, he visited a factory and the owner started crying in his presence how Apple was telling them they would be dropped if they didn't stop polluting and he said it was too late, that the land they were on was toxic and Apple dropping them would put hundreds out of work.

ajuc 4y ago

My main problem with planting trees is - you're not planting seeds, but seedlings. These seedlings were already growing elsewhere, you just burned some fuel to transport them to another place. Additionally at least in my region whenever I leave a plot of land unattended for a few years - tree appear on it. If you leave it for more than a decade it becomes a forest. So - it seems the important part is assigning land for forests and not bothering the trees that will grow there. The tree-planting is optional.

quixoticelixer- 4y ago
The amount of fuel used by transporting 10,000 seedlings is easily sequestered by just one of them growing.
- ajuc 4y ago
  But it was growing already. The bottleneck is land allocated for trees, not the tree-planting procedure (in fact it's automatic once you have some trees in vicinity).
  - quixoticelixer- 4y ago
    No, you get trees for planting from a nursery, not from the wild. And tree planting is not "automatic"
    - ajuc 4y ago
      Are you sure? A forest grew on my grandpa's field automatically about 15 years after he stopped using it (mostly as a cow pasture). Nobody planted anything, we just left it be. In 2008 this was a grass field, we made campfires there. Now it's a forest: https://goo.gl/maps/rSeprtz7orYAwVPY8 https://goo.gl/maps/rSeprtz7orYAwVPY8 In fact if you don't mow a lawn for a few months saplings start appearing :) Forests are perfectly good at spreading by themselves, they evolved for millions of years to do that. If you want more trees you just need to let them grow.

DayDollar 4y ago

Ironically, ice fracking large amounts of stone and filtering atmosphere gas rich water through that is more effective. But you goto expell large amounts of energy to turn the rock "spongy".

Storeblog 4y ago

throwaway12388 4y ago

No matter what the paper says. Growing trees is good for the environment in large. It caputures some carbon and gives shade as a result you are required to run AC less and they can also become homes for birds and ants

elmolino89 4y ago

If the nitrogen is the factor limiting the growth then there is a simple trick: plant trees able to fix nitrogen. Like plenty of tree species from the Fabaceae (pea) family. Probably using species with low water rquirements.

egberts1 4y ago

Great research paper; absolutely crappy and disingenuous summary in HN post by the FOP.

onetokeoverthe 4y ago