3 ms·
The numbers don't look right, they would imply human CO2 generation of over 100 million tons per day.
by MichaelZuo 3y ago
The numbers don't look right, they would imply human CO2 generation of over 100 million tons per day.
- dvh 3y agoThat's 14kg per human per day. Seems about right.
- onos 3y agoAnd one tree does 25kg per year. So each person should plant 14 * 365 / 25= 204 trees. Seems very reasonable.
- johndunne 3y agoConsider UK; 204 trees * 65 million people = 13.2 billion trees. Woodland estimates there's approx 3 billion trees in the UK now. That's over 4 fold increase in trees every year. I doubt the terrain/nature could support such a significant increase in just one year, let alone a number of years. But I like the idea of more trees. https://woodlands.co.uk/blog/woodland-economics/how-many-trees-are-there-in-the-uk-will-tree-planting-help-much https://woodlands.co.uk/blog/woodland-economics/how-many-tre...
- kitd 3y agoThe UK is one of the least forested countries in Europe. It is very doable.
- uoaei 3y agoIt used to be covered in trees! Surely it can support forests again.
- onos 3y agoYou don’t need a new tree each year cause they can live decades. UK 4xing it’s tree coverage sounds doable and nice!
- johndunne 3y ago:facepalm: you’re right! Just 4xing alone is enough to cover the population’s emission. I’m totally up for upping the tree population in the UK.
- tda 3y agoThis planting should happen one time, not yearly. Of course every dead tree should be replaced though. If there are 204 trees capturing CO2 for every human (and these numbers are correct) we should effectively be carbon neutral. No idea if that is even remotely realistic though
- pydry 3y agoUK population density is 715 / sq mi. World average excluding Antarctica is 154. There are less densely populated places where more trees could be planted.
- 3m 3y agoYes but that is skewed by the South of England. There's a TON of hardly populated land in Scotland/Wales.
- vlovich123 3y agoHumans emit about 35 billion tons a year according to the reports which comes out to emit 100 million tons per day.
- 14 3y agoThen we will need to see these machines scale up over time like we see solar doing now. I hope one day industry will be required to match their carbon capture with devices like this to their carbon output. Perhaps someone will make a solar farm in tandem with these co2 capture devices with the fans from these devices cooling the solar panels as solar panels work more efficiently at cooler times (1). 1: https://www.solar.com/learn/do-solar-panels-work-less-efficiently-at-certain-temperatures/ https://www.solar.com/learn/do-solar-panels-work-less-effici...
- vlovich123 3y agoIt’s not enough to get to zero emissions. We’re well past the point where we need to get to negative. And afaik these machines can’t scale to even a fraction of the way to net 0 unless we start building out fission/break through with fusion. Think of it this way. It’s more energy intensive to capture carbon than it was to generate the electricity from that carbon. The amount of energy required to make this work requires you to generate roughly the same order of magnitude of energy as has been emitted through the burning of fossil fuels since the beginning. I’m a big fission supporter but I doubt even fission could get to the cost scaling needed to generate all this energy effectively. Even fusion might struggle since we don’t actually yet know what the unit economics of it will be. We might get lucky and figure out a way where recapturing carbon is net cheaper energy than it generated but I doubt it as that feels like it would be very close to a perpetual motion machine scenario.