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Plant trees. Chop trees. Build stuff. Bury wood. Repeat. Note: it doesn't mean keep burning gas at the same time.
by ktzar 3y ago
Plant trees. Chop trees. Build stuff. Bury wood. Repeat.
Note: it doesn't mean keep burning gas at the same time.
- cogman10 3y agoYeah, this is pretty much the only solution. The only step I'd add is "make charcoal, bury charcoal". That ultimately releases H2O back to the ecosystem and you only bury the carbon. As a bonus, it's an exothermic process, so you could recapture some of that energy to make electricity.
- RecycledEle 3y agoIf you are worried about rising sea levels, why try to release the H2O back into the ecosystem?
- Tostino 3y agoThat's...not how this works at all. Is this a joke?
- RecycledEle 3y agoNo, it's not a joke. Please explain this to me.
- Tostino 3y agoThe rising sea levels aren't about more water being in the environment, it's about more water being in liquid form rather than stored in solid form in glaciers on land. The small amount of water being in a tree trunk vs released back into the atmosphere isn't even close to registering.
- RecycledEle 3y agoBut enough water does matter. By the argument of insignificance, all North American CO2 emissions from 2024 will not matter.
- Tostino 3y agoUse actual evidence for your argument. You claimed ignorance, why should I believe anything you say?
- ben_w 3y agoThe water cycle is much faster than the carbon cycle, so that makes very little difference. But even if it didn't work like that, rising sea levels are only one of many different impacts of increased CO2 in the atmosphere.
- parthianshotgun 3y agoCouldn't you just bury the wood? Ala Hugelkultur
- AstralStorm 3y agoYou could but biological processes are liable to turn it partially into outright methane or a peat bog, which can emit methane.
- kragen 3y agonote that methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide
- FartyMcFarter 3y agoI'm not an expert, but presumably you need to bury wood in a sterile place so that it doesn't get eaten by bugs/microbes and turned back into greenhouse gases?
- actionfromafar 3y agoBury in a dry place, or under water without much oxygen. Mines could work in both cases. Basically filling up coal mines with coal again.
- AstralStorm 3y agoSo, transport the wood emitting some GHG doing it. No problems with that plan whatsoever. ;) Actually mines tend to get wet and require serious drainage (pumps) to exploit. They're only dry for the moment, over time they will become waterlogged.
- kragen 3y agothe greenhouse gases emitted by any conceivable transportation range are an order of magnitude less than those captured please do the math instead of just posting bullshit without any regard to whether it is true or false you're right about the mines tho
- lukas099 3y agoSome of it will turn into gases. Some will turn into those bugs and microbes and other forms of biomass.
- FartyMcFarter 3y ago> Some of it will turn into gases. Yeah, and this is definitely bad. > Some will turn into those bugs and microbes and other forms of biomass. This is the part I'm not sure about. Does this decrease the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere enough to counter said increase in greenhouse gases?
- Euphorbium 3y agoThere is a huge movement in my country to entirely ban ikea from the country. It would be as usefull as shutting down all the nuclear powerplants.
- etrautmann 3y agoWhat is the argument here?
- Euphorbium 3y agoThey say that there is no biodiversity in forests made for wood harvest.
- fomine3 3y agoI suspect that other options aren't quite better than Ikea
- Euphorbium 3y agoMuch, MUCH worse.
- leoedin 3y agoMy favourite approach is to make biochar. You heat the wood in an oxygen free environment and so can control the amount of hydrocarbons you extract. The carbon left over is fairly inert and so relatively easy to store long term. You can get enough hydrocarbon out of the process to pay for it. If we redirected the bulk of our wood waste through a process like that - rather than it all being burnt (and so releasing all of the carbon in the wood) - we could probably sequester a few percent of global emissions.
- jvanderbot 3y agoYeah I never understood why this wasn't more talked about. I suppose that leftover "char" is just a little to close to coal for everyone's comfort. This is how charcoal is made, after all.
- peteradio 3y agoIts also a large component of terra preta. I think you could sell it as soil amendment and flip the perception on its head.
- extraduder_ire 3y agoHonestly, if you can make material that's soil-like enough out of things that would otherwise be process waste, it'd be a handy way to directly combat rising sea levels. Just dump it somewhere and reclaim the land.
- blkhawk 3y agothere is a natural gas variant of that where instead of using steam in the steam reformation process to generate hydrogen and CO2 you use more of the energy contained in the gas to cook it off into atomic carbon and hydrogen. you can then bury the carbon. I think it would be fabolous if you could use up all the natural gas that way. If you want to know more Google "natural gas pyrolysis".
- junofan 3y ago
- api 3y agoThat’s basically LARPing the Carboniferous epoch that buried most of the stuff in the first place.
- iudqnolq 3y agoThe UK government is adopting a slight variant of this schema that turns it from net-neutral to net positive: have somebody else do the chopping, buy the already chopped wood, prevent the wood you bought from turning into emissions. Now you're emitting negative carbon/s.
- jartelt 3y agoAccording to the IPCC, to meet the 1.5 degree C target we need to be doing 6 GtCO2 of carbon dioxide removal per year by 2050. It would be very difficult to reach that scale with reforestation and afforestation along in the next 27 years. Plus, if you simply bury wood it will be broken down over time and release methane. No one has yet developed a scalable way to bury large quantities of wood and keep them from decomposing (startups/researchers are starting to work in this area).
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoThe breakdown of wood a few feet beneath the surface is actually extremely slow. If converted to charcoal ("biochar") through pyrolisis first it's much better, and won't release methane or CO2 (and enriches soil) The bigger issue would be the logistics, and the amount of CO2 emissions simply involved in processing and burying it.
- cogman10 3y agoWe are going past 1.5C. That being said, the way you do this isn't specifically with reforestation, rather, this needs to be tree farming with fast growing trees. Perhaps even geneticly engineering trees for this specific purpose.
- jartelt 3y agoOk - carbon dioxide removal is going to be needed to meet to the 2 degree C target too. Sure, you can reforest or afforest with whatever trees you want. It certainly will help but won't solve the issue alone.
- elil17 3y agoTrees require more time and land to capture a given amount of carbon compared to direct air capture.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoI have wondered if, on a net scale, burying said wood (in the form of chips or sawdust) in desert regions would actually net out as net-negative for CO2. Add organic matter back into the mostly sterile soils, increase moisture retention, and once a certain % of soil organic matter is restored, in turn plant trees or perennial crops back into that locale.