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It's a shame we suck at acknowledging the obvious inefficiencies in our systems and adapting our behavior accordingly and instead waste huge amounts of money, b

It's a shame we suck at acknowledging the obvious inefficiencies in our systems and adapting our behavior accordingly and instead waste huge amounts of money, brainpower and energy for magical and unlikely to ever work techno fixes. In this case: if we all agreed to drastically reduce our consumption of animal-based products, we'd free up huge amounts of land which we could use now to plant rapid growing, carbon-capturing plants. Then harvest them and either process them as biochar, where roughly 50% of the carbon remains captured and use the generated heat for energy/heat generation - or maybe even bury the harvested biomass in a way which ensures no methane or carbon will be emitted. The plants would do all the hard work, we "just" need to reap its result.

DarmokJalad1701 2y ago
> It's a shame we suck at acknowledging the obvious inefficiencies in our systems Plants a significantly extremely inefficient at capturing carbon compared to industrial technology like carbon capture using Calcium Hydroxide. > we'd free up huge amounts of land which we could use now to plant rapid growing, carbon-capturing plants You severely underestimate the problem and overestimate the ability of trees to fix it. Planting trees doesn't scale to the levels required to make any difference even if we used all land on Earth. It would take around ~2 trillion trees planted per year just to offset the 40-50 gigatons of CO2 being pumped out per year. That is around ~2 billion acres of land - is more than the entire land area of the contiguous US - every year, just to break even. Ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38187573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38187573
_heimdall 2y ago
What do we fertilize those plants with once we dramatically reduced animal product consumption? And how do we handle the health issues of removing almost all animal products from our diets?
jaredhallen 2y ago
The overlap between land that's good for growing crops and land that's used for raising livestock is pretty small.

DarmokJalad1701 2y ago

> It's a shame we suck at acknowledging the obvious inefficiencies in our systems Plants a significantly extremely inefficient at capturing carbon compared to industrial technology like carbon capture using Calcium Hydroxide. > we'd free up huge amounts of land which we could use now to plant rapid growing, carbon-capturing plants You severely underestimate the problem and overestimate the ability of trees to fix it. Planting trees doesn't scale to the levels required to make any difference even if we used all land on Earth. It would take around ~2 trillion trees planted per year just to offset the 40-50 gigatons of CO2 being pumped out per year. That is around ~2 billion acres of land - is more than the entire land area of the contiguous US - every year, just to break even. Ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38187573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38187573

_heimdall 2y ago

What do we fertilize those plants with once we dramatically reduced animal product consumption? And how do we handle the health issues of removing almost all animal products from our diets?

jaredhallen 2y ago

The overlap between land that's good for growing crops and land that's used for raising livestock is pretty small.