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Economics rules everything. How much does this cost vs simply planting trees, when the value of harvesting the trees is included? Since tree farms are general
by cyphertruck 9mo ago
Economics rules everything. How much does this cost vs simply planting trees, when the value of harvesting the trees is included? Since tree farms are generally profitable, and wood is expensive, it seems this method is likely to be economically less efficient.
- roflmaostc 9mo agoThe problem is you cannot plant enough trees around the globe to offset our CO2 emissions. Also, a forest only absorbs CO2 while alive. Once it dies, it emits CO2 too. You would need to permanently store the wood somewhere (submerging in water, etc). Recent article: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/28/africa-forests-transformed-carbon-sink-carbon-source-study https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/28/africa-f...
- adregan 9mo agoOne little appreciated fact is that trees also respirate CO2 when they are cracking their stored sugars produced via photosynthesis. So they don’t sequester all of the CO2 that they consume.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 9mo agoIt's little appreciated since tree growth still consumes CO2
- adregan 9mo agoI suppose I’m pointing it out to highlight the trade offs with any of these solutions. What is unsaid is that we need to sequester CO2 for hundreds of years—often far beyond the lifespan of the trees. Trees are short term storage, and sometimes the storage is a lot shorter than popular imagination purports.
- thinkcontext 9mo agoIndividual trees are short term storage which is why its important to create healthy ecosystems for them to live in. Turning denuded farmland back into a forest buffers carbon from the atmosphere for as long as the forest stands. It could stay there for centuries or return to the atmosphere if it gets bulldozed for a subdivision.
- xnx 9mo agoBiochar seems like a good option
- gs17 9mo agoIt's a hugely underappreciated option. I'm not sure how accurate it is (or how legitimate the companies doing biochar carbon removal are), but cdr.fyi shows biochar as the top carbon sequestration method that's actually happening.
- cogman10 9mo agoIt's possible to permanently capture the carbon if you turn the wood into charcoal and ultimately bury or store that. But left out to rot and yeah, the fungus and bacteria will ultimately consume the wood and release CO2 as a byproduct.
- Y-bar 9mo agoYou don’t need to convert it to coal. Use it to build houses, furniture, and other things. I am currently building a wooden house this way. Wooden frame, wooden exterior, wooden floors, even wood-based insulation (https://huntonfiber.co.uk/ https://huntonfiber.co.uk/). The isolation has the shortest life span and it is expected to last at least 60 years.
- dylan604 9mo agoIf these forests are planted by humans, why do we think the dead trees would just be left to rot like you suggest vs being harvested for wood? The logic does not compute other than trying to make a ridiculous point.
- arkensaw 9mo agousing the wood for heating also releases the CO2. I do think planting trees is a good idea, but it's worth pointing out they can be a carbon source even after harvesting, depending on the usage. On the other hand if the wood is used for construction or furniture it will not emit.
- thinkcontext 9mo agoI think this loses the forest for the trees. That is, a single tree rotting isn't what matters its how long the ecosystem the tree is part of lasts. Consider a square kilometer of denuded land turned back into a forest. You can think of the forest as a temporary storage for carbon, its stored in the trees, soil, animals, insects, etc in that square kilometer. Individual trees may die but on average if the forest remains in good health there will be a number of tons of carbon kept out of the atmosphere.
- loeg 9mo agoWhat do you think happens to harvested wood?
- nephihaha 9mo agoTrees have advantages that go beyond bureaucratic aspects of environmentalism.
- fsckboy 9mo agoI think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree. -- Joyce Kilmer
- manoDev 9mo agoPlanting trees solves both the carbon capture and the emissions issue from different angles. Some examples are: - With more wood available it’s more economical to use it as a building/manufacturing material over other emissive sources (concrete, steel, plastic) - We can replant the same area multiple times - Even if we plant crops for biofuels, it’s closer to carbon neutral than burning fossil anyway Every move we can make towards planting (and managing) more of the surface of the Earth is an improvement, without waiting for miraculous new technology.
- gus_massa 9mo agoI agree. Plants are not very efficient (1% or 2%) but they include packaging the CO2 in a stable form. You can store the grain or wood for long periods of times. In this case, it looks like they get CO2 as a gas. It's cheaper because you don't have to use energy to undo the burning, but it's difficult to store for a long time. (I'm not sure if someone tried to make a fake underground bog in abandoned mine. Just fill with wood and water to keep the oxygen low and make the wood decompose slowly.)
- cjbenedikt 9mo agoTake a look at "wood vault". 'Wood vaulting': A simple climate solution you’ve probably never heard of | Grist https://share.google/lS8xnMGEd1pMzlNg2 https://share.google/lS8xnMGEd1pMzlNg2 Economically not attractive but apparently very efficient in locking up CO2.
- adrianN 9mo agoThe problem with any scheme to capture and store carbon from the atmosphere is the incredible amount of carbon we've blown into the air in the last 150 years. Just look at the size of the machines we use to harvest coal. Essentially you'd need to have machines of similar size working for many decades to re-bury the carbon we extracted and burned. Who's gonna pay for that?
- mr_toad 9mo agoThere’s no getting around it. If we reduce CO2 emissions to zero it’s either plants or carbon capture, and one way or another the planet will have to do something with all that carbon. Last time it took plants millions of years, and that was before things started eating wood. I’m pretty sure that we’ll have to have a hand in the process if we want to reduce CO2 levels in timespans shorter than geological.
- adrianN 9mo agoI agree that we’ll actively have to do something if we want to reduce carbon levels. I’m not convinced that we’ll want to reduce carbon levels badly enough to spent all that money. It’s very hard to convince voters that they’ll have to spent lots of taxes for a project that sees payoff in two or three generations at the earliest.
- S3verin 9mo agoPlanting trees is not effective since it takes decades to capture the carbon, but the next years are crucial for determining long term climate developments.
- adammarples 9mo agoThere is no carbon capture technology on earth that can be rolled out at a scale over the next few years that can compete with planting trees. Especially not one that has just been invented in one university. Ash grows 90cm per year, that's all carbon. Scale that to millions and billions.
- dcollect 9mo ago[flagged]
- yodon 9mo ago>Economics rules everything Physics rules everything, once you start trying to run at scale. The density of carbon per unit volume in solid materials of interest doesn't vary that much, whether you sink it in trees or in exotic materials like diamonds. That means you can calculate the volume of material required so sink a desired amount of atmospheric carbon. If you want to have a measurable impact on the atmosphere, say dialing it back to 1980 CO2 levels, you're talking not about making a pile of stuff but about making a mountain range that's a mile high and hundreds of miles long. Now figure out how many trucks you're going to need to move that much material from where your sequestering machine is to where your pile of stuff is. Or if you want to dump that material in the ocean (which someone else will certainly object to), extend your calculation to figure out how many container trucks worth of material you need to dump into the ocean every hour to accomplish your atmospheric cleanup in whatever amount of time you choose (a decade? If it takes a century, that's not fast enough). And finally think about surface to volume ratios. You're trying to sink it into a volume, but you can only get the gas into the volume through its surface, so the speed of your process is limited by surface area. If you want to do it with trees, my personal spitball estimates are that you probably need to plant somewhere between the entire state of Connecticut and the entire state of Colorado to have the kind of impact one would want (there's more subtlety to tree calculations than one generally likes to admit, so feel free to come in with way higher numbers than I did). Which brings us back to economics. If you have a well-managed forest of that size and scale, someone is eventually going to come along, maybe in 100 years, maybe in 500 years, and say "hey if we cut this down, we could burn the wood to heat our homes" and all that carbon goes back into the atmosphere, so you actually need to sink it into something that is energetically unfavorable for recovery, which means you also need to expand a huge amount of energy to sink the carbon into that energetically unfavorable state.
- marcosdumay 9mo ago> you're talking not about making a pile of stuff but about making a mountain range that's a mile high and hundreds of miles long. Just to put it into numbers, wikipedia has the total amount of CO2 on the global warming page, if we assume it's in a 2 kg/l substance it totals to around 180 km^3.
- Yizahi 9mo agoIn the order of importance: 1. Even if we do magic and emit nothing, we still need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere or it will cook us over time, just longer. 2. We would need an enormous area for forests (which i great), which would mean a lot of intervention, like resettling people, demolishing and constructing new buildings, a lot of machinery time to move people to and from the new forests, a lot of planting and forest maintenance involved. And add he work to cut and bury resulting wood. If you would sum all the incidental emissions from this process it would rapidly become much less efficient (if at all). Without either CO2 capture or a sun shade of some sort, the CO2 levels and temperature will only ever increase, just like now.
- jacquesm 9mo ago> it will cook us over time, just longer. The largest sous-vide cooking pot ever...