4 ms·

The only realistic way to "bear the cost" of CO2 emissions is paying for getting atmospheric carbon back into the ground. Right now that seems difficult to do a

by adrianN 8mo ago

The only realistic way to "bear the cost" of CO2 emissions is paying for getting atmospheric carbon back into the ground. Right now that seems difficult to do at scale. The best way I know is making charcoal and burying it. Offsetting 1kWh needs on the order of 200g of wood turned into charcoal and buried.

erpellan 8mo ago
Making charcoal releases CO2 though? How does that help with carbon capture?
- AngryData 8mo ago
  You don't HAVE to make it into charcoal, but it will take up way more volume if you don't and contains tons of volatiles like methane that will come out and may make the ground less stable to simply bury with dirt as it partially rots. Theoretically you could harness some of those volatiles for some energy production, but at the very least use those volatiles to heat the wood and make it charcoal for basically free.
  - nDRDY 8mo ago
    Methane is a significantly more effective GHG than carbon dioxide!
- adrianN 8mo ago
  Charcoal is like 80% carbon and the tree extracted it from the atmosphere.
nDRDY 8mo ago
Are you suggesting we cut down trees and bury them to save the planet? For me, this idea marks the departure from reason and into crazytown. When our civilisation is excavated in 500 years, they are going to say we were as crazy as all of the others.
- harimau777 8mo ago
  I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable. As I understand it, the lumber industry has optimized the ability to grow massive amounts of fast growing pine as quickly as possible. So this isn't suggesting that we start clearcutting forests, it's suggesting that we start growing massive amounts of lumber with the explicit purpose of converting it to charcoal and burrying it.
  - dathinab 8mo ago
    it actually is a bad idea if you look into the details trees aren't just carbon, they are bio mass/nutrition and if you constantly remove bio mass you sooner or later run into issues (Which we already do in some places, e.g. when over using fields (see US dust storms), or with some managed Forrest getting increasingly more unstable not just because of warmed climate but also because of removing dead treas leading to an interruption of the natural nutrient recycling (and insect habitats) leading to Nutrition deficiency in the long run.) but we do have working carbon removal technologies, they are just not cheap hence why you want companies to pay for them, it gives them a huge reason to reduce emissions instead
    - mrguyorama 8mo ago
      The point of turning the trees into Charcoal is to return all the non-carbon elements to the environment and remove any metabolic activity from releasing that carbon. The USA currently produces about 70 million tons of paper per year, which is about half carbon by weight. We produce about 2 gigatons of lumber per year, which is again about half carbon, all absorbed from the atmosphere. Unfortunately, we produce like 40 gigatons of CO2 per year. So we would have to scale lumber work dramatically. It's also not a clean industry itself, reliant on heavy machinery running on gasoline or diesel, and turning that wood into charcoal would require massive refineries. IMO more effective bets are figuring out how to artificially induce massive blooms of algae and plankton in parts of the ocean to essentially recreate the conditions that lead to the hydrocarbon deposits in the first place. There's some work on this right now, but like any massive engineering and ecological tampering, there will be tradeoffs and downsides. I also don't know how you prevent the dead plant matter from decomposing and releasing the carbon.
xnx 7mo ago
> The best way I know is making charcoal and burying it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar, for those who have not heard of this.

by adrianN 8mo ago

erpellan 8mo ago

Making charcoal releases CO2 though? How does that help with carbon capture?

AngryData 8mo ago
You don't HAVE to make it into charcoal, but it will take up way more volume if you don't and contains tons of volatiles like methane that will come out and may make the ground less stable to simply bury with dirt as it partially rots. Theoretically you could harness some of those volatiles for some energy production, but at the very least use those volatiles to heat the wood and make it charcoal for basically free.
- nDRDY 8mo ago
  Methane is a significantly more effective GHG than carbon dioxide!
adrianN 8mo ago
Charcoal is like 80% carbon and the tree extracted it from the atmosphere.

nDRDY 8mo ago

Are you suggesting we cut down trees and bury them to save the planet? For me, this idea marks the departure from reason and into crazytown. When our civilisation is excavated in 500 years, they are going to say we were as crazy as all of the others.

harimau777 8mo ago
I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable. As I understand it, the lumber industry has optimized the ability to grow massive amounts of fast growing pine as quickly as possible. So this isn't suggesting that we start clearcutting forests, it's suggesting that we start growing massive amounts of lumber with the explicit purpose of converting it to charcoal and burrying it.
- dathinab 8mo ago
  it actually is a bad idea if you look into the details trees aren't just carbon, they are bio mass/nutrition and if you constantly remove bio mass you sooner or later run into issues (Which we already do in some places, e.g. when over using fields (see US dust storms), or with some managed Forrest getting increasingly more unstable not just because of warmed climate but also because of removing dead treas leading to an interruption of the natural nutrient recycling (and insect habitats) leading to Nutrition deficiency in the long run.) but we do have working carbon removal technologies, they are just not cheap hence why you want companies to pay for them, it gives them a huge reason to reduce emissions instead
  - mrguyorama 8mo ago
    The point of turning the trees into Charcoal is to return all the non-carbon elements to the environment and remove any metabolic activity from releasing that carbon. The USA currently produces about 70 million tons of paper per year, which is about half carbon by weight. We produce about 2 gigatons of lumber per year, which is again about half carbon, all absorbed from the atmosphere. Unfortunately, we produce like 40 gigatons of CO2 per year. So we would have to scale lumber work dramatically. It's also not a clean industry itself, reliant on heavy machinery running on gasoline or diesel, and turning that wood into charcoal would require massive refineries. IMO more effective bets are figuring out how to artificially induce massive blooms of algae and plankton in parts of the ocean to essentially recreate the conditions that lead to the hydrocarbon deposits in the first place. There's some work on this right now, but like any massive engineering and ecological tampering, there will be tradeoffs and downsides. I also don't know how you prevent the dead plant matter from decomposing and releasing the carbon.

xnx 7mo ago

> The best way I know is making charcoal and burying it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar, for those who have not heard of this.