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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 civilisat

• harimau777 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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.
      • nDRDY 7mo ago
        Algae blooms are typically the sign of something very wrong with an aquatic ecosystem (usually human-induced). This is in addition to the issues it causes in the rest of the local ecosystem by drastically reducing the light, nutrients, and oxygen available to other aquatic life. I can't believe these ideas are being seriously suggested. Is it a win if we reduce CO2 but make the planet uninhabitable for other reasons?
        • mrguyorama 7mo ago
          You would have to do it basically "out to sea", far enough away from humans that whatever negative effects are able to diffuse throughout the entire oceans. Maybe then the negative effects won't be life ending. But how else do we sequester bulk carbon dioxide? You probably aren't going to engineer something more effective than plant matter. So yes, you seed a gigantic algae bloom out in the ocean, it does a lot of bad stuff to a part of the ocean, and maybe it nets out positive. But hey, don't worry, nobody lets me make important decisions, so not exactly "seriously suggested". Smarter people than I will have a clear list of pros and cons to this plan, and will make a much smarter decision, which might be followed by politicians maybe. But there's no carbon capture option that doesn't do something dramatic and somehow damaging. Any plan will be industrially the inverse of burning all that oil. Pulling it out of the air will be the largest industrial project we have ever done and require more electricity than extracted from all the oil we burnt ever. To grow trees to do it would require 1000x the lumber industry we have now. Sun shades can keep us cool but not take the carbon out of the air. Aerosol injection is going to have it's own externalities. "Crush a bunch of rock and let it chemically absorb the CO2" is extremely limited. There's no clean option out of this anymore. There's no magic button. We could stop all carbon production today and we will still have significant impact.
          • dathinab 7mo ago
            > do it basically "out to sea", far enough away from humans that whatever negative effects are able to diffuse throughout the entire oceans this is not how it works, like at all pretty much all oceans are already at risk of ecologically collapsing even without climate change, and will be majorly affected by it (both directly and indirectly) just because they are big doesn't mean thy can just compensate whatever you throw at them. A huge problem being damage being not very visible to the average human until catastrophic (so humans are prone to not take actions). Like we already have gigantic dead zones all over the oceans. Many effects of climate change fall into the "live will get very shitty but still survivable category". But an ocean dying can lead to a chain reaction leading to a mass extinction event. Like not just a lot of animal dying, but a something like noticeable more then 50% of species going extinct. That includes most to all of humanities food supply. Theoretically humans might be able to survive this, practically we are still speaking about a non negligible 2 digit chance for human extinction (not necessary directly by that, but other catastrophes like volcanoes, plagues or meteors still happen) this are the kind of solutions with a high potential of having worse outcomes then not doing them
  • nDRDY 7mo ago
    It is such an unreasonable idea! Ignoring the loss of biomass (and the fact that there would be no way to implement this scheme without providing a very unwelcome financial incentive to cut down trees wherever they are found), you'd use as much CO2 in the machinery required to cut the trees down and dig a big hole! Unless you're suggesting we do it all by hand? In which case, the picture of a crazed, doomsday cult is complete. I suppose at least it involves less murder than the Aztecs and their sacrifices.
• adrianN 7mo ago
  I suggest it’s easier to leave to carbon in the ground in the first place. Carbon capture promises are unrealistic. But if you want to go with charcoal it’s probably best to get wood from coppicing.
• dathinab 7mo ago
  the only crazy thing here is your comment completely ignoring all existing technologies related to that topic to spout obvious nonsense about "cutting down trees and burying them" (which would bind active bio mass which isn't a grate idea, also that won't produce oil anyway not that this is relevant for the discussion) various ways to reduce the carbon in the air do exist (and without trees) and the carbon can be both recycled for other usage and literally placed in the earth, too it is not rally a solution for climate change as it's very expensive to do. But this also makes it a good idea to "make companies pay for it" (at least if their carbon-equivalent output goes above a certain threshold). Because if they have the choice between very expensive carbon removal or reducing carbon output for a much cheaper price they will do the later; But in emergency/outlier situations they still can do the former, just at a very high price.).
• blitzar 7mo ago
  my read was ... we should cut down trees, burn them and bury the ashes to save the planet
  • nDRDY 7mo ago
    It's too controversial now, but one day we will recognise the current narrow-minded obsession with CO2 as the Western civilisation-wide doomsday cult that it is.
    • BizarroLand 7mo ago
      I think this is literally the most head in own ass stupid thing I've ever read on the internet.
      • nDRDY 7mo ago
        Quite the opposite - I'm asking people to take a wider view of the changes that humankind is making to the planet. Given those changes, a viewpoint that concludes with people asking for vast numbers of trees to be cut down, burned (or charred, at least), and buried has some fundamental problems.
        • BizarroLand 7mo ago
          Your house is on fire. What is more important to you, putting out the fire or repainting the living room?
          • nDRDY 7mo ago
            Putting out the fire, yet I get people telling me all the time I need to buy lots of shiny new things to save the planet! (and cut down trees).