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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

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.
- nDRDY 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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

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.

nDRDY 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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