The most effective way to tackle climate change? Plant a trillion trees
edition.cnn.comFor those interested, there's an Ask HN thread about this now too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20361651.
Pakistan completed a billion tree plantation project in 2017 [1]. This is currently being followed up with a 5 year 10 billion tree plantation project, at an annual cost of 7.5 billion PKR (~47 million USD) [2]. Planting 989bn trees for the other 200 countries should not be too difficult.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_Tree_Tsunami
[2] http://www.radio.gov.pk/04-07-2019/pms-vision-of-clean-green...
Poland is paying up to 2000 euro per ha (for up to 12 years) for converting agriculture land into forrest. There is also a lot of additional subsidies for forrests on private land which can add up to few thousand euro.
You can actually make small but stable profit from buying land and converting into forest.
> Priority will be given to those who intend to plant a forest in the so-called ecological corridors, in areas threatened by water erosion, in areas adjacent to inland waters and forests, in areas with a slope of more than 12 degrees. Also, those who have land for afforestation in voivodships with a forest cover of less than 30% will get points. Depending on the species composition of the crop and the previously mentioned criteria, the amount of support can range from PLN 4,984 to PLN 7,624 per hectare. In addition, payment is possible for fencing of crops.
Link in Polish: http://www.lasy.gov.pl/pl/informacje/aktualnosci/jak-zdobyc-...
Assigned budget for 2014-2020 is 300 milion euro.
And I believe other EU countries run similar schemes.
Also planting a forrest - as an ecological system - is better to just planting a tree, I think.
Forrest area in Poland is growing since WWII from 20,8% in 1946 to 29,5% in 2016. The target for 2020 is 30% area of the country under forrest and for 2050 - 33%. 80% of forrests in Poland is under management of Lasy Panstwowe - state-owned company with political reach.
China's planting a Great Green Wall [1], with another 66 billion trees. However it's struggling with dropping groundwater and species monoculture [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-North_Shelter_Forest_Pro...
[2] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/04/china-great-gree...
The fact that it costs 50 million a year is incredible. That's less than 0.1% of what the UK government spends on interest on it's debts per year.
That's not where the cost is. It's in the opportunity cost for that area. Entire forests have been destroyed mostly not for their wood, but to re-use the land for a different, money-generating, purpose.
Maybe we should also consider the opportunity cost of not having a livable planet?
Well unfortunately the prevailing mentality seems to be why bother when someone else will do it for you out of mutual shared interest.
This is how we die.
People are free to buy up land and dedicate it to growing trees. If individuals aren't willing to pay the costs of doing so, then why would organizations representing the interests of those same individuals behave differently? Yes, sometimes small groups can get focused action on these issues, but it doesn't happen consistently enough to be relied upon as the solution.
When you can get citizens to consistently try to solve the problem on the level they can control, then you aren't going to be able to consistently get governments to do it either. The options left are to use educational methods to convince the citizens otherwise or go with options that do not require action level buy in from the majority.
Before there were fire departments there private fire services. You would pay a fee and if your house caught fire your service would put it out. But once your house is on fire to a point beyond your control, the fire service isn't likly to save the building. They'll just be putting out the fire. That's good for your neighbors-- embers traveling on the wind could ignite their rooves. But since it doesn't actually do much for a person themselves, not enough people carried fire service to prevent fires from spreading unnecessarily. So now everyone anywhere with significant population density acts collectively to fund a fire department to keep fires from spreading.
Sometimes the things a person can individually do don't work and they need to act in concert to make a difference. Fire control, transportation, defense... health care? Mitigating environmental catastrophe?
People want to be protected from fires, to the extent that enough will support their government funding fire services. Even with fire services provided, fire insurance is a popular product for those with a sizable amount of assets that can burn down. This has enough support to be enacted.
I suspect the same will happen with climate change once it changes enough. The problem is that by the time directly impacting people enough to convince them of the need for action, the ability to resolve the problem will be outside our scope to control. Much in the same way a few cities had to burn to set an example for others. Which leads us to the other problem, we only have one 'city' to burn.
If we try to solve climate change the same way that we solved fire services being seen as a common sense government action, it will work but only after the city is burning.
Some trees are relatively safe in a fire and others relatively unsafe.
Redwood trees (as an example) are relatively fire safe. At the opposite end Eucalyptus trees are fire hazards.
So - plant a fire resilient forest appropriate for your climate.
wow
The study specifically mentions that they considered land not used, including for growing crops (they did mention using land used for grazing, but since cattle has apparently a significant greenhouse impact, I guess it's fair game)
There are vast swaths of land that can be planted as forest without any negative economic impact.
£50 million is almost a rounding error for the UK government - havering about whether the new aircraft carriers should be CATOBAR or not cost £100 million!
That maths don't add up. If 200 countries need to do 989bn, then they need to do 4.945, let's say 5.
If we consider countries with more population are going to plant more (so trees per capita perhaps). We could go with landmass but it takes money/people to do this, so let's go with capita.
Pakistan being a highly populated country and so needs to plan more than the 5bn average (they did 10).
But there is a very long tail of small countries in that list of 200 so many more small countries. Most will go below the average needed and so won't stack up.
Can we finally get greenhouse credits for tree population?
It has to be tree population growth though - just having a lot of trees doesn't help, we need to plant them.
uummm 'we' already do. NZ for one has a carbon credit for forestry.
Does that $47m cost include the price of the land?
If the government doesn't have that much viable tree-planting space available then they either have to seize it which would make some people very unhappy, or compulsorily purchase it which would push the cost up a lot. That isn't a reason not to do it, but in order to talk about it you need to be clear about what you're actually talking about.
Why only those two options for getting trees onto private land? Why not an incentive system for landowners to plant and maintain trees? Let the government plant trees on your lawn and get a reduction in your land tax.
One option is to subsidize the trees as a future investment for the one planting. While this won't do much to get people to plan trees where cities are at, in more rural areas you can convince someone to plan trees that will be able to be harvested in 50+ years. The only catch is that the people who own land are likely old enough they won't see the returns themselves, but if you present this as a method for investing in your children's future it could get buy in. A contract could also include an early sell penalty to dissuade people form cutting too early. Something like "If you sell early, the government is owed 50% of the total sell value. This percentage reduces by 1 per year until it reaches 0% at 50 years. This is in addition to any taxes owed on the sell."
Also, just advertisement and information campaign aimed at getting people to plant trees in rural areas as an investment in their children's future would encourage more planting as well.
That would still be a significant cost (in lost tax receipts).
Tax credit on new greenhouse tax. Revenue neutral if done right.
> but in order to talk about it you need to be clear about what you're actually talking about.
We absolutely do need to know what we're talking about. For example, the seize-or-purchase dichotomy is a false one. The article mentions, for example:
> But although tree planting on such a colossal scale faces significant challenges (not least identifying who owns the land in question, and securing the rights to plant and maintain trees there), widespread efforts are already underway. [Italics mine.]
In other words, the government doesn't have to seize or purchase the land. They are after a specific right, which we could even imaging being structured, where appropriate, as a subsidized service that owners of degraded land might clamor to receive.
We could almost even suppose that the people who are presenting these figures have take these things into account, at least tentatively.
Not at all. I don't think a single m^2 of land has been or will be seized or bought for any of this.
Actually, I should have been more clear - this is just the money coming out of the government budget. Some unspecified amount of money is coming from private-public partnerships and from donations. The trees are being planted on deforested public land, or just private land where the owners are happy to have forests/trees up, or in public urban spaces. Pakistan has already been hit very hard by climate change - for example by multiple catastrophic floods in the past two decades. There is a lot of public support for this venture.
I remember hearing about it.. but it should be news head title.
Also, by making it a socially distributed action. To make people relearn, take part, take ownership, spend more time out.. it could probably cost less.
It used to be a national holiday in Korea, and many people still celebrate that day by planting trees every year. [1]
I often think that to make something free, make it part of the culture. People gathering around doing it because it has large social short and long term value.
Are there stats on what percentage of these trees are still alive?
> Planting 989bn trees for the other 200 countries should not be too difficult.
Can I add this to the HN Weekend Projects list next to Dropbox, Facebook, and Twitter?
Can't come quickly enough in the UK as we have a significantly lower percentage of tree cover compared to Europe, and I love forests dearly. It was said that after WW1 there was barely a tree left standing in the country, and we've never recovered. It pains me that the average Brit seems to think a green field is nature, whereas many are virtual deserts in terms of biodiversity. I'm just hoping we get a decent mix of trees as part of this planting and that it is not subverted by commercial interests into massive monoculture plantations as was the case in Scotland.
I often rant about this, when people from home bemoan about tropical deforestation (which is of course terrible) and go on about how "they" are destroying the planet. When asking what they are doing about the problem closer to home they look at me like I am crazy.
Where are the protests to confiscate arable land for reforestation in the UK. Where is the public will to pay a higher % for food due to less arable land. Where is the willingness to accept a lower standard of living (in the short term at least) due to reforestation of the UK. All of which they expect of 3rd world countries, but not for their home country.
The above is never going to happen, but I often wonder whether instead of hegerows around the patchwork of fields we have in the UK it is mandated to be 2-3 trees thick. Sure some land would be lost, but not much and as anyone who has flown into the UK, a huge % of the country is a patchwork of fields, that should be a significant number of new tree planting
Course the traditional laid hedgerows usually had trees spaced along them as well, sometimes quite closely. The best country lanes are those with traditional hedges either side, where the trees have met to create a green shaded tunnel. They brought in some regulations around hedgerows not too long ago, but it seemed like too little, far too late. Limiting field size seems overdue too given how much they've changed, even over my lifetime.
Coming from the north of England, I'm often struck when I get to Scotland or down south just how extra sparse trees seem across the north.
I would dearly love to see progress to reforest the UK.
Same here. The place where I grew up in Devon was beautiful, loads of trees and farmland. Only it was all flattened 25 years ago and replace with big ugly houses.
> think a green field is nature
I see these areas basically as factories, albeit we do have the kind of food security our ancestors could only dream of. Would be fantastic to see more forested areas and associated 're-wilding' projects. Could be hugely beneficial in so many ways if only people can take the long view.
Green fields are of course a kind of nature. It's interesting that the kind of natural environment humans seem to find pleasant - fields with some trees, animals and some water are quite similar to parts of Africa we evolved in eg. the Serengeti here: https://media.gadventures.com/media-server/cache/19/56/19567...
The woods in England where I grew up were more like this https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/media/100142120/flooded-woo... - damp crowded, muddy and not that pleasant to hang out in for any length of time. I think our parks are to some extent a way to make things look more like Africa. (eg Hyde Park here https://www.kidrated.com/kidrated/wp-content/uploads/2015/04...)
You may be looking for Capability Brown.
Are you from Fenland?
Ah no, Herts. The woods are not all like that.
There was a map of France and England once which showed relative age of forests compared to e.g. Germany, which correlated with ship manufacturing (wooden of course) which Germany (did not really exist then anyway) did not participate in at the time.
Thick forests everywhere also aren’t nature. Today’s wild animals and the megafauna we made go extinct usually pretty well kept the land open.
No not everywhere, but as the parent comment is talking about the Britain, the natural state of the UK before human intervention was a heavily (perhaps not densely - I don't know) forested island
That's not really the case. It was a widely held belief or myth that the British isles were covered in dense forest. The coverage was at most about 60% and also that humans have always been intervening in the landscape and they arrived very soon after the glaciers retreated up north. Most of the woodlands were managed or occupied and there were not many places which didn't see the human touch (in Britain) compared with other places in the world.
In part the myth of the virgin untouched forest comes from colonial views of natives existing in harmony or as part of nature and not really human. Even in the US, Native Americans have been managing the "wilderness" for thousands of years before the US Forest Service.
Not sure about the environment of the British Isles, but that of North America is not and was not a monolith. Sure natives in some areas were burning some vegetation, but that didn't happen everywhere. Actually in some areas the burning was only of undergrowth, so that it actually made the canopy more dense than it would have been without burning.
Any idea which UK charities would be the best to contribute to to get tree coverage up as quickly as possible? I've looked at the woodland trust, but equally I'm thinking that in terms of reducing CO2 my money might be more effective being deployed in another country.
The National Forest is one such organisation.
https://www.nationalforest.org/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_National_Forest_(England...
Yeah I have struggled with this in the past. I would gladly pay to go and plant trees somewhere within a couple of hours of where I live, but I could not find many easy ways to do this as an individual in the UK (unless you are a kid under 11 years old where there seems to be a lot of options!). I donate to Woodland Trust, but they seem to be more about maintaining what we have & small-scale replenishing rather than more large-scale replanting.
Most recently I've been trying to offset 10 tonnes a year via these people: https://www.carbonfootprint.com/carbonoffset.html They were the only people I could find most recently that sold "personal carbon offsets" in the UK which includes UK-based tree planting (as well as options for elsewhere)
There is Trees for Life in Scotland:
Edit: Most of the Scottish Highlands are a particularly bizarre landscape that people generally think of as natural but is really rather artificial as deer, lacking natural predators and being popular for hunting, tend to eat young trees.
Bit like Dartmoor - looks spectacularly wild and romantic, but used to be forested until Bronze Age farmers cleared it for agriculture and the soil turned acidic.
The Lakes and the Peaks are in the same boat too, probably the other national parks.
It would be fantastic if it could be re-planted with trees.
I wish I had enough cash to purchase a chunk of pasture and reforest it, but everywhere in the SE is stupidly expensive I think. Possibly moving up north soon, so I may well purchase an acre of two if I can. I'd want to be near enough to be able to keep an eye on it.
[...]in the UK as we have a significantly lower percentage of tree cover compared to Europe,[...]
Please use "...compared to _the rest of_ Europe" next time. That stresses the very real commonalities between European countries. Civilised people using inclusive language are our only hope for a brexit process without too much bruising. Little things like this can really help.
I apologise for injecting that completely off topic remark into this conversation and will shut up now. I probably deserve some karma burning, just not too much please.
P.S. Thank you for you comment about tree cover and the world wars in the UK. I just read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forestry_in_the_United_Kingdom with great interest.
One thing that I rarely see mentioned when tree-planting is suggested is species, biodiversity, and impact of selection of trees to be planted on the environment.
1 tree is not equivalent to 1 tree of a different species.
Reports such as this one[0] hint to the impact of tree choice on things like human health, but I'm curious about the effects it has on climate in general (and sustainabiilty of tree populations: disease resistance, etc.).
The first few tree planting drives in Tamil Nadu (a southern state of India; it's capital Chennai recently ran out of water) got significant public backlash [0] for this reason: they planted nothing but Acacia trees (due to their short growth term) and the leaves took a long time to degrade, killing all the undergrowth and creating a monoculture.
[0] https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/Acacia-rem...!
> it's capital Chennai recently ran out of water
This casual statement made my eyes bulge. Like, what does this mean? How does it happen? Is water permanently gone? What are the ramifications?
I found a WaPo article on Chennai, which I see has about half a million more people than NYC.
> The city’s reservoirs and lakes are parched and its wells have run dry after two years of scanty rains here. Local authorities are trucking in water and desalinating seawater, but the supply is less than half the city’s basic requirement.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/06/28/major-indian...
This reminded me about Yemen. Eight years ago I read that Yemen may be the first country to run out of water. I went to check on where they are. It's not good. Drought is being compounded by conflict and politics.
I can't help but think that this is a harbinger of the future in more places than Yemen as climate change continues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in...
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/an-update-o...
Yemen hasn't invested properly because of other pressing concerns. Yemen is a reminder of the past, Africa is a glimps of the future. It is not all terrible.
"Running out of water" generally means that on a given day, or perhaps for a longer stretch (days, weeks, months) there is not enough water for essential needs, especially sewage, washing, and drinking, but also industrial and recreational activities.
After air itself, water is the most-used substance by humans (followed by gravel, sand, and rock -- we aren't out of the stone age yet), and the quantities and quality (purity) used are great enough that simple stockpiling does not generally work.
Chennai particularly is in the north-eastern monsoon belt with a wet-and-dry tropical climate (Köppen). Monthly rainfall averages vary by a factor of 100, from as low as 3mm per month in the dry season (Jan-May) to over 400mm in the wet (Jul-Dec, especially Oct-Dec). The climate chart at Wikipedia shows this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chennai
There are no rivers. The water table sits at 2m depth typically. And yes, it is recharged by the monsoon. The shortages are critical, but temporary.
With such an all-or-nothing weather cycle, the need is to both shed and drainnwater during the monsoon and to retain it during the dry season. That's a difficult order.
Current forecast is for rain every day.
Covered on HN as well:
Thanks vijayr. I missed that one.
You're welcome heymijo :)
And 20 more Indian cities are expected to run dry by next year: https://www.firstpost.com/tech/science/indias-water-crisis-b...
This approach considers biodiversity & self-sustainability: https://fellowsblog.ted.com/how-to-grow-a-forest-really-real...
It’s also important to choose local species. Planting a non-native tree species causes unexpected problems long term. See the eucalyptus problem in California.
Yes, but not only plant them. You also need to keep them and then you can never let them decompose or burn. Or you have to keep planting a new tree whenever one dies. Basically the "Plant 1T trees" means "increase the total number of trees by 1T and keep it that way". Also we would need to increase that number every time we increase our greenhouse gas emissions. No matter how "green" that sounds, that's just unsustainable. We still need to decrease our fossil fuel extraction to basically zero. And we need some way to put that sequestered CO2 back into ground or somewhere where it doesn't get back to atmosphere.
Just planting 1T seedlings, collecting subsidies, and congratulating each other how we sequestered that calculated amount of CO2 is a totally fake activity.
We really need to do this one right.
Yes, though as an interim measure it's a start. A very large stock of trees can renew itself, so while individual trees return most or all of the carbon they capture, the stock of all trees becomes a stable stock of carbon sequestered from the atmosphere.
That doesn't solve the problem of increasing CO2 emissions, but it blunts the trajectory and with any luck prevents some of the more destructive potential positive feedback loops from winding up.
If the trees are used for wood or paper production, replanting logged trees is economically a no brainer.
Yes, but then you still have the same problem when you discard that paper or wood product. It either decomposes or burns, which releases the stored carbon, and you have to catch it again with another fully grown tree.
What I'm saying is that yes, we should plant more trees, but it must not be just about "planting", like this article and many others are trying to portray. Otherwise it will be all for nothing. And we still have to do the other two parts - lowering our overall energy demand and getting off of fossil fuels. We have to do all three.
Philippines law would require students to plant 10 trees if they want to graduate https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/philippines-tr...
Suppose 8 billion people and 1 trillion trees. Each person should plant 125 trees. Neat law though.
Bioremediation of carbon is almost certainly the best possible option. Plants are natural carbon-sequestration factories.
Hectare for hectare wetlands are even more effective than forests, and encouraging and protecting swamps, bogs, marshes, wetlands, and mangrove forests would be an even better notion.
I like that the headline on this one actually gives a number. 1 Trillion! Something like 139 trees per person.
I read an article similar to this earlier today (not on HN like I posted before I edited this). https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-07-05/climate-chang...
It's closer to 129, though that is still a big number.
Not so difficult. I'm sure most people could plant 10 trees a month, given the motivation.
Trouble is, how are we going to get people motivated to do this?
I can easily come close to 50 times that in a month (a given being that not all the seeds I throw around become real trees, so let's say it's 5 times). Doing so on a piece of land that won't get it's trees cut in short order is however next to impossible.
Make it mandatory (and pay) for schools to ensure that each secondary school or higher kid plants 10 trees a year. The motivation multiplier on the rest of society from this policy will take care of the rest.
Used to be a thing in Norway until the 70ies or early 80ies. Now we Norwegians are busily blaming ourselves for planting Sitka spruce instead of native species, but I guess the right answer might not be to stop planting trees but to be a little more considerate in what we plant and where.
What's wrong with Sitka spruce?
Replaces local species.
No, the problem is those trees need to stay alive and grow and not be burned for the carbon capture actually work out.
They could be cut down and turned into cross laminated timber buildings. If the trees are left to grow old and die naturally, does the stored carbon get re-emitted as a bi-product of decomposition? EDIT: According to the discussion below, yes it does.
Planting does not guarantee that a tree can live
Very interesting. I see non-profit orgs advertising 1 planted tree for $1 [1]. Depending on how that scales, and whether this article is true, it should make it possible to effectively combat carbon increase for $1T.
Seems like a rather low number, all things considered.
I can't speak on the Kenyan project you linked, but I did recently complete a 3000 tree habitat project. Even at bulk rates we purchased our trees at between $0.80-0.90 per tree. It took 3 people about 5-6 hours to complete the actual planting using a tractor and a tree planter. Outside of the actual purchase of the trees, other things to consider are: Labor was unpaid, however the county has a cost-sharing program we could have applied for which would have paid ~$8/hr per person to offset labor costs. I wouldn't be surprised if many of these non-profits use volunteer labor but also take advantage of reforestation grants to offset the cost. We borrowed the equipment and only used a couple gallons of diesel, but normally renting that equipment for the day would have been in the hundreds of dollars. Plenty of hours were spent meeting with state foresters to plan where the trees would go for maximum effect and deciding which species to plant. We had to transport the trees from the nursery and store them until they were planted. There is also a very limited window of time between when they are harvested at the nursery and when they need to be planted. If you wait too long many will die. Also to note that we had to call at least 4 nurseries to get the order we wanted. There is a limited supply of seedlings available each season and you have to plan well in advance if you need more than a couple hundred trees. At about a month out we're noticing about 10% dead loss, which is better than expected. Over the next year that could inflate to 30%. The goal shouldn't be to just plant 1T trees, it needs to be adding 1T new healthy trees to the environment, which means you would have to plant 1T + X0B extra to cover the dead loss.
So $1T in cost is a good ballpark to start with, but don't be surprised if it balloons pretty quick. Tree planting doesn't scale as efficiently as we might like.
> which means you would have to plant 1T + X0B extra to cover the dead loss
It depends if the dead trees are in groups that leave large gaps in coverage or random deaths (Alopecia versus thinning).
Also surely the actual number of trees is almost irrelevant - the important factors are: carbon capture per acre per year, and risks of carbon release (fire, conversion back to farmland, milling etc).
Also, https://www.trilliontreecampaign.org/donate-trees quotes several projects with a low price of EUR 0.10 per tree.
Ping. You haven't yet responded to my question on another thread.
If they put all of the climate change money into a pot we have enough. Politics decides it is more important to give to a company or class of people in the name of climate change.
Planting trees isn't a viable (complete) solution though for various reasons.
- Healthy forest has 40-60 trees per acre
This means you need 31,250,000~ square miles which is 15.87% of the Earth's landmass.
- You need adequate rainfall where you plant the trees
- For the healthiest trees, and best carbon sequestration, you also need to 'seed' the mycorrhizal networks that work in cooperation with tree roots.
- You'd have to pick appropriate species for appropriate areas
- Mature trees, the vast majority of the time, sequester far more than younger trees
- There is considerable variation in the amount of carbon various trees can sequester in a given time
Some land that actually used to sustain decent tree populations, is now nearly barren. A good example of this is Iceland. When the first settlers reached Iceland in the latter half of the 9th century, forests covered between 25 and 40% of the landscape (nearly 10-16k square miles), it is now around 0.5% with active efforts to reintroduce trees with the reintroduction going very slow. This year they are attempting to plant around 4 million trees but a fraction of those will likely survive.
Yes. A tree can be planted when its the size of a bean sprout. I can put a million sprouts in one acre. The target is easy to achieve. Out of those million trees I plant, only 50 will survive.
And then keep on planting trillions more because we keep digging up coal and oil?
It would probably be better to cover 1-3% of our land and coastal areas with solar panels and wind turbines.
nuclear obviously, the most effective and green way to produce energy
Now show how to build enough reactors in the next twenty years to completely replace fossil fuels. If your strategy doesn't show at least 75% CO2 reduction by 2030 you've likely missed the 1.5° goal.
Building reactors takes a long time. We probably first need to ramp up the industries that manufacture pressure vessels. The forging presses able to produce pressure vessels for modern reactors can manufacture maybe half a dozen a year, and there aren't too many of these massive presses around. You can of course argue that we build a different kind of reactor that doesn't require pressure vessels, but then you need additional time for R&D and proving the design in practice. Don't forget that we also need to train the engineers that staff the new power stations. Nuclear engineering is not a terribly popular major right now.
Wind and solar on the other hand are well suited to reducing our CO2 output starting today. Building a wind turbine doesn't take ten years.
One of the reasons it takes a.long time is because we build so few.
When France decided to go nuclear for its power grid they where bringing a reactor online every 3mths for 15 years on average (56 plants in 15yrs).
Economies of scale combined with mass production would bring the costs down, if you could get multiple countries to agree to a standard design with commonality of parts and maintenance you could scale up really fast once you had a pipeline for each major component.
When we are talking about an extinction level event I think a species level Manhattan project is a good solution.
Won't happen for myriad reasons but wouldnt it be nice if our own vicious self interest didn't doom our not so distant ancestors.
If my step soon makes it to 90 he'll see 2100.
I'll be long gone before then.
maybe wind energy indeed, it's always good to have alternatives. But the electricity demand is mostly when there's not much wind (start and end of day, same for solar) and it's not easy to store that energy
solar panels are generating a lost of toxic waste https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/25/18018820/solar-panel-was... and are probably a hazard for birds and insects
Are there any videos of these presses? The process sounds interesting: the entire industrial capacity of the world to produce these is only a dozen a year? How many are there, and how long does each one take? Surely not that long...
It's not 12.
France was bringing 4 reactors a year online for 15 years.
France is not 1/3rd of global manufacturing capacity..
So will you allow Iran to build nuclear power plants?
Planting trees is easy. Trees grow from seed. My back yard can have a million trees. What counts is how many survive and what they are used for. Are the trees sustainable or do we just care about the equivalent of lines of code?
Many trees are planted to be used as bio fuel. More are planted to be converted to paper and pulp, others for construction.
All forestry involves thinning weaker trees from the forest. Planting trees shouldn't be what's measured at all but areas of sustainable forest created.
Photographer Sebastião Salgado and his wife have re-forested his family's farm, planting over 2M trees over 20 years, and have developed the know-how to make this reproducible at much more granular scales than big government-led projects. http://www.institutoterra.org/eng/conteudosLinks.php?id=22&t...
I would love to have more trees.
But not for reason of sucking CO2. Please understand that forests are CO2 neutral. Any CO2 a tree consumes in its lifetime will be converted to leaves and wood and eventually fall to the ground and be converted by insects, fungi and bacteria BACK to CO2.
To get rid of CO2 from atmosphere we almost need to do the opposite, chop down trees and bury trunks somewhere where the don't decompose.
Existing forests are neutral. Growing new ones is not.
Exactly. I get very frustrated by these conversations..
Wood sequesters CO2. Growing more wood will, trivially, sequester more CO2. Is that sequester "as good" as sequestering it deep underground? That depends. If it is sequestered by an ecosystem that persists over time - in other words, if it is sequestered in a forest, and that forest remains there even if the individual trees die and decay - then yes. The CO2 that is pulled out of the atmosphere stays out of the atmosphere unless the forest disappears.
There is a case for burying charcoal,
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/407754/the-case-for-buryi...
Use more energy to heat up biomass and convert it to a useful energy rich state and then ... bury it.
If this is the best solution to CO2 problem, I would rather have a CO2 problem.
So, there are actually companies looking at generating renewable energy WHILE making biochar, one of them that comes to mind is in Australia - although their website seems to be gone here is an article that still exists https://biochar-international.org/pacificpyrolysis/
Basically they were (are?) for 12~ years were powering up to a [200kw generator proccessing up to 300kg](from my previous notes about them) of material an hour of dry biomass. Stuff like collected lawn clipping and branches. You could also use waste like paper sludge, sugar cane refuse, waste water sludge (feces and toilet paper), wood waste from milling, used grain from breweries and distilleries, organic waste from industrial sources etc.
Go watch videos on making char cloth, it's a similar process. With char cloth you basically take a can that's mostly air tight, poke a hole in the top, place natural fibers inside like some scrap denim, replace the lid and heat the contents. The gas that gets cooked off is actually flammable and can be a fuel.
The process they were using required a rather large machine and ended up not only producing biochar but output more energy than went into the system by being much more controlled and capturing the gasses.
I suspect you could also manufacture a system that instead just uses concentrated solar power to process material, instead of needing to get up to 1000C though you'd only need to get around 450C (based on past studies for optimal temperature for producing biochar with optimal soil drainage properties), you could pull the gas off of that and pipe it some distance away to another facility doing the same a more traditional way, using the gas as the fuel source for it.
Wouldn't the solution be planting enough new trees to replace the newly-dead ones? i.e. keeping a sufficient mass of trees growing, always? That way, you'd have a continual carbon sink?
It is only a sink if you take carbon out of it. Else it is a closed system. For every tree growing, there is somewhere a tree rotting.
I remember when the whole 'CO2 neutral' thing came into my mind, not long ago when I read the article about the 53 year old sealed garden [1].
Definitely interesting, but I think that a fast-growing tree would probably create more O2 (consume more CO2) in its first 10 or so years. I think that big, old forests where large pieces of wood are dropping and rotting, etc, may tend to be on the neutral side of things.
I think that some studying of what type of trees to plant, etc is definitely in order. Certainly some drop less - and quite possibly they determine that the trees need cut down, turned to paper or paper products, and replanted every number of years.
When I think of the situation you are describing (CO2 neutral), I picture a dense, damp forest area. I feel like trees, properly spaced, may lean more toward co2 consumption.
Anyway, just a thought...
[1] https://biologicperformance.com/sealed-bottle-terrarium-gard...
Is rate out same as rate coming in? I really don't think that is the case, what would the natural cause be to make an exact match between rot and growth? Duff accumulates, forest floors rise.
What do you think the heavy dense part of the tree is made from ? Yes largely carbon.
I looked it up. It takes about 15 trees to absorb 1 tonne of CO2. Which is used for a 10.000 km flight.
For every 1,000 you fly plant 1.5 trees
Flights will consume those miles and fuel much faster than those trees can grow to consume the CO2 from them, so you'd need an exponential number of additional trees planted in anticipation to offset future flights up to a certain point where you run out of reasonable land to grow trees on, or water and nutrients, and then you'd have to expend energy to chop the whole forest down and bury it to still come out ahead. The only way out of the debt spiral is to stop consuming fossil fuels for flight.
buried trunks decompose though
without oxygen access decomposiotion wouldn't result in CO2. Bottom of a swamp essentially, a peat bog.
For the briefest moment I just considered buying a forest in Germany, one that I could visit with my son, having some high-minded talk with him about sustainability while feeling very smug.
Then I found a german forest marketplace[1], that has a good FAQ regarding the regulations of owning a forest in Germany.
After reading this I don't want to go anywhere near owning a forest, having to have insurance for the case anyone walking through my forest trips and injures himself, having to pay taxes for the very rain that penetrates the ground and may end up in the sewage system...
Here's my question: which type of trees would be best? I assume the trees that convert co2 to o2 the quickest, which means the trees that grow the fastest, right? Maybe is it better to plant trees that are more disease resistant instead.
One of the best resources I’ve found lately is the book “The Carbon Farming Solution.” [1]
If you’re interested in how different species of plants and trees compare in terms of carbon impact, different types of land-management, perennial staple crop exploration, etc, it’s really well written and researched.
Bottom line: planting trees is great, and there’s a ton of ways we can improve the land. But maybe the single biggest impact thing we can do is stop cutting down forests for grazing cattle. At the end of the day the planet needs natural, wild forests, at a massive scale.
Discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356859. But this story has been so popular that we might as well let run again.
I twice submitted a great talk that goes into more depth on this and other things, but both times it failed to get many views ([1] [2]), despite my having a hunch that there would be significant interest in it. Any thoughts on how to give the talk some more visibility?
How about creating a simple campaign website, trilliontrees.org, that serves as a rallying call to plant trees and that compares and provides guidance on the myriad of nonprofits involved in planting trees?
Anyone interested to partner on this?
I almost think you're joking, since this already exists.
Weird. I visited this url earlier today and took me to a godaddy parking page. Maybe I mistyped or tried the .com.
When we are currently losing (deforestation) 18 million acres of forest per year!
You can help by switching your search engine to Ecosia:
Each search result generates revenue (through ads) that sponsors tree planting.
I think trying to slow the cutting of trees would also help.
How many Christmas trees are cut down every year? I bought a synthetic tree many years ago, and I just keep using that to save on killing a tree every year.
You can also look at this the other way round:
By buying a Christmas tree, you create a market for those trees which makes people plant them. This leads to several generations of trees growing at any time, so that there is a net-reduction of CO2.
To make the reduction permanent however, the ultimate fate of all those Christmas trees is important. That market also entails more (fuel burning) economic activity surrounding Christmas and transportation of those trees. If they are disposed of in such a way as to be decomposed by microbes, much of the carbon returns to the environment. It's very hard to store carbon in a more permanent way than deep underground, which was where it was before we foolishly started pulling it all up and burning it.
The Christmas Tree Carbon Question is more complicated than you might think.
https://www.sightline.org/2015/12/21/your-christmas-trees-ca...
The tl;dr is that usually cut trees are better in terms of carbon footprint, but not always.
I'm already over 100, way ahead of all you virtue signalers ;)
What about 50 years later when the CO2 capture of the forest reaches equilibrium?
Do we then plant another trillion trees?
It's still worthwhile (and I also like trees, although usually not monocultures).
Is it really only fifty years? I would have guessed a couple hundred at least. Climate change is really a time problem. Given hundreds of years we'll be off carbon based economies purely for economic reasons. In fact I think that will largely be true in less than a century. So anything like this that buys us time may actually be all it takes.
But how about stopping deforestation? That seems like it would be more effective - pay developing countries based on maintaining their forested areas, policed using satellite data. I think we should also focus on planting trees and basically every other mitigation we can at the same time - doing one thing doesn't preclude others.
This is being done with some success in the rain forests of one of those deforestation happy palm oil producers, Indonesia.
https://www.wri.org/blog/2019/02/indonesia-reduces-deforesta...
The trees can be gasified and turned into biochar, and buried into the soil to capture the carbon and improve the soil quality (while generating electricity and heat). Then new trees can be planted in their place. Or they can be used to build buildings which sequesters carbon similarly (albeit for a shorter span of time).
Wildfires and insect infestations will be an issue, and they are very difficult to model. Canada has a lot of trees, but they emit more Carbon than they absorb. [1]
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/canada-forests-carbon...
> but they emit more Carbon than they absorb
That’s a strange way to put it. The trees form a carbon reservoir. If they burn or decompose then they release carbon. But they cannot grow and release carbon indefinitely. If they emit carbon long enough then there won’t be trees left. On the other hand if the total mass of trees grows long enough they will have trapped more carbon.
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing!
Cool, that's 167 per person alive and our family of 5 already planted 1500 over a decade ago. I am awesome.
Planting is only effective when trees are nurtured and watered after planting. I have seen too many planting efforts over the years where, after the initial enthusiasm, there is no care for the saplings and they die off only for people to lament and blame the government.
The publication mentioned has now been published, I believe this is it:
That's quite absurd. Planting 1T trees would be extremely nice to the environment yet we fail to see the big picture. In oceans we have less than half of the phytoplankton than we used to have only a century ago[1].
""The amount of carbon that we can restore if we plant 1.2 trillion trees, or at least allow those trees to grow, would be way higher than the next best climate change solution," Crowther told CNN."
Phytoplankton actually contributes more than trees do to tackle the big construct of "climate change".[2]
In the article, all the climate change action is taken against the CO2 levels in the atmosphere - but I think we can all agree there is more to it than just CO2 (and we can go quite deep on that rabbit hole and slash apart lots of this big amorphous mass of a construct).
On top of that, there are quite some theories on what drives climate change [3] and different views on it [4]. Yet all mediums speak from the same theory which is CO2 is bad. Period.
Now, as said before on a comment by Krageon and Arbalest, it will be the comparable to a person planting 129 trees.
Don't get me wrong I love trees, forest and all that - no question that's beautiful and has more profound effects than climate change alone in our environment and society - but one gets fed up by the `simplicity` we think as a society of these problems.
I guess this is my personal opinion but I think we can do better with technology (which is why we are all in this community anyway) than that. And, again in my opinion, should be the way we lead and liaise with this problem instead of `go plant more trees`.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-shows-oceani...
[2]https://novapublishers.com/shop/phytoplankton-biology-classi...
[3]http://climatica.org.uk/climate-science-information/long-ter...
[4] https://www.bettermeetsreality.com/a-history-of-earths-carbo...
> should be the way we lead and liaise with this problem instead of `go plant more trees`.
Why should it be one or the other? Let's do both (plus many more things).
Even the authors of this study mention that "planting trees" isn't enough, even for the CO2 issue alone, since planting trees is merely a mitigation for past damage.
The point I was trying to make is not that it's exclusive and hence why I reiterated I'm not against planting trees. Or trees in general, in any case I like them quite a lot as I come form the countryside and miss the forest and mountains a lot.
One of the points I was trying to converge is on the danger these types of articles pose and is they are delusional. It makes society think oh well, that's a big problem but we have a readily available solution, just plant more trees and all is solved.
The other is on one of the statements which is dubious.
I do a lot of work on this area hence why I'm saying all of the above and that's what I found when speaking with general public. And also with people with `high educational degrees` which (in theory) take things more critically and think them through.
I am trying to turn my garden into a small forest by checking out what grows with most leaves and least water. So far that seems to work; some of them die because then are too young and fragile. But most of them survive and keep growing; it's a nice hobby too.
I think if only 1% of the global population reproduced for a few generations it would be way more effective than tree planting. It seems like all the environmental "fixes" are external, and not related to our replication rate.
To reach the 2030 and 2050 targets (-45%, -100%), this change alone would be very insufficient. It would help during the second half of the century though, when emissions will likely need to be negative.
Cool, because I'm trying to plan for humanity's distant future, not just 50-100 years from now.
Good luck with that.
Turns out trees are great carbon capture devices and oxygen production engines
Is there an economical value to that? It will predate a lot of good lands for non-producting results. And probably require some human management. Who will pay for that?
It has a similar economical value to having an army.
" all the locations identified by his team are on degraded land, rather than agricultural or urban areas"
also if we don't stem climate change, it is likely that no one will exist nevermind money
we should plant food producing trees
Here is a fork:
Plant 1T trees in the defrost areas of the artics ?
The light difference between winter and summer get too extreme for most trees far enough north. The soil is also extremely poor. This gets brought up by people who think Canada would be hugely successful in a warmer climate, but even if there's no permafrost, the growing season won't change.
I wonder if the UN can just divide this number to countries base on mass, GDP, pollution, wealth, etc and mandate them to do it.
is that 10^12 or 10^18?
Well, by my Maths, 10^18 would require close to 7,000 trees for every square meter of dry land on the planet Earth. Even if we allow the use of Bonsai, that would be a stretch :)
Trillion is 10^12 in both British and US English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion disagrees and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Short_sc... goes into more detail.
Oh crap, how are other countries still using this, is that really true?
[edit] however @treerock is correct britain formally switched to short scale since 1974 so english is unambiguous, in all but historical contexts.
Also recommends using SI prefixes just as done in the article which is unambiguous in all languages. I guess translators must be aware of this when converting words from billion and up.
German has Tausend (1000), Million (1000 Tausend) , Milliarde (1000 Millionen), Billion (1000 Milliarden), Billiarde (1000 Billionen), Trillion (1000 Billiarden), and there aren't even proposals to change, and why should we?
> and there aren't even proposals to change, and why should we?
becaaause.. it's intermediate scales are un-prefixable, because it names adjacent intermediate orders of magnitude with only subtle mutations of the previous name, because it's inconsistent with itself (<x 10^9), and finally because in 2019 it's extremely ambiguous, in all languages SI prefixes have been around since 1960 all of science and engineering uses these. In other words the same reason English abandoned the long scale.
Then again it was probably far easier for Britain to change in 1974 than it is for the remaining long scale countries to change today since the discrepancy will have been built into all software and systems dealing with currency and other things between countries since then... So i guess you are probably stuck with it and all it's disadvantages whether you are aware of them or not.
> its intermediate scales are un-prefixable
huh? Mrd, Brd, Trd, ...
> it names adjacent intermediate orders of magnitude with only subtle mutations of the previous name
million and ten million are also rather close. So what?
> it's inconsistent with itself (<x 10^9)
Those are explicitly named for historical reasons, which is well in line with how names for numbers are handled: we generally work in a decimal system, yet have "eleven" and "twelve", followed by lastdigit-teen while everything above twenty is decimaldigit-y-lastdigit. (German has similar quirks, although the order remains the same. Still: neunzehn, nine-ten vs. neunundzwanzig, nine-and-twenty).
And let's not start with French (ten, twenty, thirty, fourty, fifty, sixty, sixty-ten, four-twenties, four-twenties-ten, hundred). [to be fair, Switzerland and Belgium fixed that in their dialects, using septante, huitante, nonante]
> in 2019 it's extremely ambiguous
It was ambiguous since the 17th century when the short scale was invented.
I'm not sure if the UK officially switched by now, all I see is a random statement by a Prime Minister 45 years ago that I'm not sure is normative (https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/written-answers/1...)
> in all languages SI prefixes have been around since 1960
Sure, and it's used sometimes, but are SI prefixes defined as normative numbering scheme anywhere? That is, which language and which country uses Gigagrams officially?
Majority of your arguments against it are that other bad things also exist... really?
Also I am British, i've never come across long scale until now, we definitely don't use it, and haven't in a very long time. I'm also well traveled but apparently not enough in Europe to notice this.
Do trees reduce diesel based particulate emissions? What about nitrogen? Or will this just impact co2
Yes, trees reduce particulates https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37813709
"A study by US-based The Nature Conservancy (TNC) reported than the average reduction of particulate matter near a tree was between 7% and 24%."
>What about nitrogen?
There are several trees are nitrogen fixing species, they're a pretty important part of permaculture. Some of the mycorrhizal networks that exist in many forests also fix nitrogen. Also, some species like pine trees get a lot of their nitrogen from endophytes living in their tissue.
Unfortunately the nitrogen fixing species mostly absorb N2. Which I'm fairly sure isn't the compound that OP wanted removed from the atmosphere. They were probably thinking about nitrogen oxides.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned using robots to automate planting of trees.
There are a couple really cool drone tree planter projects out there that are able to plant thousands of trees an hour. https://www.fastcompany.com/40450262/these-tree-planting-dro...
This is better than nuclear? How?
Replacing fossil fuels with nuclear helps prevent further CO2 emission but doesn’t mitigate past emissions.
What’s already been released is enough to have already changed the climate and will continue warming the planet as long as it’s in the atmosphere.
Planting trees helps remove CO2 from the atmosphere that we’ve already released.
We should be both planting trees (to reverse past emissions) and changing our energy sources (to minimize future emissions).
Building nuclear power plants is something we should be doing, however simply constructing enough nuclear power plants to replace all fossil fuel plants would create an insane amount of carbon dioxide before they even go online.
Creating cement/concrete is one of the primary sources of CO2 emissions - producing a cubic yard of concrete (about 3900 lbs) is responsible for emitting about 400 lbs of CO2. Of course then you have to factor in all of the CO2 produced for manufacturing the structural steel, the fossil fuels that go into all the plastics and wiring, etc.
Why don’t we try making super fast growing, sterile GMO trees to do carbon capture and reduce the cost of wood?
Maybe stop cutting trees ?
I can’t get the whole article to load.. but my hot take is, for the most part, in all the places where the conditions are right for trees to grow, there are trees there already. The exceptions are just those places where the trees have been deliberately cleared by humans, to make room for agriculture or grazing animals (as in pre-Columbian America as I suspect the article points out). But allowing all those areas to regrow cant be sufficient: If it were, could you not make the argument that it was the clearing of all those areas in the first place that caused all the warming we’ve seen so far?
No, trees don't just regrow if you've cut them down on a large scale. The landscape changes permanently.
Well, “permanently” on human lifetime time scales perhaps. I’m just saying you probably can’t get forests to grow in places where they never occurred naturally pre-civilization.
There are enormous swathes of land that used to be forested that no longer are because we cut or burned trees either to use the lumber or to clear the land for agriculture.
Sure, in tens of thousands of years, trees would likely eventually repopulate that land; but that’s an extremely gradual process, as most trees’ seeds don’t disperse very far, and it takes years for each new tree to mature enough to produce seeds to extend the forest’s reach.
Whereas if we seed those areas directly, we could have forests again within decades.
Ok, that may be true but you're still not really understanding my argument. I'm going to spell it out.
Assume: The land we're reforesting is land that humanity deforested. Hopefully I don't need to make that argument, it should be clear.
Assume: If reforesting land causes cooling, then deforesting the same land caused the same amount of warming.
Let A=the amount of warming you get by deforesting some land, also the amount of cooling you get by reforesting the same land.
Let B=the amount of warming you get from shoving CO2 into the atmosphere.
Let C=the total amount of warming so far.
Then A+B=C
If you're making the argument that A=C, then B=0
But B is not equal to 0.
Therefore A is not equal to C.
That means: reforesting all the land we deforested is not going to cancel out the CO2 we've put into the atmosphere.
Does that help clarify my point? Reforestation BY ITSELF cannot be enough.
> Reforestation BY ITSELF cannot be enough.
Of course it's not. That's stated very clearly in the article.