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Comment by radicalbyte | Hacker News Reader

I've been looking into carbon capture recently because it's going to be vital to slowing down the warming (and buying us another 50 years for the transition).

What surprised me is that I can cover double my two-car-owning European family's carbon footprint via planting trees in the UK at an annual cost of around $400. It'll cost half that to do the same in a developing country.

We need a global carbon tax and we need it now. Heck, even a carbon tax in the EU / US applied to local emissions and, importantly, to imported goods would go a long way to solving the problem.

We can't just sleepwalk into oblivion, can we?

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But it's not just planting the tree, right? It's taking land that currently has no tree, reserving it for the tree, and guaranteeing that the land & tree will remain intact for a nominal period of time, possibly indefinitely?

Trees are cheap. Fertile tree-growing land not currently used for trees: not so much.

Here in the (western) US, millions (billions?) of trees are burning up every year due to forest fires.

So to add to your list, we also need a way to facilitate healthy forests without completely destroying them and re-releasing nearly all of their stored carbon back into the atmosphere within a couple of weeks. Controlled burns is one way, but that requires an investment in firefighters and other specialists.. who are currently all preoccupied fighting uncontrolled fires.

Here in Australia, fire is an essential part of the life cycle of our bushland (our virgin forests of primarily eucalyptus trees).

https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/topics/parks-reserves-and...

You might be interested in The Queen's Commonwealth Canopy: https://queenscommonwealthcanopy.org/

The thing that I don't like about carbon offsets is the incentive to cheat. Green consumer buys carbon offset, company selling carbon offset pinky swears to offset carbon, but failing to do what was promised is unlikely to be caught, and is pure profit if they don't do it.

And they don't necessarily have to lie to do it. Take your growing trees example. They arrive at the carbon offset by saying that a tree takes X carbon, so Y trees will offset your carbon. They plant Y trees, and they are done.

However over half of trees planted in communities, will die within 1-2 years. (See https://www.state.sc.us/forest/urbsurv.htm for a source.) Based on conversations with people who planted trees for a living after clearcuts, in a wild forest setting the percentage loss is even higher for a combination of reasons from unreliable water to browsing by forest animals to a monoculture being vulnerable to disease. What incentive is there for the company planting the trees to come back in 5 years and see how many trees are still there? The higher the number, the better for them, checking just costs them money.

Moving on, are trees permanent CO2 storage? No. As forest fires around the world demonstrate, trees are only temporary storage. You don't control what will happen to those trees by mid-century and farther.

And all this assumes that there is no lying. See https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2010/0420/Buying-carbo... for one of many examples where it turned out that there was lying.

So pay for your carbon offsets. It will soothe your conscience. It might even do some (probably temporary) good. But be aware that you're likely telling yourself a white lie if you think that they are real.

I think this is really well put.

And just so people understand: the anthropogenic forcing of climate change is the net increase of persistent greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, driven by pulling fossil fuels out of the ground and burning them.

So to offset that, it's not enough to just plant some trees. We would need to plant, grow, and maintain enough net new trees, globally to fix the carbon that until recently lived in coal, oil, and gas reserves. Trading trees for fossil fuels means aiming to have more trees globally than the planet ever had for most of human history. (Because for most of human history, fossil fuels were still underground.)

What private company is going to deliver on that? And how could anyone possibly hold them accountable if they don't?

So I share the skepticism of buying offsets. To me they feel like papal indulgences from the most corrupt time periods in the Catholic Church.

"Carbon offsetting on the blockchain"...

Can you post information about this, especially the math? According to US stats I've seen it requires an acre of growing forest to offset 100 US gallons of gas per year.[0] We have a long commute (which I'm working on cutting) so we need about 8 acres to offset fully.

[0] https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calc...

Edit: added missing units.

I used one of the carbon offset sites, this one:

carbonfootprint.com

Thank you. Their numbers match the EPA numbers.

I'm honestly surprised that site's still up.

I was too. Perhaps an editing mistake?

Hell, considering the UK is heavily deforested, probably a lot of people who would appreciate those new trees too.

That's why I'm going to get trees planted. I grew up in the South West of the UK, when I was a kid I played in the woods and wildlife there. Now it's gone, replaced by houses.

So I figure it's worth paying extra to offset my carbon usage by double whilst rebuilding a little of what was destroyed in my birth country.

This is one thing I really notice about the UK. Lots of people here think featureless green fields == nature, which is a shame.

> sleepwalk into oblivion

Tell that to the Egyptians, Romans, Easter-Islanders (debated now, actually), and the countless other human civilisations who didn't really appreciate their impending demise before it was too late. Hell, the Romans hired essentially barbarians (so mercenaries, basically) to defend the northern territories against...you guessed it, barbarians.

Just because the bulk of the harmful effects that humans contribute to begin at 50+ years, conveniently after humans have to live through it. Humans still create children to suffer through the hell they created though, how peculiar.

The Fermi Paradox slowly turns out to be the Fermi Taboo

Exactly, it's stupidly cheap, "so you destroyed the world because you couldn't be bothered to pay 5% extra for clean energy? Thanks Grandpa"

It's not someone's future grandpa resisting a carbon tax, but massive lobbying by the coal and oil industry.

https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=E1210

https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=E01

And a lot of oil is in favor of a carbon tax because it shifts more electricity away from coal to oil than from oil to wind/solar.

Perhaps. But oil companies give millions to climate change-denying politicians, and to think tanks that falsely claim that there is no human-driven climate change.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/15/exxon-mo...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jul/01/exxon-mo...

This is just saying oil and ags gives lots of money to Republicans which I don't think is a surprise to anyone especially because Republicans tend to not only bw climate change deniers but are also anti-environmentalism, which oil and gas still very much funds.

I was curious about this and wanted to share some quick calculations on how viable this is:

A tree can absorb as much as 48 lbs of CO2 per year [1]. This is pretty vague cause this can vary by tree age and size, but let's use this arbitrary number

In 2014 the United States generated 6,870 million metric tonnes of CO2 [2]. 48 lbs is about 0.021 metric tonnes [3]. So...

    6,870,000,000 / .021 = 327,142,857,142.85

327 trillion trees!! The population in the US on 2014 was roughly 317 million people [4]. This means for each person we would have to plant

  6870 / 317 / .021 = 1,031.99 trees

Just north of 1000 trees. That's 1k additional trees that need to be planted just to offset our CO2. Crazy

    [1] https://projects.ncsu.edu/project/treesofstrength/treefact.htm
    [2] https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-us-greenhouse-gas-emissions
    [3] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=48+lbs+to+metric+ton
    [4] https://www.census.gov/popclock/embed.php?component=pop_on_date&date=20140101

I thought this was pretty interesting. So I looked up how many trees there are per person:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

The US has 716 per person. Sadly, it looks like China and India are the worst culprits: "Brazil had 301 billion trees (1,494 per person), Canada 318 billion (8,953 per person), and China 139 billion (102 trees per person). Among highly populous countries, India (population, 1.267 billion) had a tree population of only 35 billion, leading to just 28 trees per person."

By comparison, the US won't take that long to get to carbon-neutrality. India and China are going to be a burden on the planet for the next century at least.

Note that you don't need to plant an additional 1000 trees per person, you just need to have 1000 trees per person to cancel out their emissions.

So, if you plant 3 times your current forest sizes into wood harvesting forests, you would capture all of your CO2 emissions into a solid.

That's probably not reasonable (but I'm not sure). Even then, if you double your forest area, and cut the wood from there you'll offset some 20% of your emission already.

It's not a silver bullet, but it is something.

Then add that many trees again each following year.

I assumed the forests were harvested every 4 years. That's average for low quality wood, like what goes into MDF.

But the emission compensated was only for 2014.

Yeah I don't think China or India are catching up any time soon. They're extremely arid regions.

China even has a program in place to plant trees along the Gobi dessert to stop it's expansion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-North_Shelter_Forest_Pro.... That will help with the number (closer to 200 tree/person) since they plan to plant 100 billion trees by 2050 http://www.theplaidzebra.com/china-is-building-a-great-green...

It's actually a clever plan. They will destroy ecosystems on the way so its not _perfect_, but it's feasible and will likely work if they fuccessfully find the right kind of tree to start the forest. Greenland is doing it too[1], with a lot of setbacks, but they are starting to recover (albeit slowly)

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/20/climate/icela...

(Even in the short scale, 327,142,857,142 is ‘only’ 327 billion, not 327 trillion)

More importantly, those trees will capture that amount every year. So, once you have them, you only have to replace trees that get lost. Assuming a 10 year lifespan (many will die young), it’s only 100 a year to plant. That’s doable (trees you plant will be tiny)

However, 1,000 trees at, say, 10 meters average distance cover about 0.1 square kilometers/25 acres. That way, the USA would support about 100 million people (I think 10 meters distance is a bit conservative, but there also will be areas where trees won’t easily grow)

⇒ Americans will have to (at least) halve their energy use. I think that is doable.

Good to hear about tree plantng in the UK at $400 and at $200 to compensate for European-level personal energy use. Please give me the source! Our project TreeDripper.net that promotes tree planting by schoolk in poor countries needs this type of quantative information. Or mail to info@demotech.org , thanks!

>What surprised me is that I can cover double my two-car-owning European family's carbon footprint via planting trees in the UK at an annual cost of around $400. It'll cost half that to do the same in a developing country.

Then what happens when the trees are fully grown? Processing them for industry would just reintroduce the carbon back into the environment. Letting them stay in the forest is nice, but you would quickly run out of room. There needs to be some sort of way to bury the biomass in order to put that carbon out of the atmosphere for good.

>Letting them stay in the forest is nice, but you would quickly run out of room.

No you wouldn't. There is massive deforestation all over the world. If we planted so many trees to offset carbon emissions that we accidentally solved that problem, that would be a huge environmental benefit on its own, and it would hold an enormous amount of carbon.

>There is massive deforestation all over the world.

And that deforestation is to make room for other things, mostly farms. As the world population continues to explode, the amount of land that can be allocated to forests quickly decreases.

Build housing out of them. There's a 14-story skyscraper going up in Portland, OR made of cross-laminated timber; basically no concrete.

those type of houses are mostly made of glue and plastic. There is a ridiculous amount of toxic glue in modern wood buildings.

At 1000 trees per year per person, that's a lot of building per person.

Adding a bit of iron to the ocean -- the same as is released by a large volcanic eruption -- could do the trick.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/07/r...

> There needs to be some sort of way to bury the biomass in order to put that carbon out of the atmosphere for good.

Biochar would be suitable [1]. However, wood is probably not the best feedstock, due to its slow growth compared to other plants.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar

> "Then what happens when the trees are fully grown? Processing them for industry would just reintroduce the carbon back into the environment."

A forest is only a significant carbon sink while it is growing. Harvesting and replanting a mature forest is the best thing to do with it.

Obviously you want to use the wood for construction, or other long-term applications. Well-constructed buildings can last for hundreds of years (and after that, the timber can be recycled). Long term carbon storage.

It's disappointing to me that planting trees is the best we can come up with. One would hope that we could work on a 10x, technological solution.

It's generating useful material for us and fully biodegradable at the end of its lifecycle, and even self-replicates. What's not to love?

> What's, not to love?

Biodegradable. That means that at the end of its life it decomposes and returns its recourses to the environment. Normally this is good, but not when the goal is to remove a resource from the environment.

"If you write out the basic facts of trees, but framed as technology, it sounds like impossible sci-fi nonsense. Self-replicating, solar-powered machines that synthesize carbon dioxide and rainwater into oxygen and sturdy building materials on a planetary scale." - @CryptoNature

This is the ultimate NIH. Discarding the solution because it was invented by nature and not the human race!

Is carbon offset by afforestation effective though? I had read that we can't counter the emissions by planting trees alone. I'm definitely interested in doing this and covering more than double of my footprint

If you chop the trees and use the wood for something durable (not paper), yes it's effective for small scale things.

Most carbon capture forests don't chop their trees. So you are just locking some land into a natural reserve. It's something good by itself, but won't help fighting Global Warming.

Is there some sort of service that I can pay to have this done? That's not an unreasonable amount of money to spend for that.

Could you point us to any good resources you've come across?

Hi are you using any specific UK service to plant trees please?

carbonfootprint.com offer carbon offset tree planting both in the UK and globally

That's the site I used.

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