0 - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...
I have recently been made aware of relatively inexpensive massive high density tree planting projects as a way to potentially solve the CO2 "problem"[0] I personally find ideas such as these are far better for world's ultra-poor then raising the price of energy thru carbon taxes, as pretty much the only way people can move into a significantly better living situation is thru the use of energy.
[0] https://www.oregonlive.com/environment/2019/07/massive-tree-...
Long term carbon sequestration via forests is extremely expensive as you can’t then use the land for anything else. Not extracting carbon is by far the cheapest option for long term sequestration.
PS: Sequestration of biomass underground is a viable long term option, but it’s again expensive.
Not sure how any of that is expensive, as it fulfills our requirements for food, housing, and luxury goods.
This land is not already being used for forests because other uses are simply more useful or less costly. The net loss of utility then needs to continue for as long as the carbon is sequestered.
Finally, if you want to sequester carbon somewhere else you need to collect and transport it which adds more costs. Further, if that’s the goal forests are simply slow carbon sinks in comparison to other plants.
You're correct, nothing comes for free, but the alternative is to leave this dead standing wood on forest floors to be later fuel wild fires. Or in the case of agricultural waste, to be composted or burned directly. Seems like a waste, as composting produces methane and CO2, which unless captured in an anaerobic digester just goes into the atmosphere and contributes to global warming, and burning does similar harm.
Small scale gasification reactors can run equipment, and are easily transported on trailers to the site of waste if it is not already easily centralized (in which case a dedicated cogeneration plant is usually a better option). A 20kW reactor can produce enough electricity to run 16 US homes, so situating one on every block is also a viable option that we should be considering.
But it's important, since it could buy us a few more years to implement more permanent solutions.
*Younger forests pull the most out over a given period of time. The bulk of the carbon stays locked up as long as the wood doesn't decay/isn't burned. It's one reason some architects are starting to look at structural wood for larger buildings again, as long as the building stands you keep the carbon locked up in the framing. If we had a magic wand we could create a few super-fast growing species and plant massive amounts of forest of complimentary species that provide the soil with nearly everything needed to grow one another and simply harvest the lumber, drag it out to anoxic depths at sea and sink it not unlike the commonly accepted theory of the azolla event doing similar with aquatic ferns in our planet's past.
The best trees can manage about 48lbs of CO2 per year, that's 46 trees per metric tonne and healthy forest is 40-60 trees per acre. Just to go carbon neutral last year that would mean you would have needed at LEAST 53 million square miles of optimal forest. For reference, there are 196.9 million square miles of land on earth, effectively 1/4 of the land mass on earth would need to be 100% optimized decade or two old forest.
Roughly 31% of the earth is forest, however it's far from the above optimal conditions. In reality we'd need probably 50% (if not more) of the earth to be forest to manage what we did last year.
Coincidentally, pre-industrial era the earth was about 48% forest and current estimates are we lose something like 28,125 square miles annually to human operations. We're producing more and more while reducing the planet's ability to sequester.
Sadly planting more trees isn't even going to equate to a bandaid, it's going to be like loosing a limb to a wood chipper and gently blowing on the wound. It's purely a "this makes me feel good" thing.
It is even true that the CO2 was at this point before. If it had shifted at geological timescales even if it was from human activity it would be more or less fine as the ecosystem could adapt to it like previous epoches. Certainly there would be extinctions but would give time to adapt and speciate.
Tree planting helps some but it isn't comparable at scale at all - as in running out of available landmass bad.
Tree planting would help the ultrapoor if they maintained it locally given things like impact on soil erosion and rainfall but those are only localized effects
Yes, but they also require other things to grow, so the scaling of their growth with rapidly increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration isn't as impressive as some people imagine, and it's only been empirically demonstrated in the short term. As far as I've read, the main uncertainty as to what happens in the medium-long term relates to how much nitrogen is available in the soil, and how the nitrogen-fixing topsoil ecosystem adapts. If it can thrive in such a way as to fix more nitrogen, that could lead to further plant growth. But it's also plausible that the rapid shift in the environment disrupts that system and leads to a regression in plant growth rates.
Of course. Nobody is saying there should be no CO2. But if your implication is that higher CO2 means better growth, it is generally wrong. Some plants do grow better, some don't, in a higher CO2 environment. But more importantly, it isn't as if CO2 is an independent variable. Along with it comes significant changes that plants are not adapted to -- higher average and peak temperatures, more or less rainfall (depending where in the world it is). Yes, given enough time, the plants that make it through the stresses of climate change will adapt and thrive, but in the near term (a few generations of humans) it will cause problems.
> I am not sure it was immediately obvious to people 120 years ago that CO2 was such a "dangerous" thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect
In short: Joseph Fourier (of the Fourier transform) advocated for the idea of atmospheric gasses causing a greenhouse effect. It was advanced along the years, in 1896 Arrhenius even calculated the effect on the climate due to a doubling of CO2. There were scientific papers published in the 50s using the terms "climate change" in the 50s, well before the Mariner 2 spacecraft.
"Carbon tax hurts the poor" is oil industry propaganda. The poor use less carbon than average -- especially the "ultra poor" -- but everyone receives the same dividend. It's a net transfer to the poor.
On top of that, the underlying cost (after accounting for tax, subsidies and regulations) for oil in poorer countries is higher than in richer countries because they have worse infrastructure for delivering fuel. You can put solar panels and batteries on a shack in the middle of a field and have electricity for decades. To do that with a gas generator you need gas stations, vehicles to deliver it, roads to drive them on etc. They don't have those things, and won't get them overnight, but meanwhile you can give them electricity today and they immediately get running water and electric light and wireless telecommunications etc. So oil is garbage for them and they're better off never burning a drop of it while the people who do are paying a carbon tax that funds a dividend they can use to buy solar panels.
It's true all over the place.
Suppose you live in a country which gets 80% of its energy from fossil fuels. Well, that sucks, so now your average energy costs go up by $1000 a year. You can't afford that! Only you get it all back. You get a $1000 dividend, use it to pay for the same energy you did before, and nothing changes.
Except for one thing. When your country continues its path to industrialization, nobody is ever going to build a new coal fired power plant again. All the new capacity will be non-fossil fuels, because now they're much cheaper relative to coal -- no carbon tax.
The only cost you're really paying is the relative price difference between fossil fuels and alternatives. But that's already close to zero and has non-cost benefits for your country like air quality and energy independence.
Moreover, the idea that this is some cost for developing countries that developed countries didn't have to pay is also a lie. The cost of renewables is driving the cost of fossil fuels down through competition. The carbon tax is only needed to prevent that -- to keep their price back up around their traditional cost, which makes them uncompetitive with the falling price of renewables, so that they die out instead of the lower demand causing their price to fall to the point that they still end up as 20-50% of generation capacity.
And not by Joe Schmoe who it would make sense to ignore, but by Svante Arrhenius.
> Svante August Arrhenius (19 February 1859 – 2 October 1927) was a Swedish scientist. Originally a physicist, but often referred to as a chemist, Arrhenius was one of the founders of the science of physical chemistry. He received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903, becoming the first Swedish Nobel laureate. In 1905, he became director of the Nobel Institute, where he remained until his death.
Hindsight is 20/20. Even now, because of the nature of what amounts to an empirical science who's primary effects will only be measured in the future, we haven't unambiguously proven that climate change is occuring, and cannot do so without additional decades or centuries of data, at which point it may be too late.
It is similarly fallacious to accuse oil companies of knowing about this problem and failing to act. 30 years ago this was similarly a theory with even less evidence than today, and only a handful of scientists even considered it.
There's no social or economic cost to the world for acting to prevent climate change. The costs are all negative - we save vast amounts of money and societal damage by acting.
There hasn't been any serious scientific dispute over whether climate change was occurring for at least 50 years.
And of course it's completely accurate to note that the oil companies knew about the problem and have not only refused to act, but have spent massive amounts to prevent action. Many of their own documents are available on the internet for your inspection.
You're describing catastrophic terraforming on the scale of about 100 years. That's a huge claim with enormous ramifications and given the current expense of mitigation, it rightly warrants scrutiny, both in probability of occurance and scope of change.
>Simple math from the very beginning of the fossil fuel era made it obvious we would eventually run into problems.
Absolutely nothing about climate change is simple. Which is why it took decades to establish any kind of consensus. Global climate is a chaotic function of various positive and negative feedback mechanisms - simply noting that increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gasses may cause climate change is not nearly enough to conclude that there is a problem without considering the hugely complex system in it's entirety.
>It has been extremely obvious for decades that the predicted problems were here, now.
We've been collecting the very data necessary to prove the "obviousness" of climate change over the same decades in which you claim the problem was already evident. You need time series data to establish a trend with any kind of certainty, and climate changes at a minimum over hundreds of years.
>There's no social or economic cost to the world for acting to prevent climate change. The costs are all negative - we save vast amounts of money and societal damage by acting.
Like the rest of your post, your perspective is biased by your assertion that climate change is happening. You need to view this from the perspective of a society which has not had time to perform the necessary data gathering and analysis to make such conclusion - in which case, there are now and were decades ago current costs to switching off of fossil fuels, which it would only be reasonable to incur given a minimum degree of certainty in future climate change. It is simply infesible to make drastic policy changes for every sounded alarm - one must obviously consider the expected value of the change, which is (disaster cost)*(probability of disaster)-(cost of change). The value of this probability is difficult to model and has been steadily increasing with recent climate science.
>There hasn't been any serious scientific dispute over whether climate change was occurring for at least 50 years.
Just decades ago the consensus was that of global cooling. Again, you underestimate the complexity of determining whether the climate is actually changing and, in particular, how it will change in the future.
>And of course it's completely accurate to note that the oil companies knew about the problem
Again, oil companies did not "know" of the problem, they were aware of the possibility of the problem. The very documents which you mention state that additional modeling was required to determine anything with certainty.
Not everyone of course, but I just want to point out that “they know about it and are hiding it” isn’t always accurate. There is a lot of denial