Tree planting: Where can I do it and which type is best?
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
There are about 3 trillion trees for a population of 7 billion people for an average of 428 trees per person, so that means you have to make up the delta of about 172 to 572 trees over the course of your lifetime to erase your carbon footprint (of course, young trees don't sequester as much carbon, so your footprint will still be positive for much of your lifetime - but as the trees get older, they sequester at a higher rate per year, which eventually gives you a negative footprint). This projection was based on the CO2 sequestration per year and the average survival rate documented in [1].
[1] https://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/Downloads/method-calculat...
This seems really doable for the average person!
It's definitely possible for any healthy adult.
That's a hell of an error. Sorry folks.
nationalforests.org, the Arbor Day Foundation... there are probably lots of good options.
Whether it's at a lat/long that previously held a tree or not is largely irrelevant when considering whether your action was helpful or neutral.
...an estimated 3.6 million metric tons of greenhouse gases that, as seems to happen at least once every fire season lately, was more than enough to obliterate the progress made by all of California’s climate-change policies in a typical year.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/31/magazine/para...
The idea is not to just plant trees but to increase the number of trees on the planet over the long term so that effectively the CO2 absorbed does not go back to the atmosphere.
This is aimed at reducing CO2 in the atmosphere and has to go hand in hand with reducing emissions.
Given that carbon has a half life of between 20-200 years, and that we appear to be reaching peak emissions, and that a lot of estimates say our emissions should drop by 70% just given how often we replace power plants and how completive renewables are right now and are projected to be in the future -- it seems like planting trees really could be enough.
Here's a link to the discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20543605 -- on mobile so I can't figure out how to get the comment URL. If you're interested, just go there and search for my username -- onlyrealcuzzo. I'd love a second set of eyes on it. Not sure the math is right.
I've read in several places that 50% of carbon in the atmosphere is absorbed by the ocean within 20-200 years.
I'm guessing that's bad for the ocean, and maybe there's a limit, and the rate probably isn't constant. It's not a half-life at all.
Walking around parts of Portland on the sidewalk is like being on a rollercoaster because of the tree roots.
Numbers are important and should be discussed transparently. Lots of variation in guesstimates, fudging, simplifications, etc cloud the issue and give drastically different "good ways forward". So, please, correct my back-of-the-envelope estimate below:
E.g. from [1]: "Following the estimations of carbon stock including above ground biomass, the total stock in the studied chestnut forests could be ordered as follows: CF3 (105.8 t C ha-1) > CF1 (102.1 t C ha-1) > CF2 (76.3 t C ha-1). The pure chestnut forest CF3 characterized with the highest total carbon stock per hectare and only 20.6 % from it is accumulated in the aboveground tree biomass."
Chestnut is one of the best carbon sequestering forest options we have. Estimate (overly positively) that this capacity cycles over 100y. Fudge down the CO2 and CH4 release from decomposition. That gives ca 100 tC/ha over 100y, aka 1tC/(ha y) or 100tC/(km2 y).
Globally we have ca 35GtCO2 or 10GtC carbon emission per year. Current forests store about 15% of that, but we are currently loosing forests at a rapid rate, and we need to not only reach neutral but also sink the 100y or so of spewing we've already fucked up. So let's keep the number at 10GtC/y.
10GtC/y would then require 100E6km2 of NEW perfect assumption chestnut forest.
We have ca 500E6km2 of total land surface on earth. That means we need to set aside 20% of all land on earth for our NEW chestnut forest. But we don't have that much land that can sustain something like this. Forest grows less well outside of humid temperate to tropical regions. E.g. Antarctica, Sahara, the steppes, boreal forest regions, etc. E.g: All agricultural land, both fields and grazing, is 11% of total land area but over one third of all culturable land, the rest of which is already mostly forest. Even if we covered all growth-possible land area that is not already forest we simply don't have enough land. And we would be out of farmland.
Based on this back of envelope calculation tree planting is not a viable solution. It's a good step in the right direction, but nothing to get the crowds overly excited about.
Instead, e.g. azolla is around 15x more potent as sequestering growth stock than forests, and it grows floating on water. Genetically engineering azolla to grow fast in higher salinity would be a better way to combat climate change. We have plenty of ocean surface area. There will be downsides to such a solution, but compare with other solutions or the horrors of what will be if we don't act...
And I'm sure someone can cook up some gm-franken-algae that is even more potent.
My point, if any, is to make sure to actually run the numbers. Get different estimates then pay skilled scientists to get better estimates. Discuss the numbers, assumptions, simplifications. Don't get the general population stuck on low worth paths when they could start fighting for more valuable ones.
And I don't propose "stop planting trees". I argue that planting trees is a good thing, but only a minor item that is overshadowing more valuable options in the general debate. We need to get people to start facing reality to the point where they can start thinking about compromises. There is no "solution" that don't require drastic changes in how we use our land and live our lives.
Side note: nuclear is the only short term low land-usage footprint solution I can see, and drastic genetic manipulation biomass or vast nuclear powered direct capture are the only long term solutions I can guesstimate. Anyone that can show me interesting alternatives?
[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285516686_Carbon_st...
I tried to find literature, but came back empty handed, on whether it is better to let tree grows on a parcel, or cut grass regularly and let it compost, adding biomass to it.
Of those two options, trees. Compost does not sequester carbon in and of itself. That's a wishful thinking myth that is based on a lack of understanding of soil. Compost is organic matter, in various stages of life, death and decay. We want soil to have more organic matter. So people assumed adding compost to dirt would accomplish this. It does not. The organic matter is decomposed into CO2 and returns to the atmosphere. We need to increase STABLE organic matter in the soil, and compost does not do that simply by adding it to dirt. The only thing that creates stable organic matter is microbes living in the rhizosphere in symbiosis with plants. In order to increase soil SOM, we need more root mass. The way compost can help is to plant a forest or meadow and keep soaking it in compost tea so that the roots get deeper and deeper, expanding the rhizosphere and the depth of the soil. Normal roots will only grow as deep as there are symbiotic microbes, and yet those microbes will only live where there are roots, so there's a catch-22. We can use the microbes in compost, dissolved into water as compost tea, to get microbes deeper than the roots, so the roots go deeper, and then keep doing that. There's people with grass that has 20 foot deep roots from doing this.
So does that mean that at any given place, there won't be soil for deeper than the roots go? What happens to the soul if all the roots die or are removed (assuming it is not washed away by water)? Does it decay into CO2?
One is carbon-sinks. This can be done by permanent new trees. Or by replacing trees and use the old wood or plastics for buildings. Or make carbon based usables and permenantly bury their waste in deep landfils that don't let out co2. Or by new techniques for sequestering carbon from air. Planting trees and letting them die is only temporary.
Second and most important though is getting more heat out of the planet than in. Focusing on carbon is one thing. But reflecting energy to space also works, e.g. by white roofs, or mirrors, or heat conducting materials that send off energy in frequencies not absorbed by clouds and co2/water/methane.
According to: The University of Michigan and NC state:
The average American's footprint is 21 metric tons a year while the average tree absorbs 21 kg a year.
That makes it a ball park of 1000 trees.
1) The timescale is very long - a single tree to drive carbon neutrality is MOST optimistically pegged at 40 - 100 years depending on species. With expanding populations planning or guaranteeing execution on that time scale is limited. AKA it's very unlikely that most efforts, unless planted in an evergreen protected land will actually drive a net positive impact.
2) Forest soil and topsoil (from dropped branches, leaves, etc) can sequester up to 2x as much carbon as the actual trees themselves and is typically counted in the "net negative" C02 impact. But warming temperatures creates a negative feedback loop increases the rate of C02 release from soil.
3) Governments, in their effort to drive commercial tree planting, are accidentally driving the wrong incentives - farmed forests are <50% as effective at C02 sequester as natural forests and the act of burning wood pellets for fuel and or even using for building materials dramatically reduces and in fact calls into question ANY C02 benefits.
Effectively the only sure fire way towards atmospheric CO2 reduction is cutting consumption
(1) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/epa-declares-burni...
(2) https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/trees-carbon-emissions-bo...
Which I am the opposite of.
There are a lot of flower & daisy soft solutions to C02.
Drive to the suburban forest in your SUV, plant 100 trees that will inevitably be cut down long before they have a carbon negative impact, come home and run your AC.
You're still running 1000/1 in negative C02 balance.
Vs finds ways to dramatically cut use, double down on investigative hard solutions like nuclear and major infrastructure projects like mass transport, car banning, new taxation on major freight (sea and road) to force efficiency adoption etc.
Lots of hard solutions are readily available to solving the problem, but by definition they're hard.
I agree with the point that planting 100 trees should not leave anyone feeling they've done their part. Repeating the math until we're blue in the face is what helps there I guess.
But convincing the entire population of the world to set their thermostat 1 degree higher during the summer months would have a 1000x multiple impact on a 40x shorter time scale than if every one of those people planted a tree.
The spirit of my comment is that in general people LOVE the path of least resistance.
Ask the average person about combatting climate change and their response is "plant more trees".
Because that's easy, shit you can pay the gardener to do it or donate $10 to a plant the tree collective and feel instant gratification with no sacrifice.
Vs the highest possible impact solution which is cutting personal consumption - even a little bit!
This confused me for longer than I'd care to admit, but now that I get it, I'd just say that a much smaller proportion of 'the entire population of the world' - even the developed world - has AC than it might seem to an American perspective.
You can't ask people to set their thermostat 1 degree warmer every year for that 40-100 years. You can expect there to be scope for continued tree planting for decades.
Neither is a sole solution, but both are part of a holistic, reasoned and coordinated journey to carbon neutrality.
So do 1000 times that, and don't plant them in a suburban forest but one that will stay around longer. Or contribute money to tree planting initiatives who do it right.
Trees provide more services than log production
I'm pretty confident OP up there also loves trees. But we're at a point where we need to calculate efforts and allocate resources wisely. Maybe we need fewer forests and more nuclear. idk.
I know for a fact every tree I can plant with my bare hands would be carbon negative, because I did the math.
When I see people who are anti-tree planting, I wonder if there is some authoritarian predilections at play and anything that doesn't result in central control or provide some mechanism for rent seeking or corruption is going to get down played.
The reality is that if you go and work with your local land management folks who can give you guidance on the types of trees and where to plant them, then going out and spending a weekend putting fifty trees in the ground, will give you quite a nice reduction for the CO2 emissions necessary to plant them. What's more is trees reproduce on their own. If you get a tree into the ground it will likely produce two additional trees over its lifetime if not more.
Also, do you keep track of the trees to make sure they actually grow? Just planting the seed or even a sapling is far from sufficient to ensure that carbon sequestration occurs. Young trees are food for a variety of animals and insects. Do you know what fraction of the trees you plant actually reach maturity? I've seen estimates that far fewer than one in five do.
Your own property, literally anywhere trees can survive.
Short of cutting the tree down yourself, hauling it yourself, and then processing & building it:
The C02 cost of harvesting, hauling, and processing trees into wood is very costly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emis...
Displacing fossil-derived electricity with enough low-carbon electricity to supply an air conditioner is more effective than raising the AC temperature one degree or planting a tree.
The key issue is to reduce emissions. Sometimes that necessitates reduced consumption of energy services [1]. But reducing consumption is not sufficient and often not necessary to deeply cut emissions.
If 3 tons of CO2 per capita per year is a sustainable emissions rate, then the US emits at about 550% of the sustainable rate. Even Cuba emits at 107% of the sustainable rate. No polity is going to voluntarily reduce their material standard of living below that of Cuba. And even a super-emitter like the US could reach the sustainable rate with a combination of more efficient energy use and non-fossil (renewable and nuclear) primary energy production substituting for fossils. So I think that "stop burning fossils for air conditioning" is a prescription closer to solving the root problem than "endure a little more discomfort in the air conditioning season."
[1] For example, there is no foreseeable technology that will enable trans-Atlantic passenger flights without burning chemical fuels. Long distance flights could burn synthetic fuels made using non-fossil electricity, but that would raise fuel prices. Whether by fiat or by pricing, long distance air travel will necessarily become less common if/when aviation faces pressure to reduce CO2 emissions.
Just mention it as one of the low-emissions alternatives to fossil power. Cite climate-focused organizations for support rather than industry-specific organizations. The aim is to reduce emissions, not to promote one specific technology toward that end.
I wish that we just had carbon tax-and-dividend instead of a thousand different regulations and tax code incentives mandating or nudging toward specific kinds of efficiency measures and fossil replacements. At the same time I understand that carbon taxes face enormous popular opposition while tax credits and CAFE standards don't, so I'll accept having 3 different kinds of federal tax incentives to separately promote nuclear power, wind power, and solar power (plus a myriad of differently structured state level incentives) as the best the US can currently do.
In theory it seems like a great idea, in practice with decades of 10’s to 100’s of Billions in R&D it’s unlikely to improve that much within the next 5-10 years. (106 Billion and counting from the US government alone: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2018/07/09/nuclear-...)
I would say in 40 years we’re going to be in a much much worse situation so is your argument don’t bother ? Else we should do both, plant a trillion trees and replace fossil fuels and civilisation might be ok?
Sorry but it just seems like you’re trying to make this a negative idea, when it’s a clearly positive thing outside of just sequestering carbon, there are other areas of the eco system improved by having more trees.
Elevated shade decreases local soil temperature.
It's not that shocking. If two tree rings are the same width, the outer one contains more material due to the larger circumference. The surface area of a tree increases every year until it starts to decline. In a healthy tree, canopy and roots are balanced, and any gain or loss in material above ground is mirrored below. Dead roots rejoin the food chain much, much slower than twigs and leaves, so nearly half the carbon that goes into the tree goes into the ground and stays there, even if you cut the tree for timber. And due to root fusion, some of the roots may survive... if you didn't cut down all of the trees of the same species. I'm looking at you, timber industry.
[1] https://www.nationalforests.org/get-involved/tree-planting-p...
Based on wikipedia ([1], [2]), worldwide tree density is about 750 trees/hectare, with 4B hectares total (30% of land area). We clearly can't add another 7B to offset global emissions, but seems like a good marginal investment as long as there's room to grow that number. [3]
The real question is whether that $1 is enough to permanently "create more forest" Even at 5x the price it seems like a bargain for a lifetime of carbon emissions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest
We should plant lots of trees, but we should also do everything else in our power in parallel.
That's only about a tree every 5-20 weeks. So about once a month to about twice a year.
https://www.mpi.govt.nz/funding-and-programmes/forestry/plan...
They do have a programme to pay land owners for planting trees, but in minumum one-hectare units, and it's financially a loss. I own and live on farmland in NZ. I could turn a hectare into fully native bush and get their maximum one-time payout of $4,000. But the costs of native trees are expensive and the labour to fully plant up a hectare properly is not insubstantial. The $500 top-up payout for fencing doesn't cover the cost of fencing. Then I'd have to give up about $500 per year in farming income, permanently. It would feel good, but there is still a significant financial disincentive.
The government isn't really in a position to increase payouts. Taxes are about as high as the economy can handle and the government has lots of other projects to fund. If this is going to happen, it's going to be on the backs of individuals acting out of their own good will.
This guy built a whole forest.
You need to maintain it and it requires so much chemicals especially from Monsanto. It's so much work and money just to maintain grass.
I like alternatives like moss or clovers. Even cactus gardens seem better suited.
Thanks for the clarification, I some how thought grass was man made or domesticated/engineer like cows.
That's pretty dense for a large tree.
You get customers to pay for the planting of 500 trees at $X/tree. This is treated as a long-term investment. 30 years later the trees are harvested and the "investors" get back X% of the value of the trees.
So they get to say they live a carbon-neutral life, and as a bonus, get to make some money.
Squirrels bury between 3,000 and 10,000 nuts each fall, so each person just needs to drive over one squirrel.
https://github.com/vrachieru/xiaomi-flower-care-api
My plan is to use that and build a Raspberry Pi to monitor my plants. And later on maybe control the watering system.
Anyways, it's a nice cheap plant monitoring option. It was really helpful when I was trying to figure out why my plants were turning yellow. People were mostly telling me that I was either over watering or under watering, etc. Then the probes all told me that my soil has no fertility left so I just added some organic 5-5-5 fertilizers and my plants are doing great again. The nerd in me love checking the data every day but would ideal build a Raspi server to sync and display some graphs some day (using a Prometheus endpoint perhaps?)
If anyone has good advice on how to control a set of water valves using Raspberry Pi, please let me know! I know about GPIO but I would like to have a bus of some sort so I can add more valves in the future if needed. Maybe a USB solenoid?
There are many raspberry pi projects on reddit for the "microgrowery" community... I recommend having a search. I plan to set up an indoor tomato and herb garden using these methods.
For solenoids, I advise some methods like [1] so that you can connect a cheap and daisy-chainable relay board like [2] via SPI. Then you can control anything.
If you don't want to get down into the 5v to 3.3v mumbo jumbo, it may be easiest to connect an arduino or clone via USB to the raspberry pi. There are bazillions of documented ways to drive relays with an arduino.
[1]: https://www.tansi.org/rp/interfacing5v.html
[2]: https://www.ebay.com/itm/SPI-breakout-board-with-6-relays-fo...
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07L491F8K/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_U_x_d...
There is a related subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/takecareofmyplant/
Think about using a bell siphon [1]. Its typically used in aquaponics with a constant stream of water being pumped, but the pump can certainly be switched with a relay/pi/sensor setup to allow for intermittent dry spells (depending on what your growing). Water can be pumped from a nearby reservoir or tank.
[1] https://worldwaterreserve.com/aquaponics/bell-siphon-for-aqu...
They work with the council and have organised the planting & maintenance of over 600 trees since 2012 (including the lovely Himalayan Birch outside my house which I sponsored last year).
I have also helped out here and there and created a 'tree map' a few years ago which has information on all the publicly owned trees in the Borough - http://maps.catfordstreettrees.org.uk/ (I actually happen to currently be in the process of updating the map with new data)
I'm interested in hearing about other projects, too.
"In England, you would not need planning permission to plant less than two hectares (20,000 sq metres) in a low risk area, it said."
How do you expect one determines an area to be low-risk? To do so requires assessment from all stakeholders who could deem it not to be low-risk.
Woodland Trust:
> In England, planning permission isn’t needed if your project is under 2ha and in a low risk area. Check your area using the Forestry Commission land information search.
https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/plant-trees/advice/where/
Map browser: https://www.forestergis.com/Apps/MapBrowser/ (via https://www.gov.uk/guidance/use-the-land-information-search)
Then enable the Forestry Commission > Targeting and Scoring > Low Risk Areas for Woodland Creation layer.
At the very least, if your plan is to just beg forgiveness, it would give you a better argument that you thought it was acceptable and at least tried to comply.
I wonder if there would be a away for the government to allow people to purchase land at a reduced cost and tax-free (sales and property taxes) for the sole purpose of planting trees. Land purchased this way would be legally protected against the government's power of eminent domain/expropriation [0]. Sale of the said land would be restricted in the same way. If someone did want to develop the land, they would be allowed to do so only if they paid the difference that would have been accumulated over the years in taxes compounded with interest. The whole thing would sort of be like a U.S. 401k or Canadian RRSP, but for the environment.
It would sort of like what this Brazilian politician asked for here except the ownership of the land would be transferred, so it wouldn't be a sort of one-sided, long-term extortion [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain
[1] https://www.npr.org/2015/11/10/455432704/rich-nations-should...
One way to do this is through a conservation easement, which essentially splits off the right to develop some land and sells/donates that right to a land trust or the government. You retain ownership of the land itself, but this restriction becomes part of the title, so it runs with the land and binds you and future owners to its terms. In exchange, the donation is tax deductible (or the sale nets you money) and the easement also reduces your property tax since the land is now worth less (30-60%).
There are also less permanent versions where the owner agrees to manage the land in a particular way or according to a designated person’s advice (e.g., a forester). I think these are often for a fixed term (e.g., 10 or 25 years).
I might just start saving up for land and planting trees there if I can.
The way I see it, "making it easier to plant trees" is also an excellent action you can take, that can have even more of a positive impact than what a single person can achieve in terms of simply planting trees.
So if it's hard to do in the UK, you may find your time to be better spent making it easier for others (and yourself) to plant trees. And if you're on HN, you are like to have an entrepreneurial spirit; maybe you'll be tempted to start a charity or startup in the space.
Good luck :)
They are also trimmed down which is not as bad but not really helping the problem mentioned. Again these trees were hundreds of years old.
https://i2-prod.leicestermercury.co.uk/incoming/article16420...
Planting trees in public spaces seems like a recipe for the council just taking them down. I'm not sure if it's even allowed by law.
Seeking permission from land owners would be a pain. For one they could just say no, which is fair because it's their land. But how do you go about finding out who they are in the first place?
Acorns and conkers can be gathered in their thousands each day in the British autumn.
You can volunteer for week long tree planting & conservation trips:
Growing saplings is slow and sometimes difficult, but one of the coolest things I've ever done was taking saplings I grew and then heading out into a reserve with scientists to plant them.
I feel like a huge understated challenge to these efforts is finding land that's protected / optimal for planting that will knowingly not be plowed or cleared within 60 years. Otherwise, it doesn't really matter how many trees you plant if they're all uprooted or killed before they even reach 6' in height...
Remember that there are many, many species of tree with a natural lifespan in their preferred environment that can be measured in hundreds of years. That's a huge time period between full-sized and 'slowly falling apart'.
A tree in decline may have heart rot. Every year its losing wood while making new. It's a fight against gravity and the elements. When the losses outpace the gains the tree loses integrity, major limbs start falling off, and eventually the trunk fails. If you told me this tree is carbon neutral, I'd have to take your word for it. But for the previous thirty years? That tree was socking away tons - literally - of carbon.
There are "mature trees" in the world today that will outlive the children sitting beneath them.
Has anyone looked into this?
The land will produce successive crops.
https://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/Downloads/method-calculat... page 8
There is a maximum rate somewhere in between, in an age that varies by orders of magnitude for different species. It's pretty meaningless to talk about young or old trees without context, except on that general way in that trees get old at some point.
Perhaps use it to build long-lasting structures, such as houses?
Allocate some large area of ground for planting fast-growing trees. Dig a large and deep hole in the middle; something like 20 meters in diameter x 500 meters in depth. Let the trees grow; when they're mature, cut them down, throw into the hole, and throw a bunch of dirt (from the mound you made by digging the hole) behind them. Plant new trees, rinse and repeat until the hole is full, then dig another one somewhere near. Would that even make sense as a carbon sequestration facility?
One scheme that actually would work is to convert the wood to coal, then burying it. That could be done without adding any energy by using old-fashioned methods for charcoal burning.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charcoal_burner
Because charcoal is chemically inert, the buried charcoal should stay put for up to a few hundred years,rather than a couple of decades for the decomposing wood.
Only if there is water. Bury it deep enough, or protect it from water (i.e. like a landfill).
500m high is another level. If it took, say, 1000 years for them to decompose fully and release their CO2 in to the atmosphere, that's still potentially useful even if its technically net zero.
We really only need to get past the next 100 years.
That said, you aren't going to make a considerably dent in the CO2 emitted in a given time period doing this. Used in combination with dozens of other things though...
https://www.permaculture.co.uk/articles/many-benefits-hugelk...
Do trees stop growing?
This does not seem logical. Two cars emit more C02 than one car. Two leaves will absorb more CO2 than one leaf. A 2m young tree will never be able to consum so many CO2 as its older 40m high grandparent with a x10000 mass (mass that must be maintained).
Trees don't absorb CO2 just by existing- they absorb CO2 by growing. The carbon from the air is converted into structure, body of the tree. When the tree stops growing, the CO2 stops being absorbed.
Cutting down the tree and using the wood for long-term storage contains all that CO2. Planting new trees means growing trees that absorb more CO2 from the air.
Some hard nuts remains have been found after 3000 years. They will survive for as many time than wood or longer. A big walnut can produce 160 Kg of nuts each year. A sequoia can produce a number of pine cones that I can't quantify, but would be probably measurable in thousands of Kg/year. Easily
Even more, upper members of the Plant kingdom produce a very special substance. One of the most inert polymers found in the nature that is much more desirable than wood for our needs of stabilising climate. Its degradation time can be measured in millions of years and appears fosilized or semifosilized in all continents and all ecosystems, with or without trees. Is called sporopollenin, and is the extra hard and waterproof material that makes the outer layer of pollen grains.
You don't need a tree to produce really hard pollen. A humble daisy can sequester carbon in a powder that will easily remain structurally intact for the next 1000 years. Everybody that has a garden and has cultured a big conifer knows that males of this creatures release copious amounts of the substance each year. Also old plants. _Specially_ old decaying plants that are about to die and invest all its reserves on reproduction. Maybe its time to start quantifying it.
Therefore your statement that plants only sequester CO2 when they grow is clearly false. If your maths and calculus do not include nuts and pollen, and do not include soft herbs, flowers and annual weeds they are incomplete, and most probably wrong, IMHO.
Mature trees grow much, much, slower. The wood is (largely) the captured carbon so once a given species reaches a certain maturity, harvesting it for lumber to be used in construction and planting a several year old tree would be the most optimal.
Some actually want to genetically engineer trees that grow much faster to do this (although faster growth generally means softer woods, but simply drying the wood and storing it in mines would buy you many decades to centuries before the bulk of the carbon was re-released).
And two leaves will also release more CO2 than one leaf, once it's on the ground, decaying.
Trees don't make carbon magically vanish, trees store it in cellulose, aka (more or less), wood. A tree that doesn't grow more wood does not store more carbon, and there is nothing to be "maintained", mass does not just disappear.
Plant 15 billion trees and then you're carbon neutral, on average, for the 40 years, and carbon negative if they live longer. But isn't that like planting trees on half of the land of the UK?
More simply, perhaps farmers could be encouraged to sink waste carbon in the same way. Corn farmers could be encouraged to send the husks to sequestration instead of burning (I know they use the ashes as compost, so there are downsides). Or hemp, as you said, strip the leaves from the stems and send one or the other to a carbon sink.
By taxing competing non ecologically friendly alternatives like fossil oil-based plastics, and sending carbon-containing products to landfill, a greater financial incentive is created for growers, and carbon is sequestered from the atmosphere rapidly and long-term.
Anaerobic decay of carboniferous matter produces much less carbon loss as gas than aerobic decay. Captured methane is destructively utilised, reducing its greenhouse gas concerns. Processing fibre crops into particular bioplastics can also reduce potential for gaseous decay.
This seems favourable when compared to trees which produce large quantities of openly decaying matter (e.g. fallen leaves) throughout their lives, and unless lumbered, will almost entirely decay when they die.
It seems more politically feasible to me, to incentivise ecologically healthy consumption through taxation (e.g. carbon tax; fuel duties; severance taxes), than to fund grand reparative projects.
they should be paid for by the industries that caused the pollution: oil and gas, automobile, manufacturing. I don't think there is any dichotomy regarding encouraging healthy consumption. Even if we were carbon neutral today, how are we going to siphon back the excess carbon that has been released over the last century?
And out of all countries the UK is the one of the few that could actually plant half it's land area in trees.
Brazil is different they are being cleared for agriculture but it is hard to tell them they can't clear forest to become rich when most of the rich world did that before them.
Writing laws to ensure outcomes with trees is hard. Our old suburban community, generally covered in mature trees, made rules that if a developer is going to tear down a house and build a new one the trees must all be inventoried, only a minimal number are allowed to be removed, the rest get fences around their drip lines for the duration of construction to protect their roots and at the end they are checked to make sure they weren't injured. Significant fines are involved for accidentally taking a tree… So now before a homeowner sells their property to a developer they "do a little landscaping" i.e. cut down all the trees except maybe some small ones on the lot lines. Problem solved!
I've planted about 30 hectares so far, will do another 15ha this year. To keep maintenance costs down, you can plant them in contour rows along with closely spaced leguminous trees like inga edulus to shade out the weeds below.
Selecting trees that are hardy against insects when they are young is a good way to go (cedros and mahogany are not, need spraying..) I'm not a fan of teak, eucalyptus or pine being planted in the Amazon, I think fast growing native species are best.
If you do the math, the numbers are really good. And it's good for the animals. And climate.
What type? Small and strong species that will not uproot, snap off or shed branches in a windstorm, and will tolerate heavy loads of ice and/or snow, depending on your climate.
Check out the efforts of Akiva Silver and Geoff Lawton on YouTube. Also:
Can anyone shed some light on the reason behind not planting in open grassland?
I found this video on Caledonian reforestation interesting: https://youtu.be/UDtsExXe93Q
I admit my front lawn is like...embarrasing. It's nothing but grass and one single tree. If I was to really go nuts on it, would that help?
It wouldn't be such a bad future if everyone's lawns were required by law to have a few trees.
Does anyone know how they handle this risk?
Apologies for tangential topic, but give me a sec and it'll try to tie it back to some other discussions happening here - has anyone here heard of "Cryo Carbon Capture"?
https://sesinnovation.com/faq.html
This seems to involve feeding the exhaust of a power plant into a process which cools the exhaust to the point where CO2 dry ice (and other pollutants) desublimates out of the exhaust and is then extracted for various industrial/commercial applications.
I am curious about this model if it feasible then couldn't this also be used on the exhaust stream of a heater for pyrolysis of fast growing trees, grasses, etc. creating biofuel and biochar?
You can use biofuels to heat the pyrolysis and biochar to sequester carbon in the soil, while also improving it to grow more biomass for sequestration. The cryo-capture handles your CO2 waste streams and further captures carbon in a cold sink (also useful for refrigeration and can maybe act as a "battery" when combined with a Stirling engine?) which also produces CO2 which can be used to enrich biomass grown in greenhouses and has plenty of other commercial uses.
If you add solar and other sustainable power inputs to the cryo-capture process then what you have is basically a farm which creates useful carbon-based products from the atmosphere using plants and basic chemistry... and here is where I hope someone with more knowledge will point out why this isn't already a thing, likely due to some serious inefficiency I'm overlooking.
Based on what you said, the dry ice would sublimate and just re-release the carbon into the atmosphere. Or did you have a different place for this carbon to go? If so, how are you planning to keep the dry ice cool, and how are you planning on producing it in the first place?
One of the things I'm curious about is the efficiency of the dry ice production at various CO2 levels and the physical quantities of material that would be expected from such these kinds of processes.
The general idea is that you would be creating a system for accumulating/concentrating carbon as CO2 solid/gas, as well as in biomass, and at the same time creating two large energy differentials that could also be put to work. The major input to this system (assuming the numbers can work) would be photosynthetics and photovoltaics.
On the demand side we already collect as much CO2 as we need from e.g. natural gas power plants. We don't have a use for any more. It will just sublimate and be re-released into the atmosphere, or into some containing vessel.
As for tree planting - absolutely necessary, but without a political solution, it won't do much but buy a bit of time. And that is ONLY true if we stop ongoing, accelerating deforestation.
A political solution would likely be better than individuals trying to plant a few trees.