Hacker News Reader

Comment by Agenttin | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, tree farming is carbon negative. By continuously growing trees and turning them into lumber you capture carbon and turn it into houses and furniture. Using the profits to buy more land to reforest, then cycling though planting and cutting down trees on a cycle.

View on HN

Are there methods of tree farming that are focusing solely on carbon capture? For example, is it known that a species of plant that grows quickly captures carbon very efficiently?

I've heard this tree grows extremely fast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulownia_tomentosa

Thanks for this. From the article:

> "An acre of empress trees can absorb 103 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year. Once the trees reach maturity, farmers harvest their wood for use in houses or musical instruments.[12]"

There is a lot of marketing and some "scammy" practices put in selling Paulownia trees. Eucaliptus is faster and many coniphers also.

You can find photos of trees regrowing light fast after being chopped, and from an old root but this is not how you measure accurately growth in a tree. The tree enters in emergency mode and is using all the reserves in the root to restore the lost canopy ASAP. It will slow down considerably in the following years.

I'd avoid introducing Eucalypts to places they aren't already prevalent. Fires don't kill them, but do kill a lot of their competition, they drop very flammable leaf and branch litter, have oily explosive sap, so naturally they spread with fires. With more fires the more eucalypts spread, with more eucalypts there are more uncontrollable fires.

A country where Eucalypts are completely dominant is Australia. In the US California is full of them. Both Australia and California have uncontrollable fire problems.

There are plantations of eucalyptus trees in Brazil, either they don't know what introducing them will do to their country or they just don't care.

Before using eucalypts, consider what introducing a very invasive tree that transforms the countryside into something much more flammable than it originally was will do.

Agree with that, but must be noted that Eucalyptus has 700 species and not all make fireforests (I like that definition and we don't have any for that so I'll coined it).

> either they don't know what introducing or ...

Is a monoculture. They don't care. Is hard to claim ignorance still in the age of Google.

Wouldn't shallow pools of algea in a greenhouse be much more efficient than trees?

I don't know, are you familiar with carbon capture rates for algae? It's a good point and one to explore: trees/plants vs. algae for carbon capture. If you could make a modular system of tiles (say 10' x 10') comprised of carbon capturing method of choice (algae pools, trees), would it make sense to install these on buildings in cities (or anywhere, but suggest cities because that is certainly where such things do not exist at scale anymore) (then consider fabrication and maintenance costs)? I have no idea what the solution is to the carbon capture problem, but increases opportunities for carbon capture seems like a high level solution.

Technically yes but it would be generally worse at self-sustaining scalability - you need to construct more greenhouses, keep the higher exposed surface area of water from evaporating, and find a sequestering use for that algae.

Non-biodegrading bioplastic made with renewable eneegy could technically work for that role but more plastic waste isn't approved of for obvious reasons.

> find a sequestering use for that algae.

Beer.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-15/growing-algae-to-brew...

In addition to capturing carbon, forests (of native tree species) provide many ecosystem services, including fresh water retention in the land, food and habitat for other species, shading of the ground, etc that a greenhouse full of algae would be challenged to provide. Most of the carbon stored in a forest is subterranean and increases significantly over time.

This is how Sierra Pacific Industries does it in California. All the clear cuts are reforested while the clear cuts are used to make timber for houses, etc. Most forests in America are managed. However the way it is done is pretty manual maybe drones and robots would make it more efficient.

(Wife is a forester)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com