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Show HN: Make continuous reforestation part of your daily workflow

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148 pointsprotontypes109 comments

Many of these tree planting schemes are a bit dubious; can you really be sure that they are planting new trees that wouldn't have grown in that area anyway, and will they still be around in 40 years time to make sure the trees grow to maturity and are not cut down and burned? The only tree planting scheme that I really trust is the Green Belt Movement: http://www.greenbeltmovement.org/ started over 40 years ago by Professor Wangari Maathai.

A lot of work is being done to make reforestation as transparent and sustainable as possible. In itself, it is no problem to record a world coordinate when planting the tree and later see if this tree is still there. The involved organizations are already working with such and similar solutions to avoid misuse. If you want to be 100% sure, you need to do it yourself: buy land, plant trees.

Maybe NFTs are the solution. I kid but.

This problem can clearly only be solved by AI.

Treecoin!

Yeah, but how do I know 9 other people didn't also pay for it?

How do I know it's not replaced by a new tree 30 years from now.

And so on.

Through transparency. these are not difficult problems to solve at all. Unless you are the type of person who doesn’t have a bank account because “the company might run away with my money, and how can I trust them?!” then you have to accept that a company doing this can easily provide verifiable documentation, go through independent audits and carry out the operation which is extremely simple in comparison to financial institutions.

You can also plant trees by yourself. Last year I planted 10 Siberian and Korean pines in one day. 7 trees survived, 3 trees died because I over watered them. So those 7 trees don't actually need any extra care from me.

Are those trees native (local on your area)? Also just curious, why not planting fruit trees? That's what I'd do right away if I had land

Fruit trees make a mess. The fruits fall if you don't pick it. Rotting fruit smells and attracts insects such as wasps.

The point is to eat those Mother Earth treasures: soft-persimmons, figs, clementines-mandarines, peaches, medlars, all those things are just so delicious and nutritive

What you said is exactly what some people around say when they cut those trees, makes me extremely sad

Before I sign up for this feel good thing, does anyone know whether it makes any meaningful difference/is enough to make any kind of impact? From looking at CO2 levels, we will be reaching 1000 ug/m^3 in my lifetime (threshold for headaches and other health problems). At 2000 it becomes a serious health hazard. Would money be better spent lobbying for abolishing coal burning power plants and making agriculture more carbon friendly (from what I gather, the biggest contributors to atmospheric CO2)?

Avoiding greenhouse gases from the outset is certainly the better alternative. However, it is unavoidable that we will continue to emit massive amounts of greenhouse gases for the next few years. Reforestation is the simplest and most cost-effective "carbon capture technology". At the same time, this restores lost habitat and thus averts another catastrophe: The loss of biodiversity.

No. It's just lining up the pockets of some shady "reforestation" orgs that has zero to do with actual reforestation except maybe the name.

Plant and ocean response to rising CO2 is unknown at this time. The only mostly certain thing is that it is highly non-linear.

Any world-ending projections of CO2 content in thousands of ppm are wild guesses and scaremongering.

I recently listened to the audiobook of How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates. It was a fine tour of the landscape of solutions. My main takeaway is that we're going to need to do a wide variety of things in a wide variety of sectors. He gets into stuff like concrete, which is very important in growth but also big on emissions.

With respect to reforestation: Gates says it would help, but possibly not as much as you'd think and he's a bigger proponent of stopping the deforestation.

Yishan Wong thinks that growing forests (as opposed to just planting trees) is an important tool for carbon sequestration: https://www.terraformation.com/about

Hi, Jonathan here, founder of the RaaS (Reforestation as a Service) at DigitalHumani.com

I totally agree that we need to do a wide variety of things. Stopping deforestation, reforestation, less meat, electric cars, etc. We need to do it all.

> From looking at CO2 levels, we will be reaching 1000 ug/m^3 in my lifetime

How did you arrive at this number? climate.gov article from last year estimates 900ppm by the end of the century if energy demand continues to increase at same rate and it is all met by fossil fuels.

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

900ppm by volume is about 1000micrograms per cubic meter. The density of air at sea level is 1.2 kilograms/m^3.

I think there’s been some misleading discussion of agriculture’s contributions to global emission. For a while, agriculture was ignored, but now that has been over-compensated for, and many people have the mistaken impression it’s most of the problem. Agriculture and forestry is still just 18.2% of emissions.

Energy is still 73.2%.

If you want to change the course of emissions, you need to change Energy. Luckily, we have the technology and understanding to decarbonize all energy. (The challenge is just to do it quickly and cost-effectively.)

You’re right about coal being the biggest emitter for energy. But... Energy is not just coal but oil and natural gas.

https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/09/Emissions-by-sect...

https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

Oil is nearly as big of an emitter as coal, and gas plus oil is now bigger than coal itself. https://ourworldindata.org/exports/CO2-by-source_v16_850x600...

Based on that data, oil is a much higher emitter than agriculture and gas emissions are about the same as agriculture emissions (but will soon be higher).

So as of 2021 it’s likely primarily coal and then oil that are the biggest emitter, followed by gas and then agriculture.

> Oil is nearly as big of an emitter as coal, and gas plus oil is now bigger than coal itself.

That's correct and everything, but I do think that for a while the best strategy is to focus on coal. Yeah, some electrifying of transportation won't harm either, but the largest short term gains and the largest long term opportunities all start on replacing coal.

If replacing coal leads to lots of peaking natgas plants, so be it. It is still a gain on the short term, and it creates clear target for storage on the long term.

Yup, absolutely true. And I think people underestimate how good electric cars are. They have about half the emissions of conventional cars even if all their electricity comes from gas (but about 40% of electricity in the US is carbonfree—about half nuclear and the rest wind, hydro, solar, and geothermal).

Each new conventional car sold is a locked-in 100 tons of CO2 (lower if we we crush them sooner). Electric cars are much smaller (half to start with), and depending on how fast we transition the electric grid could be only like 10-25 tons and then next to nothing (as even manufacture becomes decarbonized).

While the separation can be helpful, it also minimizes the actual carbon footprint of our food system. Petrochemical production, for instance, is a different category according to the epa. But one of the biggest uses of petrochemicals is fertilizer production. Trucking and shipping is its own category. Guess what relies on a lot of trucking and shipping? And so on.

Typically what counts as agricultural emissions are literally tilling, tractor fuel, cow emissions, etc. we really need to look at the whole system, together, for a clear picture. When we do that it obvious that our industrial food production is deeply tied to every aspect of fossil fuel use, land use, and atmospheric c02 in general.

But I think this is worth considering from this perspective as it focuses us on the most broadest solutions. If we decarbonize all uses of fossil fuels, we’re 73% of the way to utterly decarbonizing.

Petrochemical production, nitrogen fertilizer production in particular, is simply energy. And, in fact, nitrogen fertilizer just needs hydrogen, not hydrocarbons (which is a sort of misconception... many think hydrocarbons as a fundamental component of fertilizers when the actual Haber Process uses straight hydrogen), so should be much easier than hydrogen cars. And transport is relatively easy to decarbonize. Road and rail transport, in particular.

Things are so dire that even if we use all "guns" in our disposal it will be difficult. There is no single solutions that can help, amount of CO2 is so huge that if we would turn CO2 we need to sequester into graphite bricks we could build a wall 10 meters high and 5 meters wide encircling the Earth around Equator 32 times.

So, we need all we can think at same time, now. :/

Simply, current amount of carbon in the atmosphere has been released from sources that were not there, and we are still cutting trees more than we plant. Some calculation say we need between 1-2 trillion trees. But even then trees need a quite some time to grow and become effective.

Also, the carbon those trees sequester needs to be somehow captured permanently.

I imagine a solution where people grow stands of fast growing trees, clear cut every $optimal years, use (magic?) chemistry to separate the harvest into carbon and not carbon, then dump the not carbon back onto the soil, and replant.

Even with that, I’m not convinced there are enough acres of land on earth. I haven’t seen anyone do the math, and suspect direct carbon capture plants and olivine reactions will scale better.

You'll be happy to know that what you describe exists and it has a name: pyrolysis. Pyrolysis is the thermal anaerobic decomposition of biomass. Basically, you heat up organic material without oxygen at temperatures attainable from a relatively small fire. During this process, volatiles such as hydrogen and oxygen separate from the carbon in the biomass feedstock (dry untreated wood, bones, old cotton tshirts, whatever) and get released as syngas, leaving more or less pure fixed carbon that is very stable, safely sequestered in soil for thousands of years.

The resulting carbon, called biochar, can be co-composted to prepare it for use in soil, where it protects the soil from drought and flood alike. Plants grown in soil with higher carbon content are bigger and healthier, and these soils can produce more of whatever you're growing.

I make biochar at home but there are companies that do it on an industrial scale.

Humanity has been pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at an epic scale for decades. In addition to going carbon neutral with more wind, solar and nuclear, we need to draw CO2 back out of the atmosphere on an epic scale. And biochar resulting from pyrolysis is one of the major tools since it has synergistic effects with other tools, like mass tree plantings. Biochar production can also offset other energy uses, for example by either directly burning the syngas on-site for heating purposes, or for capturing it and using it later as a fuel in an application that would otherwise use fossil fuel.

Isn't this basically how charcoal is made?

Sort of but not really. Grill charcoal is made at a lower temperature, preserving more volatiles, and then an accelerant is often added (basically lighter fluid) to help it ignite and burn. It's similar at a glance but the differences are important.

I wonder if dumping the biochar into a subduction zone/trench would permanently remove the carbon from the system at any reasonable rate. Or possibly back-fill mines with it.

Either way, I completely agree. Planting trees doesn't solve the problem if those trees are allowed to naturally decompose. Trees are just really efficient carbon fixing machinery, we need to store the solid carbon somewhere.

That doesn’t solve the “dump the non-carbon back into the soil” part. Presumably repeated clear cutting would strip the top soil of nutrients in a few generations of trees. At that point, you need to reintroduce those nutrients (especially nitrogen) somehow.

you'll be glad to know that leaving wood to rot on the ground only releases about 30% of the carbon, and allows for further biodiversity to live that might absorb further carbon. The fact is the natural world has mechanisms for this, we just need to let them work: stop clearing dead wood for example.

Clear cutting is a bad idea, if you think about circumference = 2piR you can see that the older the tree is the more CO2 it takes up. You need to let trees get as big as possible if you want to be efficient. Additionally big trees support more biodiversity, which afaik is also important in carbon capture.

Note that cutting trees is not a problem, as long as the wood isn't allowed to convert back to CO₂.

So how do we sequester large amounts of wood for a century at least?

rotting wood does not release much CO2, I think about 30%. Most of it ends up in the soil.

TLDR, you're right. Here's the math to prove it.

I did some research into this a few years ago. Here's what I remember. Most of it is easy to search for to verify, just slightly time consuming. Broad brush strokes here to get you started.

Your average "big" tree (oak, pine, maple) will absorb about 10-20 pounds of CO2 every year once it's about 10 years old, on average. Lots of variables obviously. From what I saw, and there's debate, but the rate of CO2 absorption doesn't seem to speed up as much as we'd expect as they get older. I don't know how true that is, but at the same time, I could never find hard numbers to disagree. I have to work with what I got.

According to the US Forestry, per acre, you can have 100 really big trees or 500 really small trees. The problem with higher density is the increased wildfire hazard. It was something like 150-250 trees is the most they like to manage an area. This allows enough space to slow fires and ability to easily clean debris (if it's a managed forest) to choke out the fire.

For this, let's say we want 150 big trees per acre and on the best case scenario, once these trees are 10 years old, they're sucking up 20 pounds of CO2. That's about 3,000 pounds of CO2 being absorbed from the air with the hopes and prayers that a wide fire doesn't come through and undo that work.

Back in the day, I did this to figure out how bad Bitcoin was to the environment. Let's do Ethereum since NFTs are so hot right now: https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption. Every Ethereum transaction puts out roughly 29 kgCO2 (63lbs). That's an energy usage that truly never has to happen, but does out of vanity for the idea of saving the world from the 1% so it can create a different, new set of 1%ers. I'll get off my soap box now. That's 3, 10 year old trees needed to be carbon neutral for the average Ethereum transaction. Bitcoin is far worse, 367kg(800 pounds) per transaction. That's 40 trees needed per bitcoin transaction for carbon neutral. According to https://bitinfocharts.com/ethereum/, there were 49,000 Ethereum transactions yesterday, 250,000 for bitcoin (same site). So that's 147,000 trees or 980 acres of 10 year old trees needed to be planted every day to offset Ethereum. 66,666 acres, per day, to offset Bitcoin. Hopefully a wildfire doesn't come by and fuck up everything. Forcing you to replant to catch up on an amount of space that's incredibly unrealistic. Not to mention the CO2 of the logistics to move that many personnel around to plant that many trees.

Moral of the story, you're right. The impact of planting a handful of trees is shit. And don't get me wrong, I think we should be planting trees and trying to bring back forests. Rehabilitate destroyed and distressed ecosystems is a fantastic idea. But let's not suck each other's dicks that we're going to save the planet with YET ANOTHER PIECE OF DIGITAL TECH that is "going to solve the world's problems". Go buy a fucking tree, some seeds and a shovel. Get off the computer and go get your hands dirty. Anyways, it's far better to just cut the bullshit out of the planet instead. I just focused on the 2 largest cryptocoins. They're a drop in the bucket compared to everything else, coal, gas, etc. Cutting the CO2 producers will do more than you can realistically replant.

Bill Gates wrote about the impact of planting trees recently:

> It sounds like a simple fix and it has obvious appeal for all of us who love trees, but its impact on climate change is overblown. Although trees absorb some carbon, they can never take in enough to offset the damage from our modern lifestyle. To absorb the lifetime emissions that will be produced by every American alive today — just 4 per cent of the global population — you’d need to plant and permanently maintain trees on more than 16bn acres, roughly half the landmass of the world.

From: https://www.ft.com/content/c11bb885-1274-4677-ba05-fcbac67dc...

Sounds logical. We're burning fossils of past creatures that have lived over a period of hundreds of millions of years on the surface of the Earth.

Well fuck. Anyone know of a lobby as a service project?

Any APIs hosted by major cloud providers are LaaS, if you think about it.

Thought about it, still not getting it. I like the idea.

The Coalition for Rainforest Nations might be good. This is recommended by this report: https://founderspledge.com/research/fp-climate-change

A very misleading calculation.

You don't need to absorb ALL co2 currently being output by Americans. A large percentage of that is already being converted/stored by algae / trees

So the baseline isn't "we need to store all CO2". The baseline is, we need to convert the part that is currently "overcapacity" for our environment. And for that, planting trees IS a good solution. But don't take my word (or Bills) for it.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6448/76

... Ecosystems could support an additional 0.9 billion hectares of continuous forest. This would represent a greater than 25% increase in forested area, including more than 200 gigatonnes of additional carbon at maturity.Such a change has the potential to store an equivalent of 25% of the current atmospheric carbon pool.

s/Americans/world/, and also

- Trees are being cut down at record rate for meat production. Meat production is one of the bigger culprits in deforestation (and particularly of the Amazon and other tropical rainforests). If the world were willing to eat less meat (we don't have to be all-out vegan, we just need to eat much less of it) we'd be a lot better off in terms of how much arable land we need to feed everyone instead of feeding a bunch of cows and then feeding everyone

- The world population is much bigger now. All environmental problems are essentially only an issue because we have too many people in the world right now. If we had the population of the 1800's, none of our modern lifestyle habits would be a serious problem.

For the sake of bringing it into more immediate (for this context) perspective, I'm curious if anyone is able to do the analysis on ecological impact from technology decisions?

For example, choosing fancier, JavaScript-heavy ways of building webpages probably results in clients consuming extra electricity. One could hypothetically estimate the impact, and then come up with an analysis to the effect of, "For a site generating X amount of traffic, you'd need to plant Y trees to offset the decision to use Google Tag Manager."

Ads, basically. But I doubt web makes any impact here. Let's say every web user spends 2 hours every day waiting for ads to finish loading. 2 hr x 100 watt x 360 days x 5 billion users = 1 TWh. The US alone produces 4000 TWh per year.

yes but this is the guy who didn't think he needs to give up his private jet, so although I'm sure he's will intentioned I'll not accept his pronouncements about the environment at face value, I'll check elsewhere first.

Gates is supporting many good solutions but this quote about trees is false. As outlined in the book The Treesolution, it's just "2 billion hectares of trees to disconnect all present and past CO2 what is produced through fossil fuels." [1]

and furthermore

"Pieter Hoff says that we can replant a hectare for approximately 2,500 USD. We need 2 billion hectares of trees to disconnect all present and past CO2 what is produced through fossil fuels. The total investment to clean the air from the CO2 pollution is therefore 5 trillion USD. This investment is smaller than the costs of saving the bank system since 2008. Both USA and Europe spent over 6 trillion USD to save their banks."

Note: it's an investment, not an expense. ie profitable.

[1] https://www.groasis.com/en/downloads/download-the-treesoluti...

in my lifetime

How long are you expecting to live? Just wondering as we’re not really expected to breach 950ppm by 2100: https://skepticalscience.com/rcp.php?t=3#concentrations

Edited to add: ignore me, looking at ppm and not ug/m^3

I don't get the point. Why not just send monthly payments to a programme like Ecologi (https://ecologi.com/)? Of course, if you can convince people who you can't convince otherwise, this is helpful too.

Good point. I think for many a monthly payment is totally enough and maybe even less trouble.

With this workflow though, you can get an extra incentive to do something. Depending on how you implement it, your actions get the extra weight of a planted tree (with each push for example). For me personally, it gives me extra motivation to work on a project and remembers me that I can do something.

Interesting. So your interpretation is the reverse of what I thought: the goal is not to somehow make people spend on reforestation (who otherwise wouldn't) but make people do more work, provide those with extra motivation, who do think reforestation is important.

Just enrolled, thanks!

Hi, Jonathan here, founder of the RaaS (Reforestation as a Service) at DigitalHumani.com

https://ecologi.com/ is great! Whatever works for you. Montly payments, Continuous Reforestation, donation to reforestation organizations, etc. Let's plant billions of trees.

It looks a lot of overheads for something that is supposed to be helpful for the environment.

Why not just donate the equivalent of 1-year amount of your [whatever event-triggered actions] directly to one of these Reforestation projects? It saves your time, the cost of running server (albeit not much) while doing the same amount of help.

It depends on how you implement the measure. In the future, we want to determine reforestation based on the carbon emissions of products. With the help of projects like https://gitter.im/hubblo-org/scaphandre or https://www.electricitymap.org/map, this would be easy to do for energy consumption. In this way, digital services can be transparently and recurrently compensated for emissions in the long term.

It is less overhead.

Except there is now a middleman that also wants part of the cash. The only advantage I see is that it's impossible for one of the CFO's bootlickers to kill the payment without anyone else knowing.

Edit: apparently digitalhumani doesn't cream off.

Hi, Jonathan here, founder of the RaaS (Reforestation as a Service) at DigitalHumani.com

Our solution is 100% free. We are a group of IT-oriented volunteers concerned about climate change, and we pay ourselves for the costs of the solution (which is quite cheap though).

Our RaaS (Reforestation as a Service) API was built because most reforestation organizations do not have APIs. These organizations know lot about trees, climate and reforestation, less so about IT. We help them get the money they need to plant the trees (1$ per tree) by providing the API for free.

The API is used in lots of ways right now by our clients: Planting a tree when someone subscribes to a newsletter, buys something, refer a friend for a mobile app, fills a survey, charge their electric car, etc.

It is much easier for our clients to just choose a reforestation project they want to donate to and add the call to the API in their code.

This is really really cool. Congrats on the launch!

We're working on something similar as our non-profit project [1] built on the integration system for our browser. It will be a free service that lets you connect a few SaaS providers to start (Jira, Github, Gitlab, etc) and automatically plant trees (with some multiple). Stripe is also doing something similar at the payments level. [2]

Two things:

1. These threads always go to a "trees are just virtue signaling" conversation. I think focusing on the trees misses the forrest. Passive allocation of $$ towards good causes through these systems will help teams get involved and associate it directly with their work. This sort of thing is good and feels good. We can focus on better allocation and give people options in the future.

2. There are millions of issues/tasks/sales/PRs/etc closed every day and all of them have a real monetary value for orgs. Im sure we can capture a real % of that. It also moves social responsibility out of closed departments to having everyone in teams involved and contributing frequently and effortlessly. Its exciting!

P.S. I wouldn't normally share this sort of thing on another Show HN but I think we're probably 100% aligned in our goals of getting donations to projects that need it. If I can help in anyway or you'd like to get involved with any of this please email me parham@cloudsynth.com :)

[1] https://cloudsynth.com/social-impact/trees [2] https://stripe.com/climate

Ok but your two arguments over how this isn’t just a feel good thing come down to (1) is ok that it’s a feel good thing and (2) it can be a popular feel good thing. How many net acres of forest can we gain and how much CO2 can we remove with this per year, based on your best projections?

I am not saying it’s bad to do this. I would be happy to be a customer. But how do we know this does anything meaningful?

Key points are: this mechanism of collection can be much more effective for non-profits. And importantly once the automated passive payments are in place, it is easy to give users other options for what to do with the money (it doesn't have to be trees but its probably the most marketable start outside the HN community).

The napkin math on trees has been done quite a bit here already. I'm on mobile but I would look at the Stripe Climate thread for some references.

Can people for once stop virtue signalling like plastic bags bans or estimating carbon footprint of bitcoin transactions and finally get to the root of the problem: fixing failed states? Because in the course of you planting a single tree some corrupt government destroys a whole ecosystem.

Yes please. Better representation in democracies, and real democracies where fake ones currently exist.

Does representation fix environmental issues? I know lots of people who don’t give a second thought about the environment.

This argument is never productive. I can use fewer plastic bags. I can plant trees (or pay to plant trees, whatever). I can't fix a failed state.

Offer actionable and measurable alternatives.

You can plant a tree but You can't plant a forest.

You can't fix a failed state. But You can educate yourself (and others) on what the hell is happening with this world and vote for representative that cares.

One man did plant a forest!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jadav_Payeng

https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/12/26/572421590/...

I agree with what you are saying but I think it can also extend to planting trees, use the power you do have and vote which can make big change beyond ourselves.

> You can plant a tree but You can't plant a forest.

Of course you can plant a forest. But there's no need to. If each one of us plant 1 tree per month, we would be planting thousands of forests as a result of our team effort.

We need an international Tree Planting Day. And we need to celebrate the fuck out of it.

Many people don't own suitable land on which they could do such a thing (certainly I don't), and if you're talking about going and planting a tree somewhere as part of a larger project run by some organization that has acquired the land for the purpose then... sure, ok, but it'll be far more efficient to pay a bunch of people to work full time planting many trees every day, rather than each one of us individually driving out to a planting site once a month to plant one tree (assuming there's even a site within a day's drive).

I'm all for reforestation projects (and many other projects that could potentially have some kind of impact in reducing the rate atmospheric CO2 levels are rising), but the idea of everyone individually planting trees is not really practical. If you personally are in a situation that makes it feasible for you, then I hope you go for it and I wish you all the best.

> We need an international Tree Planting Day.

Done!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbor_Day

> I can't fix a failed state

No, but you can get involved politically, and support policies and legislation that will make a difference.

I'm not sure when "virtue signalling" became the new buzzword to attack people with. It seems these days that if you don't like someone you accuse them of virtue signalling, and if I understand the term correcty, accusing anyone of virtue signalling is itself a form of virtue signalling. Yes, I realize, this is an ironic paragraph, because I'm virtue signalling by accusing you of accusing someone else of virtue signalling.

Now onto the actual topic -- While I agree with you that fixing failed states should be of utmost concern I don't think it's a bad thing to be banning plastic items now, one at a time, because we don't currently have a good way to truly recycle plastic, and the material should be avoided at all costs for anything not intended to be reused for years.

Plastic is an immediate environmental problem and the bans are actionable.

However, my opinion is that the bans are suboptimally directed. I frequently get served drinks in plastic non-compostable cups with bamboo straws now, and see supermarket vegetables on goddamn styrofoam trays wrapped in plastic wrap, and "harmless" coconut water sold in plastic drink bottles. I'm cool with plastic bag bans but they need to extend beyond plastic bags. Ban the cup, then the straw. Ban the foam trays and plastic wrap on vegetables, then the bag.

Biggest carbon emitters are industrialized western democracies. Unless you are considering them as failed states, your argument is not correct

First this is absolutely can not be true from purely logical reasoning. And You can check up yourself by hitting the very first search result.

But most importantly You're completely missing the point which was not about carbon footprint or forests or plastic.

Carbon emission is only one of all our ecological concerns. I don't know why people only think about carbon.

You can look for example at River plastic emissions to the world’s oceans [1].

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15611

I wonder if it’d be better to not try and prevent global warming, but instead spend money and research on preparing for it. Can someone tell me why this is a terrible idea?

That's large part of what Bjorn Lomborg is advocating: https://www.lomborg.com

Because all the climate models say that it's a terrible idea to let it completely loose. They even predict that it's a pretty bad idea not to do a lot more than what we are doing now.

Given the current state of matters, whatever we do it will be at least in part preparation for the changed climate and in part preventing getting things worse.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Benjamin Franklin

Civilization is build around the existing climate and the cost of re-building around a new climate will be very very large. For example, most cities are near bodies of water and rising sea water will threaten them. So we have to either move a lot of cities (to now scarcer land) or build massive walls around them (that need to survive hurricanes in many areas). There's also thing we don't fully control like the ecosystem (fishing, pollinating insects, etc.) that would be very hard (read: expensive) to rebuild if it collapses and would probably have second order effects we'd also need to adjust for. Then there's any health issues from things like high CO2 which would probably require mass scale genetic engineering to really deal with.

"Civilization is build around the existing climate and the cost of re-building around a new climate will be very very large"

But the climate will change over decades and centuries. People move, nation's build and rebuild, and crops change over centuries, climate change or not. Think how different the world and human diet was in 1900 compared to today.

I think a lot of people look at climate change as a war, where bullets start flying and suddenly there are 20 million refugees at your door. Climate change is slow and incremental, at least as currently predicted.

Why do you think people will slowly react over decades rather than putting things off until the last possible moment when they have no choice but to adjust very quickly? If humanity could plan over decades without short term need driving them then climate change wouldn't be an issue in the first place.

You don't need to plan decades in advance to switch out one crop for another between growing seasons or to build a seawall.

Its too late to "prevent" global warming. We had our chance in the 80s and 90s. We are now at stage of mitigation and trying to curve the trend away from the worst case scenario ("just" 2C warming instead of 4C). If we don't change track then its projected by end of the century large parts of the world will be simply uninhabitable for human populations (wet bulb temperature too high, desertification, and flooding) leading to the displacement of billions of people.

The cost of fighting global warming is orders of magnitude less than letting to go completely out of control.

The UN Climate Panel finds that if we do nothing, the total impact of climate in the 2070s will be equivalent to reducing incomes by 0.2-2 percent. Given that by then, each person is expected to be 363 percent as rich as today, climate change means we will “only” be 356 percent as rich.

Meanwhile, the US wants to spend $500 billion per year and the EU 25% of all government revenue on fighting it, annually. You sure that's orders of magnitude difference?

Shouldn’t we do both?

Adaptation is definitely the better idea.

One good reason that it's superior to prevention is that it doesn't suffer from the externality problem. Me reducing my carbon output is a cost to me and a benefit to everyone else. On the other hand, me preparing for climate change is a cost to me but the benefits are also to me.

To effectively prevent climate change, we have to get every country on board with reducing emissions. 1/3 or 1/2 of the countries is good, but won't prevent it. Add in the additional fact that some countries such as Russia benefit from a warming climate and any plans for prevention quickly deteriorate.

There is just no good way to ensure long term (100+ year) global coordination.

As a point of confusion, what is the obsession with planting trees? With little human intervention, outside of climate change, the earth is experiencing mass afforestation. There's been something like a 20% increase in plant matter in the past 50 years, an area double the size of the continental united states, due to warmer, wetter climate and a longer growing season. Is it the forest fires that have people concerned? That's largely due to this explosive growth and poor forest management. It's been a few years since I looked at the numbers but if I remember correctly, creating a 10-100x increase in wood product consumption (different wood products sequester different amounts of carbon) while preventing all forest fires globally would offset all human carbon emissions.

For North America, tree preservation may be just as important as tree planting. But fire and conservation regulations can be at odds.

Per my CFP insurance carrier, I can no longer plant trees on my property. And the CDF and local fire marshal is encouraging most owners to cut down all vegetation. I routinely see bobcats, coyotes, deer, hawks, falcons, rabbits, squirrels, roadrunners, quail, many species of snakes, many species of butterflies, etc (also saw a mountain lion in the area last year). Last week, a Ca biologist pleaded with me to do nothing to a 5 acre stand of old oak trees (was going to do some tree trimmming), while the fire authorities routinely threaten me with fines.

A simple way to help plant trees is to use the ecosia search engine: https://www.ecosia.org/

searches turn into trees only if you click ads:

"Clicking on ads generates revenue for Ecosia, which is paid by the advertiser. Ecosia then uses at least 80% of its monthly profits to plant trees where they are needed most"

https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201657341-How-d...

Someone should work on “YC21 Guilt shedding as a service” These “guilt shedding” projects rarely serve any good purpose. There is no way to track the end result. Same goes for donating wads of money to social justice projects. You still see homeless defecating and shooting needles despite “guilt shedding” by SV denizens. Meanwhile the grifters who run these guilt shedding projects get rich.

Thats overly cynical, especially for this project which is run by volunteers (100% of funds go through to charities). "Lets not bother to plant any trees, because there are still homeless people" is a great example of letting perfect be the enemy of good.

One thing I don't see talked about with reforestation, is that it's not enough to just plants trees. They are merely the most visible part of a forest, and alone die much quicker than when they are surrounded by all the constituents of a thriving forest: undergrowth, bushes, other types of trees, good soil, animals, bugs, etc.

Perhaps trees are just handy shorthand for "forest", but I think all the marketing pictures I've seen of reforestation projects are monoculture trees in rows, planted like a Christmas tree farm.

Yeah, but it's not really about how effective it is, it's about feeling like you're saving the world. I'm not denying there is some sort of impact, but the main goal with things like this is to get on the bandwagon rather than actually have a meaningful impact.

Reforestation actually means the restoration of the natural forest. If this consists of one type of tree, it can look like a monoculture. Reforestation organizations usually try to re-establish a diverse forest, as this is sustainably resistant to parasites and other environmental influences.

This might give you some insights about the potential of tree planting: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6448/76.full?ijke...

The study is done by https://www.crowtherlab.com/ a lab of ETH Zürich.

Interestingly enough, a side effect of CO2 emissions IS reforestation. Earth is getting greener because of increased CO2 in the air.

What is not obvious though, is if this is going to make the problem worse. For one, the green albedo is often darker than what was previously in place, and retains more heat. However, obviously a fair amount of that energy presumably goes towards photosynthesis. Trees also tend to bring a fair amount of water into the atmosphere, however, and water is actually one of the most aggressive greenhouse gasses in terms of its capability to retain heat.

TL;DR, carbon capture is very important, and planting trees is probably a good thing, but there's a fair amount of debate.

I was under the impression that grass is actually much more efficient at turning CO2 + sunlight into biomass than trees.

But I am not completely sure, too much misinformation circulates.

Yes that's something I don't see brought up often. Carbon is an input to photosynthesis.

I'm interested in what people with greater knowledge/insight/intellect than myself think of the following.

I think total reforestation is implausible but the native reforestation of most of the earths fresh waterways is plausible using the Miyawaki forest establishment method ( that achieves 10x growth rates and natural strata levels) and localised cuttings. By staggering the establishment of native plantings 20 meters either sides of creek and river beds so there is effectively a 50m wide native forest over most waterways you can delay the capital outlay which causes a positive net present value for existing landholders to finance the planting and enhance their balance sheet. By setting aside the planting corridor to regenerate while the miyawaki plots are gradually planted the soil regenerates so the the forest establishment can be sped up over a period of time.

Because there is a positive ROI with carbon credits at current prices and the work is fairly interesting and healthy the planting projects work economically and ecologically.

The ecological benefits are that native forests have a five degree celsius cooling effect. Cooler streams mean higher oxygenisation levels which means higher nitrogen utilisation levels and a healthier pH. Cooler streams also means cooler rivers which means cooler estuaries with more sealife means and sea grasses and colder coastal sea surface temperatures and less algal blooms. Native flora corridors along fresh waterways allows native fauna highways so that biodiversity is more resilient.

The economic benefits are improved hydro-logical flow through pasture and cropland so less phosphates and nitrogen flow through the soil and the soil retains moisture better as the 20 m rich native humus barrier either side of the fresh waterway slows the hydro-logical water flow into the creek. Native forests negatively ionise the air so the growth rate of the pastures and crops along the waterways should be higher with less fertiliser applied. Also rural employment opportunities are retreating globally as wealth accumulates with knowledge into cities and the localised forest design and planting employment funded via carbon credits would provide interesting educative yet non-stressful employment opportunities and achieve a higher return on investment for most landholders than commodity production. We have 10 billion people coming on board to feed, population growth slows with great nutrition so great nutrition is the anti-dote to long-term pollution. People won't go backwards so planting fresh waterways in locally designed fast growing native forestry using the Miyawaki method or better wherever there is a positive ROI at current carbon credits prices makes intuitive sense to me.

We can also think of using less CIs and automated jobs as beneficial for environment (less energy used, ..)

This would likely be an insignificant blip in terms of the world's total energy and CO2 output. I think focusing on those types of micro-optimizations is unhelpful as they don't make any meaningful difference, and take up way too much attention. It's like making people feel guilty for taking a shower in a drought, when residential water use is less than 1%. Every person could go the rest of their lives never again taking a shower, and it wouldn't make a difference.

Your way of thinking is very common, not wrong, but terrible, why?

The world's total energy and CO2 output is simply the addition of each human footprint, all industries, transports are more or less directly related to the human end-consumer. So if everyone decide like you that their own behavior is insignificant, which is true, nothing is changing, and as you know the current trend on environment is not sustainable. I don't use a car, I don't use air-conditioning, I find natural methods and alternatives for most things, and product to reduce my footprint, and I hope everyone at some point will do that, because it'd change everything if everyone cut by a half their footprint, it's like twice less humans.

My comment on CI is half-serious, but I still avoid to put many OS/enviroment targets (for example just Linux/nodejs-14 is enough) and just running in on the main git branch

My point is that we should focus on actually effective changes. Human nature is such that focusing on the individual and the small changes that each person can make will not be effective at the pushing the needle as far as we need it to go. We need effective legislative, technological, and infrastructural changes.

It's good if people reduce their personal carbon footprint, I just think we focus too much on the micro optimizations.

Game theory and human nature are such that we won't ever get where we need to be unless the we have effective top down solutions.

Sounds like a neat idea to leverage in b2c.

If you want to plant a tree, plant a tree. I have no faith that these jokers will ever actually plant the ordered number of trees.

Hi, Jonathan here, founder of the RaaS (Reforestation as a Service) at DigitalHumani.com

We only work with trusted reforestation organizations (6 so far) and you can choose which one to work with.

Planting a tree is not that complicated, I agree, but for lots of us working in cities, it is not that easy. Finding the right species, buying the shovel and the tree, taking care of it, etc. More complicated to have tens of them planted though.

I'd rather send 1$ to a farmer in Belize (as an example) that will be very happy to get that dollar to plant a tree that will give him and his family fruits.

I truly applaud the idea. More hackers should work on schemes to support bioremediation. However, qualifications are important. For example, fruit tree orchards are typically monocultures or near monocultures, use lots of water, encourage fertilizer and pesticide use, and are rarely planted in natural distribution. A strong indicator is that, after planting, if you have to "take care of it" it's in the wrong place.

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