I merely wanted to try and raise some awareness to those who question the need for technological removal methods as there is a bit of a toxic "trees will save us" attitude when things like this get mentioned.
I thought it was funny to see similar sentiments back to back :)
I'm more into the juxtapositions of interactions between idiots vs experts, specialists vs generalists, startup-billionaire vs unemployed-drug-addict-hacker, and the level of insight that can be gained from these conversations.
I believe that the civility, and desire for unfettered conversation (avoiding ad-hominem, flame-wars. etc···) are more of an instrumental-goal of this process, than the true goal.
I don't really know why the comments on hn are the way they are, and I doubt anyone ever will. But that's what keeps me coming back here. It's the only place on the internet I can get this kind of thing, whatever it is.
I do have to say, there's something special and unique here. Like the userbases of wikipedia, stack overflow, 4chan, or twitter, there's something here that's impossible to recreate and worth preserving.
Hardly a discourse. Both gents above might have a negligible disagreement but they are sticking firmly to radical green agenda shadow-officially endorsed and promoted by Yahoo Combinator. Also, good for karma income. Just the same for praising comments.
What is this radical green agenda that you identify? I'm not disputing that exists, I'm certainly part of it, and I intend to continue leaning into it. I'm just curious how it looks from the outside.
And you can (probably) do better than trees, in terms of carbon captured per time unit. But I guess you'd have to run comparative studies between birch and bamboo for biomass grown per time unit and area.
Hm, that means that a sensible unit for carbon capture would be "kg / (m * m * s)".
But, yes, my main reason for thinking bamboo is that it is pretty fast-growing under the right conditions.
And with a Watt actually being "kg * m^2 / s^3", your unit ends up being s^2 / m^4, which dimensionally looks less pleasant.
But, yes, it'd require some care.
We don't need to wait 100 years for maturation of the wood in forests, the nice thing about wood is that you can use it for paper and construction, and that effectively sequesters the carbon.
Here in Sweden it is the law that if you cut down a forest you replant it. We have been doing it for a century. All forests here is basically in a constant plant-grow-cut cycle unless the land is claimed for new buildings (farm land has been steady declining every year).
It is debatable if the practice is carbon negative or carbon neutral. Most of wood product do get burned sooner or later, or turned into bio gas which then get burned. Almost nothing remain as stable carbon sink. A planted forest is an future investment to be cut, processed and burned. The only exception is forest reservations and those are much more expensive to make than planting trees.
The advocacy behind replanting might be better invested into a political action of bringing similar replanting laws to other countries. Sweden mostly did it because it looked ugly to have wast areas cut down without regrowth, and because it hurt biodiversity. It also make sense economically in the long run.
Yes, there is. Trees take a up valuable real estate. As long as people can do something even remotely profitable with land they own, this can not work.
For instance, trees essentially power the entire terrestrial water cycle. Without trees all the water rains out within a few hundred km of the coast. Trees (far moreso than simple evaporation) are responsible for pushing that water back into the air-stream. Isotopic analysis confirms that 80% of the rainfall on land is caused by transpiration, and most of that is trees. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11983
This explains why deforestation causes desertification. Cut down the trees and you get a continent-wide desert.
These dynamics aren't well-captured by the present economic system, which only sees "valuable real estate" being "taken up" by trees.
As long as plantation owners and/or illegal loggers do, then all your argumentation is moot.