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Comment by kisamoto | Hacker News Reader

I totally agree and I'm sorry if I gave the impression that trees should not be part of a solution. Trees (and other nature based methods) should definitely not be neglected.

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.

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This kind of civil discourse is what makes HN such a gem on the internet.

You're sure it's not comments like these? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27826277

I thought it was funny to see similar sentiments back to back :)

Meta-warning;

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.

> discourse

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.

> radical green agenda

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.

Trees are nature's best solution after millions of years of evolution. The R&D cost is low as well as the complexity. The problem is that dead trees turn back into CO2 so there will need to be some kind of sequestration like burying lumber.

Trees did not evolve solely for the purposes of carbon sequestration. Similarly, it would be silly to say that mammals are nature's best solution at sequestering oxygen.

Even burying the lumber doesn't remove the coal from the cycle, just delays it by a few years. You'd need to get the carbon into a "not readily accessible to biological processes" form. Charcoal is probably an OK start, but something like calcium carbonate would be even more stable.

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)".

There's always some local maximum most efficient process. If you take into account process inputs trees would likely come out on top. A lot of carbon capture tech can capture lots of carbon but consumes a huge amount of power/energy intense resources. My unit would be kg / (W * m^2 * s)

IIRC, bamboo ends up as "less wasted" when you turn it into charcoal than most woods. And you'd need to do a lot more energy-intensive processing of the tree to get it into a for suitable for turning into coal. With bamboo, it's mostly "cut into suitable length". With wood, it's at least "cut into suitable length", but may also require splitting.

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.

Intensive cropping of bamboo for carbon capture sounds like it would cause as many ecological problems as it solves.

Not necessarily. Well, not necessarily more than doing the same with trees instead of bamboo.

But, yes, it'd require some care.

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