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Comment by bloppe | Hacker News Reader

If the goal is to sequester as much CO2 as possible, it's much better to support tropical rainforest than planting trees near the arctic circle. The Coalition of Rainforest Nations is consistently cited as one of the most impactful NGO's in terms of carbon saved.

I'm all for planting more Icelandic trees, but I don't think you're getting as much bang for your buck as you could.

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The old “Wait, wait, stop what you are doing. I’ve got a better idea.”

You know what would really be better than planting trees? For the world to stop burning so much coal.

40% of global electricity is from coal. Europe needs to increase coal usage because of the war.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/germany-coal-renewable-energ...

There are 8 billion people on the planet. “Hey, everyone stop what you’re doing, let’s all do this” is quite ineffective. We don’t need to stop planting trees in Iceland in order to save the rain forests.

While I appreciate the irony of this comment, you actually have a point. I would love the ability to personally sponsor the energy transition. Privately subsidized renewable energy projects could be a game changer. Anybody here done much research into this?

Again, I think planting Icelandic trees is awesome! Just since OP specifically mentioned "offset my carbon emissions" I thought I'd shill one of my favorite ways of doing that :)

Duke Energy’s “Shared Solar” in North Carolina USA is one such community-funded system

https://www.duke-energy.com/home/products/renewable-energy/n...

Yes, losing the rainforest is a serious problem and it doesn’t seem to be improving.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/19/deforestation-in-brazils-ama...

Isn’t the land being destroyed so people can have more meat, palm oil, etc.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2022/03/09/...

What are organizations doing to improve the situation? Fighting consumer demand is difficult

I also find it hypocritical.

My ancestors on my “civilised” country uprooted an tore down all the trees and forests, most of the countryside is farmland. And now that we have destroyed our forests we go “no no, preserve the rainforests”… so we can keep planting wheat?

I'm sure you'd have no trouble getting people to let you pay for their solar install and buy them an electric vehicle.

> 40% of global electricity is from coal. Europe needs to increase coal usage because of the war.

Or put another way, because they didn't bother to become energy independent and shut down nuclear plants instead of investing in more.

I wonder if there's a charity that will pay for / subsidize heat pumps in Europe this winter. The war in Ukraine is an actual existential crisis for many countries over there, and ending gas imports is the easiest way for them to defend against future Russian invasion.

I'd expect the politicians to be launching a WWII-style industrial mobilization to ramp up heat pump installations. Even if they can't switch away from coal / natural gas this year, typical heat pump coefficients of power are well above 4. Going from 100% gas furnaces to 100% heat pumps powered off of natural gas peaker plants would more than halve natural gas demand! (And, in coming years, the natural gas plants could be replaced with greener options.)

Note that in moderate/colder countries (taking the Netherlands as an example), heat pumps are not a solution when your house is not up to modern insulation standards. Which is true for almost all houses older than say 15-20 years.

The insulation needs to happen first for those houses, and this can be a massive undertaking costing tens of thousands of euros. The next best thing is a hybrid heat pump.

Although there's some subsidies here and there, you're very much right that we need something way more aggressive. For the houses I mentioned (which is almost all), a total sum of ~50K EUR is just not something the average family can afford. Those that do probably up their mortgage to finance it.

Also take into account the shortages. I have a family member that installs heat pumps, he orders them by the dozens. Currently he's afraid to place orders as the delivery time is a minimum of 6 months with no guaranteed final date nor is the price fixed. It's "6K but we will charge you whatever it will actually be when we deliver". "I don't know when it is coming or what it will cost" is not a great message towards home owners.

Sure for the purpose of sequestering CO2 it may not be the most "economically efficient" but in general attempting to restore Iceland back to the pre-settlement forest coverage of 40% seems a worthwhile goal in of itself.

Agreed. I’m also of the impression that cutting down the trees led to intense soil erosion (winds and rains washing the topsoil off of the relatively flat island). In addition to minimizing soil erosion, I also wonder if forests will help regenerate topsoil.

Also, I wouldn’t mind retiring early and doing some tree planting in Iceland or similar volunteer work to pay my way around a country.

It’s complicated. Iceland is less corrupt than many nations with tropical rainforests, so your dollars are more likely to actually be used as you intended. There is very little logging industry competing against you and virtually no poaching so your effort is more durable, too.

It’s hard to quantify these things and get a conclusive answer on which is better; I think we can leave it at “both are good.”

> There is very little logging industry

I wonder why :P

When I was in Iceland, they told me the reason they don't have forests anymore is that the vikings and other later settlers logged it. (Of course, a random horse tour person isn't the best source so I could very well be misinformed.)

you were correctly informed, it was a combination of early settlers logging heavily plus long forest regrow times due to sparse sunlight plus sheep overgrazing saplings.

If the goal is to sequester CO2 then its not enough to just grow trees, you also need to prevent them from being cut down and burned. One thing that I would argue in favor of using iceland and other areas around the arctic circle is that people has demonstrated in the last several decades that it isn't economical worth to grow and farm the land for anything, which include trees. That might then mean that people will leave the trees alone for a long enough time that the sequester of CO2 matters.

In general, mature forests are net CO2 neutral as they exist in a balanced carbon cycle.

Only when they are initially planted and growing is there a net CO2 sequestration going on.

Burning fossil fuels is the problem we need to fix.

We need to do many many many things. Halting the combustion of fossil fuels is absolutely #1 on the list, but it's a long list.

That initial sequestration can't make up for ongoing use of fossil fuels, sure, but it still has nonzero value.

if your only metric is CO2, you miss the forest for the trees ;)

the problem with climate change is the wild swings in weather - if you want to stabilize and buffer these swings, you need to maximize biomass. having a mature forest ecosystem acting as a carbon/nitrogen buffer does a lot of good, but in a way that is difficult to measure

I think we get tunnel vision on CO2 ppm because it's a metric with a nice clean causative effect (greenhouse), but more energy on earth is not what's actually causing us grief, we've destroyed most of the mature ecosystems and decimated total biomass, and we are surprised that this causes issues with the total ecosystem because we consider atmospheric problems somehow unrelated to all the living things participating in chemical cycles with that atmosphere. we need more buffer wherever we can get it, and I hate to see someone poo-pooing ecosystem restoration in favor of carbon sequestration.

Carbon sequestration is a technological problem so technology people will absolutely love it - unlike something as mundane and boring as planting trees or breeding frogs.

personally my favorite is coral propagation, just take some coral and split it into smaller chunks and let those chunks grow up - they are self replicators, what more could a techie want?

> In general, mature forests are net CO2 neutral as they exist in a balanced carbon cycle.

Can we cut down forests and store them deep in former mines?

Sure, but it’s even more efficient to leave those coal mines unmined.

There is already a ton of open pit coal mines. Like here https://www.google.com/maps/@51.6155147,14.3242528,60602m/da...

I'm not advocating for new mines.

You could even cut them down and turn them into houses that people could live in.

We don't need that many houses.

No, because as soon as a tree is dead it will begin to rot and decompose (there's fungi everywhere in the air that is just waiting for a piece of juicy fresh tree to digest), thereby releasing CO2, methane and other decomposition gases.

The only way to sequester CO2 using trees is keeping the trees alive (or blasting them with chemicals to prevent rotting).

You can also weigh it down and sink it to the bottom of oceans that don't have wood eating organisms. The Baltic and the Black Sea are the ones I know.

But of course, the solution you mention is the simplest: Treat the wood with one of the several known ways to make it not break down, and leave it in big piles somewhere.

If you bury the trees reasonably deep, that CO2 takes a very long time to get to the surface (like tens of thousands of years) so it’s good enough for our purposes.

Thus my friend's idea to CRISPR plants so that they deposit their carbon in some indigestible polymer that will not rot for the foreseeable future.

I'm sure there are no possible repercussions to doing this.

Truly bioengineering at a galactic scale. In a hundred million years, geological processes will have turned your polymers into some cool new exotic fuel source.

I mean, it worked for the Carboniferous, until some cheeky fungus figured out how to digest lignin. But we had a nice 60 million year run, and got lots of useful hydrocarbons out of it, so hey!

Plants send glucose down their roots to feed mycorrhizal fungi which build up soil organic matter.

After a tree dies, how long does it take before it returns all its carbon to the atmosphere?

The idea is to cover the trees with something (soil, and large amount of it)?

If they rot the CO2 will still be below the surface?

> or blasting them with chemicals to prevent rotting

That's kind of a given. People generally don't like it when their homes and furniture decompose.

The easiest way to support tropical rainforest is to eat less beef. The amazon is cleared for cattle grazing, much of which is imported into America.

Source? From what I've seen, most beef imports into the US come from Canada, Mexico, then Australia.

https://www.beefmagazine.com/beef-quality/update-us-cattle-e...

quick search for Beef (carcass weight) per month, international trade with the USA, for Dec. 2021, shows Canada, Mexico as number one and two, but Brazil as a close number three. In that month and year, the trade with Australia is very low.

It is a recent change:

In January 2022 alone, Brazilian beef imports registered a more than 500% increase.

Record high U.S. beef prices and drought-impacted supplies in Australia, where the U.S. would otherwise source beef, have also contributed to growing imports of processing-grade beef from Brazil

https://www.beefmagazine.com/news/us-beef-imports-brazil-sur...

Shipping issues undoubtedly were an issue with Australia.

Denmark imports 1650000 metric tons soya from south america yearly to feed to animals.

This "my particular country doesn't import most of its cattle from Brazil" doesn't mean that you're not creating demand and perhaps also influencing the market in a way that someone's beef is. (Collectively, obviously.) The argument sounds similar to "but my country isn't polluting, it's China where we order all our stuff!" And, yeah, animal feed like others already said. It's all not quite as simple as "source? I don't believe I'm part of the problem by creating demand for meat here" coming from the country where the average person contributes the most to global warming

The OP was clearly saying that the importation of beef into America was causing clearing of the Amazon, when the link is a bit more complicated. Yes, some things are a bit fungible in the world economy, some trade tariffs encourage things like soya from Brazil for food etc. But just nailing the US for it when the EU, Japan, and China is just as culpable is silly.

> The OP was clearly saying that the importation of beef into America was causing clearing of the Amazon

I don't see them mentioning the Amazon or hinting that the USA's imports are contributing there, but maybe I'm misreading their comment then (also when re-reading it now I don't see what you're referring to). Oh, or are you referring to the link they posted rather than their comment itself?

"The easiest way to support tropical rainforest is to eat less beef. The amazon is cleared for cattle grazing, much of which is imported into America."

In addition to what ipqk said, a large amount of deforestation is for growing soy. Approximately 77% of global soy production [2] is used for producing animal feed. It's much more environmentally friendly to just get eat soy directly, rather than eat meat, because animals are very inefficient at converting food they eat to food that people can eat [2].

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/soy [2]: https://awellfedworld.org/feed-ratios/

You're certainly right. Even EU imports soya from amazon to feed its cows.

Not eating beef / meat / dairy is the single best thing one can do to help.

Less wood they need to import as well

or both

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