The mountain forests in Southern California (near Yosemite, etc) have been burnt out hellscapes for years.
Of course, this is all rounding error vs. the loss of 90% of the kelp forest, which many people didn't notice, since it's underwater. The kelp biomass the has been lost in the last few years is equal to 100% of the redwood forests.
As I like to shout from the rooftops, gasoline could be made carbon negative with a ~ $1/gallon direct air carbon capture tax. (And similar for the other fossil fuels.). I recently saw $7.99 / gallon, so that's a bit over a 10% tax in some areas.
Yes, poor people need gasoline too. We should tax new ICE vehicles at some astronomical rate and plow the money into steeper EV subsidies.
Alternatively, we could tax ICE new vehicles so (assuming they run for 250K miles) the purchaser pays 100% of the carbon recapture cost up front.
We could also allow for community net metering so poor high density areas could establish nonprofit solar/wind farms that lower their electricity bills.
As far as I can tell, all these plans are deficit neutral and would also boost the economy.
It will be at least a decade before used EVs with >200mi range trickle down to the $10-15k used market. Saying we should tax gas when poor people can't even afford it as is is a gross misunderstanding of the financial situation of poor people today. You can't even buy a >200mi EV for less than 40k today.
> establish nonprofit solar/wind farms
Who's going to pay for them? And who's paying for the storage?
> also boost the economy
Boosting the price of fuel would have hugely inflationary effects while everyone is still stuck on ICEs. We saw this in the 70s, we're seeing it now.
We should be pursuing every possible avenue, especially those that might have side benefits. Sequestering dead trees could help with fuels reduction and potentially improve soil health.
(If anyone reading this wants to help scale DAC, consider joining me in OpenAir collective discord! https://openair.cc/)
The state of california should enact these plans so we can all see how it goes. If it works other states will follow suit. If it doesn't, more people will leave california.
>As I like to shout from the rooftops, gasoline could be made carbon negative with a ~ $1/gallon direct air carbon capture tax. (And similar for the other fossil fuels.). I recently saw $7.99 / gallon, so that's a bit over a 10% tax in some areas.
I know that gas prices are high because of putin's price hike (tm), but wasn't calfornia gas already much more expensive than other states because of state taxes? How is this one going to be different?
In what universe is Yosemite in Southern California?
Just tax carbon. Use proceeds to subsidize situations where the hardship is too high (e.g. energy used by poor people).
Start small and phase in over time.
Is this something that one could do now ? I don't know where you'd begin on something like that but I'm loving this idea.
I have not studied or worked with bio-oils, but on biochar: As a soil amendment, many soil types are incompatible with addition of biochar. Biochar tends to retain water, which is a problem if you add it to already poorly draining soils. Biochar also shifts soil pH. In some cases this is good, in other cases it is bad. I think it is the minority of soils that are actually improved by adding biochar. I am not aware of any studies that show that biochar is a suitable carbon storage scheme. The last time I reviewed the research, the behavior of carbon in soils is as yet poorly understood and appears to be quite complex. It may be a decade or more before we understand what biochar does when added to different soil types, and we might learn that the majority of it ends up as CO2 within a couple years.
Finally you mention burying trees: it may be that this accelerates the release of Carbon. Depending on climate, standing timber often lasts longer. Dead wood on the ground (or buried) is often wetter, which favors decomposition.
I am not trying to sound negative here. You bring up a lot of points that are being actively researched and worked on. But there are not any clear easy solutions. We need to work on this problem. I wish we (as a society) were putting a lot more into this effort.
Is there a fundamental reason you can't treat the wood to make it non flammable and non digestible, and just stack them in big piles somewhere?
Edit: Hope yall realize this was sarcasm and none of these options would sequester the carbon long term.
Then sink them in the ocean.
Aside from weighing it down enough to stop floating, of course.
The majority of pine-beetle related deaths are in the southern range of the Sierras, south of Yosemite, but it occurs well into the North, as mentioned. Even conservatives, cant-be-bothered people have noticed the huge stands of dead trees, because you see them when driving to Yosemite for vacation. Meanwhile greens have been flipping out amongst themselves for years.
The forest carbon studies executed on Azure cloud mentioned here, have agenda and suffer from ordinary capitalist-picked experts problems, but generally we should all support more quantitative, fact-based decision making.
The dunce cap here definitely goes to the US Forest Service, and cronies, who have for 100 years, exercised their extensive muscle to prove without a doubt that they are in fact, red-neck badge-wearing troglodytes from a Robin Hood movie, for the most part; dramatic exceptions within the ranks noted.