Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

The city where I live is considering a tree ordinance, driven by some local NIMBYs. I did some rough numbers based on things I found around the internet and:

One year of carbon sequestration from a mature tree == 1 or 2 days of commuting to the city 20 miles away that many people who are priced out of this town drive back and forth from.

Trees are great, and most places should plant more street trees. But if you preserve trees at the cost of building dense cities that are more environmentally friendly, you're doing it wrong. Dense cities also allow for more trees in actual wild lands outside of them, rather than sprawl.

In the US, transportation and heating are our biggest individual contributions to climate change.

View on HN

There is no single silver bullet, but if you combine tree planting with nuclear / renewable power with remote work with electric vehicles ... eventually it starts to add up.

Shooting down solutions because they aren't the entire solution will mean we never make any progress.

Sure; I wasn't saying don't plant trees (street trees provide all kinds of benefits: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/tag/street+trees ), just that transportation and how we build our cities are so critical. I did not realize the huge, orders of magnitude disconnect between exactly how much CO2 driving puts out and trees sequester.

In other unfortunate news:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/25/gm-bolt-ev-production-to-end...

GM ending production of the Chevy Bolt in favor of bigger, heavier, deadlier, less efficient EV's.

Replace EVs with mass transit, and you've got something there. Density as an important component in reducing consumption doesn't end at the apartment building/Nplex lobby. Walking and cycling infrastructure also reduces health costs. Do you want to help curtail the oncoming Medicare crisis? Make Boomers bike.

That... seems obvious. Why do you assume the person you're responding to is proposing we increase sprawl? Increase density, increase public transit, and rewild outlying areas. It all goes together.

I was just stating some stuff. I was pretty surprised by just how much CO2 cars put out compared to what trees store.

Maybe mandate twice as thick wooden frames - that would capture more carbon in the house walls, and also conserve heating, as wood is a good insulator?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com