Many Climate 'Solutions' Are Dead Ends or Niches and Should Be Ignored
forbes.com
forbes.com
Battery capacity will be a minor constraint, but only minor, as there are constraints in the PV and wind turbine supply chains as well.
Those constraints are primarily NIMBY, the consenting processes for mines, refineries, and assembly factories in the case of PV and batteries, and for deployment in the case of wind.
NIMBY applies ten-fold to nuclear.
- overbuild renewables
- connect grids together
If regional grids are connected together, then excess capacity in one region can be used by another. You don’t have to store your own electricity for later if you your neighbour can sell you their excess.
Wind being unable to work in to winter is an assertion that will need some backing up.
Unimaginably expensive is not accurate description. A) hydro is an already existing solution that can work as storage. B) HVDC lines are unimaginably expensive compared to what? Nuclear, while dependable is not exactly cheap either.
Planting a lot of trees and let the trees grow still looks a much better plan that most of the other options and magical solutions. We just need to find the courage to try it seriously.
Forest fires are a crime in 90% of the times. The idea that we can't do what we need to do because criminals exist is not acceptable. We just need to make this crime much more expensive, painful and unprofitable for that people
Forests shouldn't be composed of a 99% of <10 Years old trees
Do people know that there is an humid Mediterranean forest ecosystem?
Do people know that some Eucaliptus species evolved as part of humid ecosystems?
What we have got is exactly what we can expect.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State
Required reading for anyone who seeks to understand what happens at the scale of a city, or larger.
Trees grow - then plateau/stop growing. They don’t (and can’t!) meaningfully keep sequestering carbon.
And even if you covered the remaining non-tree covered portion of the earth (somehow) with trees, it still won’t solve the problem.
Trees are tough, and grow well in inhospital and rough terrain. That’s basically their value prop? Growing them in good crop land for something like this would be a waste, for instance.
They are good for building materials, and that is one of the longer forms of sequestration. Transport and processing is a big cost there already, and makes it dubious carbon neutrality wise currently.
> Growing them in good crop land for something like this would be a waste, for instance.
Obviously not, because environmental services are also needed
And those crops not only would sequester carbon faster most likely (if you buried them anyway), but be far more scalable and efficient in doing so.
I love trees, but square peg round hole.
not chopping forests is by definition, a basic advise in all serious treatises know by men, on conservation of biodiversity on forest ecosystems [1]
[1] Only exceptions when is a mono-culture, or when we deal with alien species
Yes, I know that biodiversity can increase in ecotones. But to have a forest boundary, you need to have a forest first.
> ... or sequestration
trees take CO2 from the air and store it in wood, a structure that can last potentially for several hundreds or even thousands of years. Half of this structure is buried in the soil. Tons of carbon. If this is not the very own definition of sequestration of CO2, I don't know how to call it.
A sofa can't grow.
> those crops not only would sequester carbon faster most likely (if you buried them)
What crops? corn? wrong. The soft wood Paulownia? Wrong again. The Paulownia superfast thing is based in a lie.
> but be far more scalable and efficient in doing so.
Again wrong
> Everybody is delusory
Okay
I can't understand this phrase, would you explain it?
The trees, when they grow, pull the vast majority of the carbon in their structure from the atmosphere. 99% or close to it.
At some point, the tree growth plateaus - it may have been slow the first year or two, then accelerated the next 10 years, then gradually tapers until it hits it’s maximum growth potential at that site (give or take). That may be in 20 years, or 100, but it will happen sooner or later.
During this time, trees die - and their carbon gets broken down and re-released in the form of methane or co2.
Roots, debris, etc. roughly equal the amount of plant matter above ground.
All of this rots when the trees die or burn (which happens on an ongoing basis), which releases the carbon back to the atmosphere in the form of co, co2, methane, etc. except in rare exceptions.
You can tell this is the end result because if you dig into/in these forests, they aren’t sitting on thick beds of carbon. Typical soil depth is 3-6ft before you hit bare mineral soil. So they’re in equilibrium over time.
According to this random link I found [https://www2.nau.edu/~gaud/bio326/class/ecosyst/USFScarb.htm] in the US it averages out to about 17.7kg/m^2 across all forests.
So if you start with bare/no carbon and add trees, you’ll on average be able to temporarily store 71,614 kg of carbon per acre. Until the trees die, or burn.
If you harvest the trees and either bury them (where they can’t rot) or use them for construction, you can reset it and sequester the carbon. That has costs however.
If that isn’t done, then the carbon store is temporary - the carbon will eventually get back into the atmosphere, and the forest will have net zero carbon uptake at some point in the meantime.
The EPA recently estimate the US releases 6.1 billion metric tons of Co2 and equivalents per year (as of 2021). If we estimate an average acre of forest plateus at ~ 72 metric tons of co2 stored, that means you'd need to plant ~ 85 million acres of forest to EVENTUALLY store that co2 - per year. Just for the US alone. And hope none of those forests completely die off, don't end up growing, or burn eventually.
There are approximately 800 million acres of existing forest in the US (a heavily forested nation). Accounting for 7.5% of all forested land in the world.
It's not clear there even IS that much land which could support a forest to last even a decade, let alone land that would support it for long enough for these forests to mature - or not just burn/die soon.
But if we look at farmland in the US (currently ~ 900 million acres) - https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2019/2017C...
We'd have converted 100% of our existing cropland to forests in about a decade, just trying to counteract each years co2 equivalent emissions.
And that is 40% of all land in the US!
Add together 800 million acres of existing forest, and 900 million acres of farmland and we're nearing almost all fertile land in the US total. Even if we could squeeze out another 10% AND keep all these forests going (while we starve as we have no farms/crops anymore?) we'd still be completely out of room in less than 2 decades, with all potentially tree bearing land covered. While we still continue to produce carbon.
And if these trees die or burn, any carbon they stored is back into the atmosphere.
Carbon wise, trees are springs/capacitors, not 'sinks'. They help buffer spikes, but they don't solve the real problem - too much carbon coming from 'out of the carbon cycle' geological stores and being injected directly into the atmosphere at massive scale.
To solve that problem, the carbon needs to get taken out of the carbon cycle again. And as long as those trees are above ground, that can't happen.
It's not clear to me how this would change if we got more manufacturing here. Energy use would go up, but emissions may not given the continuing decrease per unit energy.
I’d also argue that inflation may be showing that much of that economic increase is ‘fake’ - aka based off money printing more than actual productivity improvements.
Even if you did that to the developed world, you're not going to get the developing world to follow. "Hey yall, we know we colonized you for a long time and stuff but could you please stay poor so we can fix a problem that we mostly created? You cool with that? Thanks!" Yeah, that's going to work.
The laws of physics don't care who emits CO2 or where it's emitted.
Fantasies just distract and make people feel like they're doing something by engaging in performative ideological posturing and theatrics.
We have the technology to decarbonize the majority of the economy already. We already put 1% of the worlds gdp into solar and it’s taking over at an incredible rate. Up that to say 5% and we’d make huge innovations on battery scale, storage , synthetic fuels, etc within short years. I believe we could be 70% transitioned in 10 years if we wanted to, and we would have MORE abundant energy than today. No degrowth nessecary. We won’t do that either of course.