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Comment by promocha | Hacker News Reader

Mindless money that's being poured into carbon capture projects, would help grow and maintain forests for at least 10yrs. A recent example like Heirloom that just started its facility and would only capture 1000 tons per year. It took them 4yrs and $50M+ to build one facility. Even if they somehow were to build 1000 facilities annually, they would only capture 10M tons of carbon. Also think about the carbon they would release by building those facilities. We need to remove 2 billion tons of carbon per year at current levels of pollution. Carbon capture projects are just another type of climate grifting like carbon offsets etc.

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I read that story as well, and while the company does promise increases in efficiency, the whole thing seems like a very expensive way to do very little.

Based on light googling, a mature tree can capture about 50lbs of carbon a year [1]. Assuming a few hundred trees per acre [2] you could get, let's say, 5 tons per year in the steady/mature state. Small numbers, but it adds up. Leander, TX is a suburb of Austin that sprung up in the last 50 years. It's a useful measure for me as 1) I have some intuitive comprehension of the size (37.5 sq miles) and 2) it was an area slowly developed over the last 50 years. If it were reforested (you wouldn't want to do this because, you know, people live there), we might get 100kton of capture a year (guesstimating). Repeat that 170,000 times and we can get back to the net emissions of the year 2000 - a 17gigaton reduction per year.

Of course, that would require planting an area double the size of the United States.

Anyway, that's napkin math and I hope I'm off.

1: https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2015/03/17/power-one-tree-ve... 2: https://bugwoodcloud.org/resource/files/27435.pdf

Interesting.

I looked up the world consumption of lumber in 2018 (pre-pandemic stuff). ~ 2.2billion cubic meters, a cubic meter of wood is ROUGHLY(really depends on species) 0.55 tons.

So If we doubled lumber production (which would help housing/construction and a lot of other sectors) wed at least offset the carbon created by roughly half.

Still wont come close to solving our CO2 emission issues but interesting because we could "get something" from the lumber vs just storing CO2.

Assuming 100% carbon capture into wood weight which is not realistic but I think it's a good thought exercise.

I'm not saying you are doing this, but don't confuse Lumber production and forest growth. Increasing lumber production decreases forest growth.

we need to increase forest capacity for lumber production first.

I don't think you understand how trees work as carbon sinks. You're destroying that potential by cutting them down.

Trees actually carbon sink via growth aka creating wood. The CO2 they breathe in is turned mostly into growth / basic functioning.

So no, you are NOT destroying the potential. In fact, if they grow and die and rot they are going to essentially release all the CO2 they captured.

https://extension.psu.edu/how-forests-store-carbon

So converting mature trees into lumber is essentially locking out the carbon capture more dramatically, especially if used in long term uses like housing etc. Being turned into firewood would be drastically bad for CO2 capture.

What am I missing that makes you think I don't understand?

Only if the tree rots. If you turn it into treated lumber and build a house with it…

No. A dead tree log does no longer bind any more carbon.

For multiple reasons we need actual foresters to build ecosystems, not just plant a bunch of trees. They also need to be built to maintain themselves, not be reliant on continued investment. Bonus points for building ecosystems that support a small amount of logging.

Fully agree with this. Continued investment with forest ecosystem maintainers in place is best solution.

Best solution is reducing drastically our footprint, our consumption, instead of helping to grow forests, subsidizing gree businesses, why not heavily tax plane & car industry/usage, incentivize low-footprint lifestyles, educate?

No, because this solution to environmental problems is "our impact on the environment is going to cause a global depression and catastrophe due to changing climate! we must try to stop this by causing a global depression and catastrophe ourselves by drastically reducing consumption!"

Consumption that dumps carbon in the air needs to be replaced by consumption that doesn't. Power needs to be solar/wind/nuclear, cars need to be electric, things which are done cheaply with hydrocarbon sources need to be replaced with more expensive things with sustainable sources.

Trying to make people significantly lower their standard of living with fear of future consequences will not work. It just won't. In two ways... one: a lot of what's happened has already happened and is inevitable, there's no turning back from a few degrees of warming, oceans rising, and climate patterns changing; two: people won't do it.

Trying to chase the line of solving environmental problems with consumption reduction is pissing into the wind. You have to try to do things which will actually have effects instead of trying the impossible.

It's very easy to divide by 2 one's footprint, without a loss in "comfort", my lifestyle is even 1/20 of the average, and I'm totally fine, but definitely not asking average people to go that far, it's just to show it's possible

If that's done large scale, it's as if the world population were divided by 2 instantly

Reducing our footprint would help a lot tree to grow (they don't really like pollution and climate changes), but obviously we should still help forest to grow and migrate north (in north hemisphere), it's just not where the big win is currently

You're not gonna win if you only work one way.

We can both reduce our carbon footprint AND plant trees.

Trees grow by themselves above all if we reduce our footprint (and stop nonsense things like swimming pools, oversized houses, tennis courts, concrete everywhere, ..), Focusing on reducing footprint has such a big impact, it's easy to cut by half one's footprint, and if that's done largescale, it's basically as if the world population is divided by 2 instantly

Maybe "the world" needs to pay to countries with large forests (like Brazil) to maintain them, instead of paying them for cutting them down (lumber, agro, resources)

The opposite, "the world" needs to put trade sanctions and large tariffs on countries which have exports which are cheaper because they abuse the environment (deforestation, fossil fuel powered, etc.) and while they're at it: labor (wage slaves, child labor, unsafe practices, actual slavery).

Don't pay corrupt countries to be less corrupt, charge them a fee that makes bad practices more expensive than good ones.

This is a game. Dictators and developing economies are good at taking incentive payments and pocketing them.

Regulatory capture. Too much of the population of “foresters” is bought and paid for by the tree farming industry.

Asking foxes to grow more chickens definitely gets you more chickens but you don’t get the benefits, they do.

They spent money here to put up boxes with special moss in around here.....

And when you think that they put carbon into greenhouses to make the plants grow more.. I reckon extra carbon just means extra growth in plant life. Ie the plants are a natural balancing mechanism.

People are carbon. Could we remove them?

People are neutral, unless they spend money (which is more or less a unit of pollution & carbon-emission)

There is no such thing as a carbon neutral human. We're ~20% carbon by mass.

I do agree with your point about money though--economic activity is the primary cause of our excessive carbon footprint. We need to change how we practice money such that "number go up" type thinking correlates with progress toward agreeable goals instead of correlating with the consumption of nonrenewable resources.

Every 15 people is a ton (on average). And while we can't remove 20 billion people, 6 billion or so would make a nice dent. Additionally, those people consume energy. Once their consumption drops to zero, we see additional savings.

I think I really have stumbled upon a solution here. The planet will be better off for it. What's wrong with this idea?

Be careful there, that doesn't sound nice.

An increasing number of countries have declining birthrate. This slowly, steadily gets us in that direction but not without demographic problems and significant economic disruptions. Let's try keep it peaceful...

you can reason the same with ants

but ants are like a human who doesn't spend money, or like a bird, they are sustainable, no need to remove them

but no even need to be extreme/binary, 8 billion humans who live like a 3rd world country-side human and spend a little money is totally sustainable without any issue, because that's equivalent to less than a hundred million 1st world humans

Birds are known for their nitrogen sequestration.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano

Great, but that's more or less the same with other feces, composition vary in carbon or nitrogen, but they're all great fertilizers

I think that's the plan.

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