Stopping and even reversing deforestation is the single most efficient form of CO2 reduction/capture we have available.
Deforestation rivals fossil fossil fuels for greenhouse gas emissions (up to 30% of anthropic emissions) yet it rarely gets talked about. Could it be because there is no money to be made in halting deforestation?
On the fossil fuel side what we need is a large scale industrial use of CO2 that is not hopelessly energy inefficient. If such a breakthrough happens we could build gas turbine farms at gas fields and pipe the CO2 to industrial centers. Modern gas turbines are the most efficient form of electricity generation. The emissions consist almost entirely of H2O and CO2, some collateral NO2, and trace amounts of other stuff from combusted impurities.
My understanding is that reforestation, while being wonderful and helpful, simply doesn’t address the scale of the problem.
All forests today contain ~200 gigatons of carbon. Humans release ~25 gigatons of carbon per year. So DOUBLING the size of forests on Earth would just absorb 8 years of greenhouse gas emissions.
This made no intuitive sense to me until I began to think of the fossil fuels we’ve got underground as representing millions of years of forests “compressed” into oil / gas.
And I think the unstated conclusions are whether we should actually do "X" or not. I think the answer is usually Yes, we should do X (in this case, plant as many damn trees as we can), but I also think that's me arguing from an individual perspective and not a group psychology perspective.
Like, when people argue "but focusing on trees could distract us from addressing the entire problem", I used to just be dismissive of that, but I'm starting to feel like those objections should be taken more seriously - particularly having gone through this COVID debate where people focused so much on "flattening the curve" - which was necessary, not sufficient - that too many people signed on to gradual reopening just as the (high-amplitude) curve started flattening. If we had socialized a different benchmark, maybe it would have been more effective in the long run.
(But still, even if only in parentheses, plant trees.)
This whole argument is a great example of why we use prices and markets to decide on resource allocation instead of some other system. It's easy for people to cherry-pick evidence that their pet solution is the most efficient and to browbeat others into accepting that pet solution for non-economic reasons.
But when you have to attach a price to something, you have to essentially put up or shut up. Either your project is as efficient as you claim or you lose money. And if your project suffers from economies or dis-economies of scale? Prices can incorporate this information too. Prices keep us honest.
That's why a cap-and-trade system is the best approach for limiting and reducing carbon in the atmosphere. Put a price on the externality and the market will find a way to drive it down as far as it'll go.
I think that we should cast the widest net for possible solutions, but there does come a point where they need to be winnowed down to which solutions will have the greatest effect (without bad side effects) with the least time and material resources. It'll still have to be multiple solutions on multiple fronts, though. Planting trees should be an easy win where the ecology currently supports growing them without too much maintenance work, but some areas would require massive effort to revitalize. Nuance like that is important, and so I encourage everyone to take things a step further mentally each time you engage with these topics. Do some napkin math, read some studies, etc. The more people that do that, the more we can create working knowledge and solutions instead of just taking pot shots at various proposals.
Some of that work about possible solutions has been done by Paul Hawken. His Project Drawdown book is at least an organized and reasoned list of 100 possibilities. I attended a talk about one of them - marine permaculture arrays.
This is a body of working knowledge developed over the past thirteen years, with new inventions being developed and deployed for growing kelp in the open ocean. What's proven is the ability of wave, solar, wind powered pumps to upwell cold water hundred of meters beneath the ocean surface, and irrigate kelp, doubling the growth rate. This is important because 93% of global warming goes into the surface layers of the ocean, cutting of circulation of nutrients needed by life.
What's proven is that seaweeds and kelps can sequester more carbon per square meter per year than the tropical rainforest. The idea is put submerged, autonomous satellite-assisted kelp platforms in the open ocean at scale, to farm for food/feed/fertilizer/fish or just sink
the kelp into the depths to sequester the carbon for hundreds of years. (per UN research)
There is now a kelp coin, which might someday play a role in emerging carbon sequestration markets. At the moment, it is a fundraiser, crowd- funding style to help raise capital to get these to hectare scale.
https://www.climatefoundation.org/kelp-coin.html This kelp coin is new, just a couple of weeks out.
It might take a decade or more to get to a gigaton of carbon sequestration. But it is also about food security and ecosystem regeneration. If you like short videos for information, try https://www.climatefoundation.org/2040-make-a-change.html
No. There are nearly 8 billion people on this planet. Figure it out.
This is a complex problem. Almost all solutions are worth trying. Most of them are going to be required. There does not need to be a winnowing of solutions. We just need to fucking start rolling them out.
I'm so over the argument that something won't be good enough.
No fucking shit.
Nothing is going to be good enough, nothing is going to be potent enough to solve how monumentally we screwed the environment up.
I don't think it's a given we can reverse or even stop climate change. There are many positive feedback loops going on right now.
AFAIK neither the Paris accords or any climate management proposals entertain the idea of stopping climate change.
Edit: positive feedback loops are things like the melting ice caps. Less sunlight is reflected back to space by the white ice which means more is absorbed by the dark sea. This causes the earth to warm and more of the ice caps to melt....
In climate science there is something called the tipping point. This is when mechanisms like positive feedback will make drastic climate change inevitable (with current technology).
When the tipping point will happen is up for debate. IMO the idea that we have already passed the tipping point is also up for debate.
People frequently try to say the right things to convince the "stupid sheep" people but nobody bothers to think of how to convince themselves. Activists typically believe what they believe for bad reasons so they aren't able to make a good argument for why they're right.
How about estimate the future cost of climate change and the cost of various measures to prevent/reduce it. Do they result in a net gain or loss? There's no point doing something will help less than it hurts.
It's hard to predict future costs but we should at least try instead of (incorrectly) pretending it's the end of the world and no expense is too great to stop it. People probably have a sense that some measures (like reforestation) might not be worth the cost but others consider any cost is worth paying if it does anything.
Any investment can be argued to be not worth it before the return is received. If you constrain the timeframe to exclude the timeframe of the expected return, then of course it won't be worth it. Point taken if you're talking about a sufficiently long timeframe, though.
Second, there's the behavior of the thing you're trying to fix. If you're accelerating towards a wall, you don't analyze the cost of switching to your current velocity. You're still going to get smashed apart by the wall. With Covid, people wondered if a lockdown is worth the economic cost compared to not locking down, without stopping to consider if no-lockdown's economic cost exceeds the cost of the lockdown, which is the bleedingly obvious reality. Comparing the cost of mitigating climate change over not mitigating climate change sometimes ignores we aren't in a static reality - the status quo is that we are accelerating in a direction that leads to higher and higher costs.
Finally, the return on an investment can change over time. For many people, planting one tree is obviously worth the cost of planting one tree. I've got space in my backyard, and I have seeds. It's a few square feet and it sequesters about a ton of CO2 over 40 years. I mean, that's a hell of a return on an investment, compared to not planting the tree. Now, that return will go down over time, as it becomes harder and more expensive for society to plant trees, several billion trees from now. But right now it's easy money. A US Citizen can currently offset their own carbon footprint by paying tree-planting services somewhere between $120 and $200 per year. That's cheap. It'll get more expensive over time until the point it's not "worth it" by some argument, and that can also mean that "the effort of offsetting the worlds carbon footprint through world reforestation isn't worth it", but that doesn't mean it's not worth it at first.
Ok I read the entire thread and I don't know where to plug my comment so let me do it here.
I recently drove through a road after a couple of years. On one side is Safeway and other shops - standard California shopping area - bigger than a strip mall smaller than a mall - not sure what to call it, and housing on the other side of the road.
Maybe it is bad memory but maybe it is real since I sort of exclaimed when passing through the area. The area used to be a concrete jungle but now they added so many trees that if you were not looking you may not realize you are passing a shopping area (of course I exaggerate but just a little). Not sure if they added 10 trees, 100 or maybe 200-300 (smallish ones not full size ones). I wonder if those things help and to what extent?
It's a different lense we need, this would be the argument: we should do x,x if we do it won't have enough effects by itself, it's better than nothing to have that desired effect, it's a step in the right direction to achieve the desired results, what we need to have is other people to also have the desired effect to do the same thing independently. The question is what is the effect and how much of a piece of the whole would it mitigate. Can the people who do decide to make a change in that one goal can they compare notes to improve on that outcome.
Tldr: do what you can based on where you are at your life and hope improves in the right direction, this applies to all things.
That's pretty much the problem, but I should also add that this doesn't mean we shouldn't do reforestation. It just means there isn't a single solution to a complex global problem (honestly, is anyone surprised? Why the fuck are people suggesting single solution answers to complex nuanced problems?).
We should be making larger forests, fill them with birds and animals (this is actually a difficult part if you look at huge man made forests like the one in China). But we should also use man made sequestration. We should also redevelop coral reefs around the world. Etc. A lot of people seem to be forgetting the heart of the problem. There is too much greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It doesn't matter how we remove them, just that we do (assuming the removal process doesn't do more harm, of course). Doesn't matter if it is natural (i.e. forests & reefs) or artificial (CCS), it needs to be removed from the atmosphere (and ocean). There's no "one size fits all" solution.
Bill Gates has reached the same conclusion. He’s funded carbon extraction tech that takes up a football field in size but does the job of millions of trees.
The added benefit of these is that you can directly capture carbon at its source. This is good since we know that emissions aren't homogeneous dispersed.
When I read The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley, I found it really interesting to read the history of fossil fuels.
Basically whale oil and trees were replaced by coal mining - which saved whales and trees! And if I recall the coal mining saved 5x the landmass area in trees cut down (not that that helped the british isles). And then oil saved lots of coal mine deaths and strip mining.
We just gotta keep going forward. I think it's unfortunate that modern safe nuclear hasn't gotten a place. I like that solar is getting a chance at development (helped via greedy power companies.. PG&E@48c/kwh).
Humans release closer to 35 metric gigatons of carbon per year. The increased thawing of the permafrost is releasing massive amounts of CO2, methane which is 80 times more impactful than CO2, and nitrous oxide which is 300 times more impactful than CO2. The oceans are warming and they are releasing increasing amounts of CO2.
Humans haven't been able to even slow the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, and now with the melting glaciers, thawing permafrost and warming oceans, which are all locked into positive feedback loops, it won't be long until the earth it's self will sustain the global warming pattern with no help from humans.
Between the oceans, the glaciers and the permafrost they sequester almost 2.5 times the CO2 that is currently in the atmosphere.
All we need is a technology that will capture and sequester greenhouse gases on a global scale to the tune of about 60 gigatons per year, this way we'll capture all the human released greenhouse gases, plus the emissions from the melting glaciers, thawing permafrost and warming oceans, and capture enough more so that we can eventually reverse the atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations back to the early 1700's. Oh, one last thing we need to invent this technology in about the next 10 years.
There are 200 gigatons of forest in the world. We net 8 gigatons each year. So in 25 years we will have no forest if all this is true. That conclusion is absurd.
You're missing an important detail: forests don't capture CO2 just once (in the form of organic matter, e.g. wood); they also capture it continuously... Slowly turning CO2 into coal/oil over millions of years, which is not included in the count for CO2 in forests.
It's instead like a slow by-product of it; as if we had "fossil forests" underneath live ones, which several gigatons of additional sequestered carbon.
Doubling the size of forests on Earth would provide benefits that go beyond the simple, one-time CO2 capture you refer to.
I am not familiar with the numbers, but do they represent carbon trapped in the forest's plants or in the forest as a whole (that includes the soil as well).
The latter has an accumulative nature in regard to the soil trapped carbon being a derivative.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that calculating how much carbon a forest can store, should take the throughput into account, not just the current total capacity.
There are for sure many other benefits of increasing the forested land, eg from protecting the soil to host a whole living ecosystem (from which humans can benefit from)
Not only reforestation helps with cleaning the air, but it tries to rolls back a (irreparable) damage we made to the environment during the last centuries.
> what we need is a large scale industrial use of CO2 that is not hopelessly energy inefficient
Unfortunately this is somewhere between hopelessly improbable and impossible, for two reasons:
First, our CO2 storage needs are in the tens of gigatonnes per year. At the highest practical storage density of pure CO2, one gigatonne is about 10^9 cubic meters - 400 times the volume of the Hoover Dam. There are simply no existing human product streams that are within even a couple orders of magnitude of being able to absorb that.
Second, CO2 is a waste product. Turning it into any other useful product will demand not just the energy gained from burning the fuel, but quite a bit more due to thermodynamic inefficiency.
There absolutely ain't no free lunch with regards to CO2 capture. It's perfectly doable but it's a pure cost that should just be government regulated everywhere ASAP.
If we could turn it to become a resource, perhaps it will be consumed out, just like the rest of resources we humans discover.
One possibility maybe applying photosynthesis, if we knew how to do it in a practical manner. We know that plants can do it, we know generally how they do it, but still can't replicate it.
With photosynthesis, the CO2 ends up in some form of sugar among other things. Where the hydrogen comes from water, and we want that hydrogen for energy.
Of course, as with anything done by humans, there's a danger of abuse. In such case, we could 'overharvest' the CO2 such that it could starve the plants, leading to oxygen shortage... And that's another doomsday scenario.
All in all, the problems point at the humans, so far Earth tolerates us.
Unfortunately, you can't just magic something from a waste product into a resource, particularly something like CO2, due to the second law of thermodynamics.
Carbon fixation is endothermic. It requires a lot of energy, and very specific conditions. Organic carbon fixers (plants & algae) are by far the most efficient way to turn CO2 into something useful, but they require sunlight, and there's only so much of that to go around.
> Unfortunately, you can't just magic something from a waste product into a resource
That's a semantics game... First thing that comes to mind is manure, turned from literally waste into fertilizser. It may not be a high demand resource, but with a utility nevertheless.
CO2 is used in greenhouse farming to increase produce yield. The CO2 gets turned into vegetables. Unfortunately the CO2 will eventually be released again, after the vegetables are eaten.
The O2 content of the atmosphere is 21%. The CO2 content is 0.04%. If you removed 0.04 percentage points of the O2 from the atmosphere, nobody and nothing would bat an eye.
And photosynthesis, as well as any other capture process from air, has negative feedback. If CO2 content (technically, CO2 partial pressure) goes down, the efficiency of the capture process goes down faster.
A great deal of CO2 is absorbed by oceans, which is a moderating factor, but it has its capacity limit. If we tried to 'harvest' the CO2, the oceans may be a more valuable target. Marine plants process it similarly to land plants.
Sure photosythesis needs external energy to work, no one is suggesting a perpetuum mobile. The question is what valuable (to humans) product could be at the end of the processing chain, and how would this balance with the costs? The next question is how to make the process more efficient to drive the costs down?
If plants' process is the most efficient, perhaps it should be delegated to plants, then the humans need to find ways to supply the supporting elements, like soil, light, water.
Photosynthesis is a very inefficient process. It's efficiency is in the single-digit range. It is only worthwhile because the energy source is free and very abundant. And reforestation is only worthwhile because there are benefits to it besides carbon capture.
> Stopping and even reversing deforestation is the single most efficient form of CO2 reduction/capture we have available.
No it isn't. Reforestation might be the most aesthetically and ideologically pleasing option, but it's not the most physically effective one. Trees get you $25-$50/ton-CO2 removal costs; accelerated weathering gets you around $8/ton-CO2 [2]. Iron enrichment of the ocean can get you down to around $1/ton-CO2 removed.
Focusing on pretty solutions in harmony with nature will lead us down the wrong path. Every great thing mankind has done has been the result of science, technology, and industry. We don't fly around the world by stupidly copying birds, and we won't get control of the climate by sowing plants.
Generalizing/ignoring details/bluntly, the people using the fossil fuels are rich and do it to buy more stuff/go on holidays more often. The people doing the deforestation are poor and do it to survive (sometimes in order to make stuff for the rich)
It doesn’t help telling poor people to stop deforestation, because they have no choice. The way to get there is by having the rich consume less.
...or the rich people could just pay the poor people so they don’t have to engage in deforestation? That money could be invested into other sectors of their economy, raising the overall standard of living?
That sounds like a solution that would slow deforestation and increase fossil fuel consumption. It also sounds a bit like having your cake and eating it too; the relative poverty of the people doing the deforestation enables the wealth of the people overconsuming.
Maybe resources should be heavily transferred from the rich to the poor, removing the ability of the rich to overconsume, and enabling the former poor to stop deforesting while living as efficiently as possible (although their carbon output would probably net go up.)
Maybe our economies could focus on delivering the most comfort and security at the highest energy efficiency, rather than on tricking the wealthy into throwing things away as quickly as possible after purchase and on maximizing the burning of gasoline and jet fuel.
How about a carbon tax which once collected is redistributed evenly amongst everyone. This way people who use the most carbon will be paying the people who use the least carbon for the priviledge. It also prices in the externality through the entire market so every individual doesnt need to keep track of the co2 use of every product and service they purchase which is extremely difficult.
Ideally yes but jn practice unfortunately it often is effectively pocketted by corrupt local government officals while trees are poached by the poor people. Tourism gets shit on for its travel miles but a nature tourist economy gives incentives to keep it clean and provides some local jobs even if they aren't the best ones.
The problem is that it doesn't address the root cause. Broadly speaking, there's two places carbon can be: in the biosphere or locked up geologically. Our fossil fuel emissions - by definition - came from geological deposits. We need to put them back into geological formations, otherwise when the trees we've planted die their carbon will just go back into the atmosphere.
Putting aside any quips about how our oil fields used to be part of the biosphere, I do think the current view is that forests are net carbon sinks, even accounting for decomposition.
Regardless, the time scale for growing and decomposing a forest is enormous and would buy a lot of flexibility in solving the problem more permanently if additional research shows them to not be efficient sinks long-term.
I hear this a lot, but does every bit of that really just go up into the air? Don’t trees often break down and become soil, and new trees grow on top of them?
The research I've seen in popular media says a lot of the carbon from old trees comes from an era before microbes could digest them - so dead trees just piled up for a long time and got buried. That doesn't happen anymore.
"Ward and Kirschvink say that 90 percent—yup, 90 percent!—of the coal we burn today (and the coal dust we see flying about Beijing and New Delhi) comes from that single geological period, the Carboniferous period."
Do you have any numbers? How many square kilometers of forests should we grow to compensate for all CO₂ emissions?
Here's some hypothetical numbers. Correct me, if they are way off.
1 tree = 0.5 m³ of wood = 250 kg of CO₂.
1 ha = 10 000 m² = 500 trees = 125000 kg of CO₂.
Humanity CO₂ emissions at 2018 year are 33 100 000 000 000 kg. So you would need 264.8 millions of hectares (2.6 millions of km²) of forests to compensate for those emissions.
There are 38 millions of km² of forests on Earth right now. So even if we would double our forests (and that would be a truly tremendous task), that would buy us 14 more years of emissions (and that would not get back all the produced CO₂, by far).
It's not even clear if we would be able to keep CO₂ emissions not increasing in the future.
And there are only so much of land to plant forests.
I have more trust in some kind of phytoplankton. Oceans are vast. Those organisms can capture CO₂. Some of them will be eaten and some of them will die and submerge to depths where they'll keep that carbon forever. If they won't work well enough, future bio-engineering might fix that.
1. Reduced Food Waste Food, Agriculture, and Land Use / Land Sinks 87.45 94.56
2. Health and Education Health and Education 85.42 85.42
3. Plant-Rich Diets Food, Agriculture, and Land Use / Land Sinks 65.01 91.72
4. Refrigerant Management Industry / Buildings 57.75 57.75
5. Tropical Forest Restoration Land Sinks 54.45 85.14
The book / website consistently points out that the best reduction / capture mechanisms are related to food and industry first. Though being top 5 is no joke.
There's not much money to be made in fossil fuel phase out either... some, but overall it is a cost. Halting deforestation and reforesting aggressively would be a lot cheaper at the macroeconomic level.
Deforestation rivals fossil fossil fuels for greenhouse gas emissions (up to 30% of anthropic emissions) yet it rarely gets talked about. Could it be because there is no money to be made in halting deforestation?
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/deforestation-and-greenhous... https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo671
On the fossil fuel side what we need is a large scale industrial use of CO2 that is not hopelessly energy inefficient. If such a breakthrough happens we could build gas turbine farms at gas fields and pipe the CO2 to industrial centers. Modern gas turbines are the most efficient form of electricity generation. The emissions consist almost entirely of H2O and CO2, some collateral NO2, and trace amounts of other stuff from combusted impurities.