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Empress trees absorb about 103 tons of carbon a year per acre

bloomberg.com

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Re: Empress trees absorb about 103 tons of carbon a year per acre

#111

Post by pound »

Brain_Thief wrote: post #105
JudgeWapner wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> elect sane leaders in the US and elsewhere. honest question: can you point me to any US politician that has stood up to a corporation or corporate interest with laws that effectively say, "No, you can't have what you want, the people need instead." and - most importantly - got those laws passed? I can't think of one. I think obamacare came close (which became one of the most hardfought wins ever), and yet the healt…

I don't know if this is the kind of answer you were looking for, but Elizabeth Warren was very successful in her efforts to get the CFPB off the ground, much to the displeasure of the financial sector: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Financial_Protection_... . It's true that under the Trump administration the bureau's behavior is being...modified...but it was quite a success when running as originally intended…

Unfortunately we all know that dems will proceed with Biden and that's how we will get 4 more years of our current president.. :\

Re: Empress trees absorb about 103 tons of carbon a year per acre

#112

Post by galangalalgol »

frankbreetz wrote: post #34
eanzenberg wrote: post #24

The best thing we can do for the earth is take a lot of the money being spent and plant tons of trees, then use the wood as co2 storage in the form of furniture.

Isn't most furniture already made out of wood? I'd imagine if we made every single piece of furniture out of wood it wouldn't make a bit of difference. We need to make things out of wood that are not already made of wood, like skyscrapers and large buildings. If that's not enough we need to cut down trees and bury them so they don't decompose and then plant more. I think you are vastly underestimating the amount of c…

about 5.5B tons of new wood furniture a year would be needed. That is 70tons of furniture for each person born in a year.

Re: Empress trees absorb about 103 tons of carbon a year per acre

#113

Post by galangalalgol »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #33
mal10c wrote: post #4

I think this is a neat idea but have one question. I'm not a chemist but am curious what happens to all that carbon after it's taken in by the tree. Does that carbon become something else? Or does it just kind of hang out in the tree until the tree dies? Once the tree dies, does all that carbon just go back to the atmosphere again? Thanks for any insight!

Interesting tidbit about this. The reason we have so much fossil fuel in the first place is because of what happened during the Carboniferous era. Trees evolved the capability to produce lignin, the 'woody' material in trees. However, it took millions of more years for microorganisms to evolve the ability to decompose lignin. So instead of what happens today when a tree dies and rots, the tree died and just piled up…

so when the ability to break down plastic becomes widespread amongs organisms and they devour all the microplastics in the ocean, our co2 levels are going to skyrocket...

Re: Empress trees absorb about 103 tons of carbon a year per acre

#114

Post by ska »

inetknght wrote: post #88
_rpd wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the tree dies, it will release 99% of the stored carbon back to the atmosphere. Unless you bury the tree in an anaerobic environment or treat it in some other way, the tree is just a time-delayed release mechanism. New forest can store a buffer in perpetuity, e.g., a new trillion trees can store 133 Gt. But current emissions are > 40 Gt/year, so this is < 4 years worth of emissions.

> When the tree dies, it will release 99% of the stored carbon back to the atmosphere. It's not the tree which does that. It's the organisms consuming the tree during the decomposition process which do that. And that doesn't happen all at once. Indeed, if you grow another tree then you're likely to still be net-positive. If you use the tree for other purposes -- construction, for example. Or burning for energy produc…

> Or burning for energy production

Doesn't that just release the C02 again? Construction purposes might help, or any other way of sequestering.

Re: Empress trees absorb about 103 tons of carbon a year per acre

#116

Post by jointpdf »

rgacote wrote: post #58

Not sure planting a "highly invasive tree" is the solution: http://www.ecosystemgardening.com/paulownia-princess-tree-on...

The USFS [1] page on Paulownia tomentosa cites a lot of research suggesting that it’s a “transient” invader that rapidly settles harsh or disturbed (e.g. by fire) environments, but is highly shade intolerant and gets outcompetes in the long run. So it seems to me a good strategy is to use it to rapidly colonize non-forested areas, sequester that biomass, and eventually cultivate more diverse species (or something like that).

>”...thus, princesstree frequently establishes and spreads after disturbances that create these conditions, such as fire, windstorms, pestilence, floods, landslides, and anthropogenic disturbances such as construction, cultivation, mining, and logging”

> “Hu suggests that by the time Paulownia grows to maturity, the seeds it produces likely cannot survive within the same habitat as the parent plant because the succeeding vegetation has ‘modified the physical environment so much that no new Paulownia has any chance to get established’. Thus, princesstree may not alter the successional pathways of some native ecosystems.“

[1] https://www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/plants/tree/pautom/all.h...

Re: Empress trees absorb about 103 tons of carbon a year per acre

#117

Post by kgilpin »

jwr wrote: post #106
rgacote wrote: post #58

Not sure planting a "highly invasive tree" is the solution: http://www.ecosystemgardening.com/paulownia-princess-tree-on...

Given what we are doing about the climate crisis (nothing), I would be very happy to plant "highly invasive trees" and have them spread around like crazy. Too many of those trees is a much better problem to have than a cooked planet.

I guess you would be trading a carbon problem for mass extinction.

Re: Empress trees absorb about 103 tons of carbon a year per acre

#118

Post by jointpdf »

EGreg wrote: post #5

Forgive me, but it doesn't look like much. How can a tree with such a small mass contain more carbon than a massive tree with trunks and branches? They don't even seem to be very close together in those photos: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-08-02/we-alread...

I don’t think the pics in the article show a fully grown tree. According to the Wiki picture, this thing is an absolute unit (for a 8-10 year old plant): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulownia_tomentosa#/media/F...

Re: Empress trees absorb about 103 tons of carbon a year per acre

#119

Post by plutonorm »

duckymcduckface wrote: post #80
_rpd wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the tree dies, it will release 99% of the stored carbon back to the atmosphere. Unless you bury the tree in an anaerobic environment or treat it in some other way, the tree is just a time-delayed release mechanism. New forest can store a buffer in perpetuity, e.g., a new trillion trees can store 133 Gt. But current emissions are > 40 Gt/year, so this is < 4 years worth of emissions.

Makes me wonder if in the future the solution will be to create synthetic crude and pump it back into the ground.

Maybe this is where the oil came from In the first place. A desperate attempt to dump co2 by a doomed civilisation in the deep past. Obviously not, but could make a good short story :)

Re: Empress trees absorb about 103 tons of carbon a year per acre

#120

Post by JudgeWapner »

pound wrote: post #111
Brain_Thief wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if this is the kind of answer you were looking for, but Elizabeth Warren was very successful in her efforts to get the CFPB off the ground, much to the displeasure of the financial sector: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Financial_Protection_... . It's true that under the Trump administration the bureau's behavior is being...modified...but it was quite a success when running as originally intended…

Unfortunately we all know that dems will proceed with Biden and that's how we will get 4 more years of our current president.. :\

teach them to shaft Bernie next time!
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