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Show HN: Make continuous reforestation part of your daily workflow

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Re: Show HN: Make continuous reforestation part of your daily workflow

#21

Before I sign up for this feel good thing, does anyone know whether it makes any meaningful difference/is enough to make any kind of impact? From looking at CO2 levels, we will be reaching 1000 ug/m^3 in my lifetime (threshold for headaches and other health problems). At 2000 it becomes a serious health hazard. Would money be better spent lobbying for abolishing coal burning power plants and making agriculture more c…

I think there’s been some misleading discussion of agriculture’s contributions to global emission. For a while, agriculture was ignored, but now that has been over-compensated for, and many people have the mistaken impression it’s most of the problem. Agriculture and forestry is still just 18.2% of emissions. Energy is still 73.2%. If you want to change the course of emissions, you need to change Energy. Luckily, we…

> Oil is nearly as big of an emitter as coal, and gas plus oil is now bigger than coal itself.

That's correct and everything, but I do think that for a while the best strategy is to focus on coal. Yeah, some electrifying of transportation won't harm either, but the largest short term gains and the largest long term opportunities all start on replacing coal.

If replacing coal leads to lots of peaking natgas plants, so be it. It is still a gain on the short term, and it creates clear target for storage on the long term.

Re: Show HN: Make continuous reforestation part of your daily workflow

#22

Before I sign up for this feel good thing, does anyone know whether it makes any meaningful difference/is enough to make any kind of impact? From looking at CO2 levels, we will be reaching 1000 ug/m^3 in my lifetime (threshold for headaches and other health problems). At 2000 it becomes a serious health hazard. Would money be better spent lobbying for abolishing coal burning power plants and making agriculture more c…

Things are so dire that even if we use all "guns" in our disposal it will be difficult. There is no single solutions that can help, amount of CO2 is so huge that if we would turn CO2 we need to sequester into graphite bricks we could build a wall 10 meters high and 5 meters wide encircling the Earth around Equator 32 times.

So, we need all we can think at same time, now. :/

Simply, current amount of carbon in the atmosphere has been released from sources that were not there, and we are still cutting trees more than we plant. Some calculation say we need between 1-2 trillion trees. But even then trees need a quite some time to grow and become effective.

Re: Show HN: Make continuous reforestation part of your daily workflow

#23

Before I sign up for this feel good thing, does anyone know whether it makes any meaningful difference/is enough to make any kind of impact? From looking at CO2 levels, we will be reaching 1000 ug/m^3 in my lifetime (threshold for headaches and other health problems). At 2000 it becomes a serious health hazard. Would money be better spent lobbying for abolishing coal burning power plants and making agriculture more c…

TLDR, you're right. Here's the math to prove it.

I did some research into this a few years ago. Here's what I remember. Most of it is easy to search for to verify, just slightly time consuming. Broad brush strokes here to get you started.

Your average "big" tree (oak, pine, maple) will absorb about 10-20 pounds of CO2 every year once it's about 10 years old, on average. Lots of variables obviously. From what I saw, and there's debate, but the rate of CO2 absorption doesn't seem to speed up as much as we'd expect as they get older. I don't know how true that is, but at the same time, I could never find hard numbers to disagree. I have to work with what I got.

According to the US Forestry, per acre, you can have 100 really big trees or 500 really small trees. The problem with higher density is the increased wildfire hazard. It was something like 150-250 trees is the most they like to manage an area. This allows enough space to slow fires and ability to easily clean debris (if it's a managed forest) to choke out the fire.

For this, let's say we want 150 big trees per acre and on the best case scenario, once these trees are 10 years old, they're sucking up 20 pounds of CO2. That's about 3,000 pounds of CO2 being absorbed from the air with the hopes and prayers that a wide fire doesn't come through and undo that work.

Back in the day, I did this to figure out how bad Bitcoin was to the environment. Let's do Ethereum since NFTs are so hot right now: https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption. Every Ethereum transaction puts out roughly 29 kgCO2 (63lbs). That's an energy usage that truly never has to happen, but does out of vanity for the idea of saving the world from the 1% so it can create a different, new set of 1%ers. I'll get off my soap box now. That's 3, 10 year old trees needed to be carbon neutral for the average Ethereum transaction. Bitcoin is far worse, 367kg(800 pounds) per transaction. That's 40 trees needed per bitcoin transaction for carbon neutral. According to https://bitinfocharts.com/ethereum/, there were 49,000 Ethereum transactions yesterday, 250,000 for bitcoin (same site). So that's 147,000 trees or 980 acres of 10 year old trees needed to be planted every day to offset Ethereum. 66,666 acres, per day, to offset Bitcoin. Hopefully a wildfire doesn't come by and fuck up everything. Forcing you to replant to catch up on an amount of space that's incredibly unrealistic. Not to mention the CO2 of the logistics to move that many personnel around to plant that many trees.

Moral of the story, you're right. The impact of planting a handful of trees is shit. And don't get me wrong, I think we should be planting trees and trying to bring back forests. Rehabilitate destroyed and distressed ecosystems is a fantastic idea. But let's not suck each other's dicks that we're going to save the planet with YET ANOTHER PIECE OF DIGITAL TECH that is "going to solve the world's problems". Go buy a fucking tree, some seeds and a shovel. Get off the computer and go get your hands dirty. Anyways, it's far better to just cut the bullshit out of the planet instead. I just focused on the 2 largest cryptocoins. They're a drop in the bucket compared to everything else, coal, gas, etc. Cutting the CO2 producers will do more than you can realistically replant.

Re: Show HN: Make continuous reforestation part of your daily workflow

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there’s been some misleading discussion of agriculture’s contributions to global emission. For a while, agriculture was ignored, but now that has been over-compensated for, and many people have the mistaken impression it’s most of the problem. Agriculture and forestry is still just 18.2% of emissions. Energy is still 73.2%. If you want to change the course of emissions, you need to change Energy. Luckily, we…

> Oil is nearly as big of an emitter as coal, and gas plus oil is now bigger than coal itself. That's correct and everything, but I do think that for a while the best strategy is to focus on coal. Yeah, some electrifying of transportation won't harm either, but the largest short term gains and the largest long term opportunities all start on replacing coal. If replacing coal leads to lots of peaking natgas plants, so…

Yup, absolutely true. And I think people underestimate how good electric cars are. They have about half the emissions of conventional cars even if all their electricity comes from gas (but about 40% of electricity in the US is carbonfree—about half nuclear and the rest wind, hydro, solar, and geothermal).

Each new conventional car sold is a locked-in 100 tons of CO2 (lower if we we crush them sooner). Electric cars are much smaller (half to start with), and depending on how fast we transition the electric grid could be only like 10-25 tons and then next to nothing (as even manufacture becomes decarbonized).

Re: Show HN: Make continuous reforestation part of your daily workflow

#26

Before I sign up for this feel good thing, does anyone know whether it makes any meaningful difference/is enough to make any kind of impact? From looking at CO2 levels, we will be reaching 1000 ug/m^3 in my lifetime (threshold for headaches and other health problems). At 2000 it becomes a serious health hazard. Would money be better spent lobbying for abolishing coal burning power plants and making agriculture more c…

I think there’s been some misleading discussion of agriculture’s contributions to global emission. For a while, agriculture was ignored, but now that has been over-compensated for, and many people have the mistaken impression it’s most of the problem. Agriculture and forestry is still just 18.2% of emissions. Energy is still 73.2%. If you want to change the course of emissions, you need to change Energy. Luckily, we…

While the separation can be helpful, it also minimizes the actual carbon footprint of our food system. Petrochemical production, for instance, is a different category according to the epa. But one of the biggest uses of petrochemicals is fertilizer production. Trucking and shipping is its own category. Guess what relies on a lot of trucking and shipping? And so on.

Typically what counts as agricultural emissions are literally tilling, tractor fuel, cow emissions, etc. we really need to look at the whole system, together, for a clear picture. When we do that it obvious that our industrial food production is deeply tied to every aspect of fossil fuel use, land use, and atmospheric c02 in general.

Re: Show HN: Make continuous reforestation part of your daily workflow

#28
post #25

I wonder if it’d be better to not try and prevent global warming, but instead spend money and research on preparing for it. Can someone tell me why this is a terrible idea?

That's large part of what Bjorn Lomborg is advocating: https://www.lomborg.com

Re: Show HN: Make continuous reforestation part of your daily workflow

#29
post #25

I wonder if it’d be better to not try and prevent global warming, but instead spend money and research on preparing for it. Can someone tell me why this is a terrible idea?

Because all the climate models say that it's a terrible idea to let it completely loose. They even predict that it's a pretty bad idea not to do a lot more than what we are doing now.

Given the current state of matters, whatever we do it will be at least in part preparation for the changed climate and in part preventing getting things worse.

Re: Show HN: Make continuous reforestation part of your daily workflow

#30

It looks a lot of overheads for something that is supposed to be helpful for the environment. Why not just donate the equivalent of 1-year amount of your [whatever event-triggered actions] directly to one of these Reforestation projects? It saves your time, the cost of running server (albeit not much) while doing the same amount of help.

It is less overhead. Sign up once, then just add a single REST call to your billing flow.

Except there is now a middleman that also wants part of the cash. The only advantage I see is that it's impossible for one of the CFO's bootlickers to kill the payment without anyone else knowing.

Edit: apparently digitalhumani doesn't cream off.

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