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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

#41

Post by atleta »

ubuwaits wrote: post #37
IgorPartola wrote: post #5

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…

Bill Gates wrote about the impact of planting trees recently: > It sounds like a simple fix and it has obvious appeal for all of us who love trees, but its impact on climate change is overblown. Although trees absorb some carbon, they can never take in enough to offset the damage from our modern lifestyle. To absorb the lifetime emissions that will be produced by every American alive today — just 4 per cent of the gl…

Sounds logical. We're burning fossils of past creatures that have lived over a period of hundreds of millions of years on the surface of the Earth.

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

#42

Post by IgorPartola »

ubuwaits wrote: post #37
IgorPartola wrote: post #5

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…

Bill Gates wrote about the impact of planting trees recently: > It sounds like a simple fix and it has obvious appeal for all of us who love trees, but its impact on climate change is overblown. Although trees absorb some carbon, they can never take in enough to offset the damage from our modern lifestyle. To absorb the lifetime emissions that will be produced by every American alive today — just 4 per cent of the gl…

Well fuck. Anyone know of a lobby as a service project?

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

#43

Post by adflux »

ubuwaits wrote: post #37
IgorPartola wrote: post #5

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…

Bill Gates wrote about the impact of planting trees recently: > It sounds like a simple fix and it has obvious appeal for all of us who love trees, but its impact on climate change is overblown. Although trees absorb some carbon, they can never take in enough to offset the damage from our modern lifestyle. To absorb the lifetime emissions that will be produced by every American alive today — just 4 per cent of the gl…

A very misleading calculation.

You don't need to absorb ALL co2 currently being output by Americans. A large percentage of that is already being converted/stored by algae / trees

So the baseline isn't "we need to store all CO2". The baseline is, we need to convert the part that is currently "overcapacity" for our environment. And for that, planting trees IS a good solution. But don't take my word (or Bills) for it.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6448/76

... Ecosystems could support an additional 0.9 billion hectares of continuous forest. This would represent a greater than 25% increase in forested area, including more than 200 gigatonnes of additional carbon at maturity.Such a change has the potential to store an equivalent of 25% of the current atmospheric carbon pool.

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

#44

Post by vcdimension »

Many of these tree planting schemes are a bit dubious; can you really be sure that they are planting new trees that wouldn't have grown in that area anyway, and will they still be around in 40 years time to make sure the trees grow to maturity and are not cut down and burned? The only tree planting scheme that I really trust is the Green Belt Movement: http://www.greenbeltmovement.org/ started over 40 years ago by Professor Wangari Maathai.

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

#45

Post by mumblemumble »

ubuwaits wrote: post #37
IgorPartola wrote: post #5

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…

Bill Gates wrote about the impact of planting trees recently: > It sounds like a simple fix and it has obvious appeal for all of us who love trees, but its impact on climate change is overblown. Although trees absorb some carbon, they can never take in enough to offset the damage from our modern lifestyle. To absorb the lifetime emissions that will be produced by every American alive today — just 4 per cent of the gl…

For the sake of bringing it into more immediate (for this context) perspective, I'm curious if anyone is able to do the analysis on ecological impact from technology decisions?

For example, choosing fancier, JavaScript-heavy ways of building webpages probably results in clients consuming extra electricity. One could hypothetically estimate the impact, and then come up with an analysis to the effect of, "For a site generating X amount of traffic, you'd need to plant Y trees to offset the decision to use Google Tag Manager."

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

#46

Post by protontypes »

vcdimension wrote: post #44

Many of these tree planting schemes are a bit dubious; can you really be sure that they are planting new trees that wouldn't have grown in that area anyway, and will they still be around in 40 years time to make sure the trees grow to maturity and are not cut down and burned? The only tree planting scheme that I really trust is the Green Belt Movement: http://www.greenbeltmovement.org/ started over 40 years ago by Pr…

A lot of work is being done to make reforestation as transparent and sustainable as possible. In itself, it is no problem to record a world coordinate when planting the tree and later see if this tree is still there. The involved organizations are already working with such and similar solutions to avoid misuse. If you want to be 100% sure, you need to do it yourself: buy land, plant trees.

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

#47

Post by BJBBB »

For North America, tree preservation may be just as important as tree planting. But fire and conservation regulations can be at odds.

Per my CFP insurance carrier, I can no longer plant trees on my property. And the CDF and local fire marshal is encouraging most owners to cut down all vegetation. I routinely see bobcats, coyotes, deer, hawks, falcons, rabbits, squirrels, roadrunners, quail, many species of snakes, many species of butterflies, etc (also saw a mountain lion in the area last year). Last week, a Ca biologist pleaded with me to do nothing to a 5 acre stand of old oak trees (was going to do some tree trimmming), while the fire authorities routinely threaten me with fines.

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

#48

Post by hedora »

NiceWayToDoIT wrote: post #22
IgorPartola wrote: post #5

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 atm…

Also, the carbon those trees sequester needs to be somehow captured permanently.

I imagine a solution where people grow stands of fast growing trees, clear cut every $optimal years, use (magic?) chemistry to separate the harvest into carbon and not carbon, then dump the not carbon back onto the soil, and replant.

Even with that, I’m not convinced there are enough acres of land on earth. I haven’t seen anyone do the math, and suspect direct carbon capture plants and olivine reactions will scale better.

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

#49

Post by ralusek »

Interestingly enough, a side effect of CO2 emissions IS reforestation. Earth is getting greener because of increased CO2 in the air.

What is not obvious though, is if this is going to make the problem worse. For one, the green albedo is often darker than what was previously in place, and retains more heat. However, obviously a fair amount of that energy presumably goes towards photosynthesis. Trees also tend to bring a fair amount of water into the atmosphere, however, and water is actually one of the most aggressive greenhouse gasses in terms of its capability to retain heat.

TL;DR, carbon capture is very important, and planting trees is probably a good thing, but there's a fair amount of debate.

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

#50

Post by bttrfl »

sul_tasto wrote: post #15

A simple way to help plant trees is to use the ecosia search engine: https://www.ecosia.org/

searches turn into trees only if you click ads:

"Clicking on ads generates revenue for Ecosia, which is paid by the advertiser. Ecosia then uses at least 80% of its monthly profits to plant trees where they are needed most"

https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201657341-How-d...

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