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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

#51

Post by sixothree »

protontypes wrote: post #46
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.

Maybe NFTs are the solution. I kid but.

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

#52

Post by marton78 »

sixothree wrote: post #51
protontypes wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe NFTs are the solution. I kid but.

This problem can clearly only be solved by AI.

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

#53

Post by fireeyed »

Someone should work on “YC21 Guilt shedding as a service” These “guilt shedding” projects rarely serve any good purpose. There is no way to track the end result. Same goes for donating wads of money to social justice projects. You still see homeless defecating and shooting needles despite “guilt shedding” by SV denizens. Meanwhile the grifters who run these guilt shedding projects get rich.

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

#55

Post by tima101 »

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…

You can also plant trees by yourself. Last year I planted 10 Siberian and Korean pines in one day. 7 trees survived, 3 trees died because I over watered them. So those 7 trees don't actually need any extra care from me.

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

#56

Post by frongpik »

mumblemumble wrote: post #45
ubuwaits wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

Ads, basically. But I doubt web makes any impact here. Let's say every web user spends 2 hours every day waiting for ads to finish loading. 2 hr x 100 watt x 360 days x 5 billion users = 1 TWh. The US alone produces 4000 TWh per year.

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

#57

Post by Panino »

hedora wrote: post #48
NiceWayToDoIT wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

You'll be happy to know that what you describe exists and it has a name: pyrolysis. Pyrolysis is the thermal anaerobic decomposition of biomass. Basically, you heat up organic material without oxygen at temperatures attainable from a relatively small fire. During this process, volatiles such as hydrogen and oxygen separate from the carbon in the biomass feedstock (dry untreated wood, bones, old cotton tshirts, whatever) and get released as syngas, leaving more or less pure fixed carbon that is very stable, safely sequestered in soil for thousands of years.

The resulting carbon, called biochar, can be co-composted to prepare it for use in soil, where it protects the soil from drought and flood alike. Plants grown in soil with higher carbon content are bigger and healthier, and these soils can produce more of whatever you're growing.

I make biochar at home but there are companies that do it on an industrial scale.

Humanity has been pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at an epic scale for decades. In addition to going carbon neutral with more wind, solar and nuclear, we need to draw CO2 back out of the atmosphere on an epic scale. And biochar resulting from pyrolysis is one of the major tools since it has synergistic effects with other tools, like mass tree plantings. Biochar production can also offset other energy uses, for example by either directly burning the syngas on-site for heating purposes, or for capturing it and using it later as a fuel in an application that would otherwise use fossil fuel.

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

#58

Post by IngvarLynn »

Can people for once stop virtue signalling like plastic bags bans or estimating carbon footprint of bitcoin transactions and finally get to the root of the problem: fixing failed states? Because in the course of you planting a single tree some corrupt government destroys a whole ecosystem.

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

#59

Post by gambiting »

Panino wrote: post #57
hedora wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

You'll be happy to know that what you describe exists and it has a name: pyrolysis. Pyrolysis is the thermal anaerobic decomposition of biomass. Basically, you heat up organic material without oxygen at temperatures attainable from a relatively small fire. During this process, volatiles such as hydrogen and oxygen separate from the carbon in the biomass feedstock (dry untreated wood, bones, old cotton tshirts, whatev…

Isn't this basically how charcoal is made?

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

#60

Post by zamalek »

Panino wrote: post #57
hedora wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

You'll be happy to know that what you describe exists and it has a name: pyrolysis. Pyrolysis is the thermal anaerobic decomposition of biomass. Basically, you heat up organic material without oxygen at temperatures attainable from a relatively small fire. During this process, volatiles such as hydrogen and oxygen separate from the carbon in the biomass feedstock (dry untreated wood, bones, old cotton tshirts, whatev…

I wonder if dumping the biochar into a subduction zone/trench would permanently remove the carbon from the system at any reasonable rate. Or possibly back-fill mines with it.

Either way, I completely agree. Planting trees doesn't solve the problem if those trees are allowed to naturally decompose. Trees are just really efficient carbon fixing machinery, we need to store the solid carbon somewhere.

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