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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

#81

Post by Panino »

gambiting wrote: post #59
Panino wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sort of but not really. Grill charcoal is made at a lower temperature, preserving more volatiles, and then an accelerant is often added (basically lighter fluid) to help it ignite and burn. It's similar at a glance but the differences are important.

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

#82

Post by jk7tarYZAQNpTQa »

jarenmf wrote: post #70
IngvarLynn wrote: post #58

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.

Biggest carbon emitters are industrialized western democracies. Unless you are considering them as failed states, your argument is not correct

Carbon emission is only one of all our ecological concerns. I don't know why people only think about carbon.

You can look for example at River plastic emissions to the world’s oceans [1].

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15611

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

#83

Post by smearth »

I'm interested in what people with greater knowledge/insight/intellect than myself think of the following.

I think total reforestation is implausible but the native reforestation of most of the earths fresh waterways is plausible using the Miyawaki forest establishment method ( that achieves 10x growth rates and natural strata levels) and localised cuttings. By staggering the establishment of native plantings 20 meters either sides of creek and river beds so there is effectively a 50m wide native forest over most waterways you can delay the capital outlay which causes a positive net present value for existing landholders to finance the planting and enhance their balance sheet. By setting aside the planting corridor to regenerate while the miyawaki plots are gradually planted the soil regenerates so the the forest establishment can be sped up over a period of time.

Because there is a positive ROI with carbon credits at current prices and the work is fairly interesting and healthy the planting projects work economically and ecologically.

The ecological benefits are that native forests have a five degree celsius cooling effect. Cooler streams mean higher oxygenisation levels which means higher nitrogen utilisation levels and a healthier pH. Cooler streams also means cooler rivers which means cooler estuaries with more sealife means and sea grasses and colder coastal sea surface temperatures and less algal blooms. Native flora corridors along fresh waterways allows native fauna highways so that biodiversity is more resilient.

The economic benefits are improved hydro-logical flow through pasture and cropland so less phosphates and nitrogen flow through the soil and the soil retains moisture better as the 20 m rich native humus barrier either side of the fresh waterway slows the hydro-logical water flow into the creek. Native forests negatively ionise the air so the growth rate of the pastures and crops along the waterways should be higher with less fertiliser applied. Also rural employment opportunities are retreating globally as wealth accumulates with knowledge into cities and the localised forest design and planting employment funded via carbon credits would provide interesting educative yet non-stressful employment opportunities and achieve a higher return on investment for most landholders than commodity production. We have 10 billion people coming on board to feed, population growth slows with great nutrition so great nutrition is the anti-dote to long-term pollution. People won't go backwards so planting fresh waterways in locally designed fast growing native forestry using the Miyawaki method or better wherever there is a positive ROI at current carbon credits prices makes intuitive sense to me.

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

#84

Post by Trasmatta »

11235813213455 wrote: post #77
Trasmatta wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would likely be an insignificant blip in terms of the world's total energy and CO2 output. I think focusing on those types of micro-optimizations is unhelpful as they don't make any meaningful difference, and take up way too much attention. It's like making people feel guilty for taking a shower in a drought, when residential water use is less than 1%. Every person could go the rest of their lives never again ta…

Your way of thinking is very common, not wrong, but terrible, why? The world's total energy and CO2 output is simply the addition of each human footprint, all industries, transports are more or less directly related to the human end-consumer. So if everyone decide like you that their own behavior is insignificant, which is true, nothing is changing, and as you know the current trend on environment is not sustainable.…

My point is that we should focus on actually effective changes. Human nature is such that focusing on the individual and the small changes that each person can make will not be effective at the pushing the needle as far as we need it to go. We need effective legislative, technological, and infrastructural changes.

It's good if people reduce their personal carbon footprint, I just think we focus too much on the micro optimizations.

Game theory and human nature are such that we won't ever get where we need to be unless the we have effective top down solutions.

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

#85

Post by missedthecue »

exdsq wrote: 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?

Adaptation is definitely the better idea.

One good reason that it's superior to prevention is that it doesn't suffer from the externality problem. Me reducing my carbon output is a cost to me and a benefit to everyone else. On the other hand, me preparing for climate change is a cost to me but the benefits are also to me.

To effectively prevent climate change, we have to get every country on board with reducing emissions. 1/3 or 1/2 of the countries is good, but won't prevent it. Add in the additional fact that some countries such as Russia benefit from a warming climate and any plans for prevention quickly deteriorate.

There is just no good way to ensure long term (100+ year) global coordination.

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

#86

Post by dheera »

adflux wrote: post #43
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…

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. h…

s/Americans/world/, and also

- Trees are being cut down at record rate for meat production. Meat production is one of the bigger culprits in deforestation (and particularly of the Amazon and other tropical rainforests). If the world were willing to eat less meat (we don't have to be all-out vegan, we just need to eat much less of it) we'd be a lot better off in terms of how much arable land we need to feed everyone instead of feeding a bunch of cows and then feeding everyone

- The world population is much bigger now. All environmental problems are essentially only an issue because we have too many people in the world right now. If we had the population of the 1800's, none of our modern lifestyle habits would be a serious problem.

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

#87

Post by missedthecue »

marcinzm wrote: post #33
exdsq wrote: 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?

Civilization is build around the existing climate and the cost of re-building around a new climate will be very very large. For example, most cities are near bodies of water and rising sea water will threaten them. So we have to either move a lot of cities (to now scarcer land) or build massive walls around them (that need to survive hurricanes in many areas). There's also thing we don't fully control like the ecosys…

"Civilization is build around the existing climate and the cost of re-building around a new climate will be very very large"

But the climate will change over decades and centuries. People move, nation's build and rebuild, and crops change over centuries, climate change or not. Think how different the world and human diet was in 1900 compared to today.

I think a lot of people look at climate change as a war, where bullets start flying and suddenly there are 20 million refugees at your door. Climate change is slow and incremental, at least as currently predicted.

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

#88

Post by missedthecue »

ralusek wrote: post #49

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…

Yes that's something I don't see brought up often. Carbon is an input to photosynthesis.

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

#90

Post by azornathogron »

jk7tarYZAQNpTQa wrote: post #79
IngvarLynn wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can plant a tree but You can't plant a forest. You can't fix a failed state. But You can educate yourself (and others) on what the hell is happening with this world and vote for representative that cares.

> You can plant a tree but You can't plant a forest. Of course you can plant a forest. But there's no need to. If each one of us plant 1 tree per month, we would be planting thousands of forests as a result of our team effort. We need an international Tree Planting Day. And we need to celebrate the fuck out of it.

Many people don't own suitable land on which they could do such a thing (certainly I don't), and if you're talking about going and planting a tree somewhere as part of a larger project run by some organization that has acquired the land for the purpose then... sure, ok, but it'll be far more efficient to pay a bunch of people to work full time planting many trees every day, rather than each one of us individually driving out to a planting site once a month to plant one tree (assuming there's even a site within a day's drive).

I'm all for reforestation projects (and many other projects that could potentially have some kind of impact in reducing the rate atmospheric CO2 levels are rising), but the idea of everyone individually planting trees is not really practical. If you personally are in a situation that makes it feasible for you, then I hope you go for it and I wish you all the best.

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