Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

gu.se

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 153 posts

Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

#51

Post by Klapaucius »

modo_mario wrote: post #27
Klapaucius wrote: post #16

Sequestring CO2 is a huge scale problem, and all solutions have significant flaws. Forests require vasts amounts of land, and storage is only assured as long as nobody decides to chop down the forest for other more pressing purposes (looking at you, Brazil). Storing CO2 in oceans (either in the form of "ocean fertilization" or by directly dissolving CO2 in seawater) could have huge and unknown consequences for marine…

>despite all the bad rap it gets due to its historical association with the fossile fuel industry. It's not really historical as in far in the past. The relatively recent bill pushed by Trump that gives massive tax credits for CO2 sequestration were a veiled subsidy(or whatever you wish to call it) towards extracting more oil with enhanced oil recovery.

Even if proposed for vicarious motives, the technology as such may still be the right way to go.

From an environmental perspective, CO2 sequestration for EOR (enhanced oil recovery) makes little sense, other than reducing the carbon footprint of production a bit, demonstrating the storage principle and further developing key technology.

What makes more sense is to use geological storage for CO2 captured from industrial processes other than power generation - production of cement, steel and chemicals, in other words processes that would release large amounts of CO2 even if switching 100% to renewable energy.

Also, we need some place to store all that CO2 that purportedly would be captured using DAC (direct air capture) in the future.

Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

#52

Post by detritus »

thangalin wrote: post #26
_8j50 wrote: post #3

Why isn't there more focus on phytoplankton since it produces more O2? Maybe have a device that seeds/catalyzes their growth on every boat?

Stop killing whales. https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2019/12/nat... > When it comes to saving the planet, one whale is worth thousands of trees. > Marine biologists have recently discovered that whales—especially the great whales—play a significant role in capturing carbon from the atmosphere. > In recent years, scientists have discovered that whales have a multiplier effect of increasing phytoplankt…

In addition to this, it's a belief of mine that we need to make shipping quieter too, so that we don't bother large sea creatures so much.

If there's one use-case for civilian small-scale nuclear reactors in trasport, it's behemoth cargo ships. And yes, I get how complicating a matter that is in the short-term. Here's hoping one day (soon-ish) we can make hugely contained fail-safe reactors that don't act as a high prize for trrrsts and such... .

Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

#53

Post by photochemsyn »

Gravityloss wrote: post #32
photochemsyn wrote: post #30

The biosphere is essentially in steady-state on human lifetime scales. Estimates are that 100 gigatons of carbon are released to the atmosphere as CO2 by fungal and animal and bacterial action on plant material, and an equivalent 100 gigatons are taken up by photosynthesis. There were periods in the geological timeline where photosynthesis >> respiration and the result was massive accumulation of coal and oil deposit…

While it's a good point that plant sequestration of CO2 is slow compared to digging up coal, oil or methane and burning it, it's not meaningless.

The point is, plant matter is not geologically sequestrated in the present world. The oceans are oxygenated and circulation is pretty strong, and permafrost is decreasing, not increasing. Hence, any photosynthesized carbon material will be returned to the atmosphere as CO2 relatively quickly.

The only way to sequester carbon is to make something like limestone (Ca/Mg + CO2 + H2O -> (Ca/Mg)CO3) and that requires calcium or magnesium ions. There are some sources of those ions, but not that many. Another option is production of something like carbon fiber material, or even better, blocks of diamond.

Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

#54

Post by foobarian »

remote_phone wrote: post #9

This looks like an article that wanted to give a particular outcome (that trees are not enough) and backed into that out with a study that “proved” it. However I can’t find a link to the actual study in the article. Has there ever been a study that linked the increase in CO2 to the increased logging efforts in places around the world?

It's alarming how much ignorance there is about forests being carbon neutral in steady state. The sooner we can get cars and power plants off fossil fuels the better.

Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

#55

Post by soperj »

baryphonic wrote: post #45
tluyben2 wrote: post #31

‘Not always’. Sure, trees are enduring, nice to look at, make things cooler and might help with carbon dioxide. Let’s plant them anyway.

I found the arguments in the article rather weak. One was that trees die. True enough. But if you plant 100 trees and 10 die within ten years, that's still quite a bit of CO2 converted into O2. It may not scale so well, sure. But as far as I can tell, neither do wind & solar. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make the best use of them.

Nearly all the trees we plant are planted to cut down eventually.

Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

#57

Post by Floegipoky »

baryphonic wrote: post #45
tluyben2 wrote: post #31

‘Not always’. Sure, trees are enduring, nice to look at, make things cooler and might help with carbon dioxide. Let’s plant them anyway.

I found the arguments in the article rather weak. One was that trees die. True enough. But if you plant 100 trees and 10 die within ten years, that's still quite a bit of CO2 converted into O2. It may not scale so well, sure. But as far as I can tell, neither do wind & solar. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make the best use of them.

And for those that die, something else will grow. I found myself thinking "they're literally missing the forest for the trees".

Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

#58

Post by tlb »

i5heu wrote: post #13
westurner wrote: post #4

"Hemp twice as effective at capturing carbon as trees, UK researcher says" (2021) https://hempindustrydaily.com/hemp-twice-as-effective-at-cap... : > “Industrial hemp absorbs between 8 to 15 tonnes of CO2 per hectare (3 to 6 tonnes per acre) of cultivation.” > Comparatively, forests capture 2 to 6 tonnes of carbon per hectare (0.8 to 2.4 tonnes per acre), depending on the region, number of years of growth, type of tr…

tonnes of carbon per hectare is not relevant. What you need is tonnes of carbon per hectare per year. We don't have enough space to let these plants be there, we need to convert them into coal and throw it back into the mines.

The figures given are per-year. The article is just sloppy with units.

Re: Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide

#60

Post by imoverclocked »

criddell wrote: post #33
gonzo41 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short answer is no. CO2 is sitting at about 400ppm( parts per million(. So take a million things, say golf balls, and paint 400 of them red. The rest white. Put them in a container, then search for the red balls. The goal is to get at least ~150 to 200 before you have to look at the next batch. There's not really a quick way to do that. Green house gas is such a hard problem because it's a dispersed problem. This is…

I don't think this is a great explanation. I could build a machine that would get rid of 200 red balls (out of a million) in 30 minutes. It's a linearly parallelizable problem, so with enough machines, I could make it go as quickly as you'd like.

Maybe we could use a massively scalable set of machinery that uses sunlight to produce energy and sequester carbon. Seems like the machinery could be nature inspired… or maybe just natural. Plants could just be the answer we are all reaching for here.
Post reply on HN