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When the trees are logged for use as lumber, the carbon is sequestered into structures and new trees are typically planted (or allowed to grow) for future logging, capturing carbon in the meantime.
Good point! I wonder if a 1000 year old tree would gather more or less carbon over it's lifetime than 20 separate 50 year old trees?
I wonder if there are plants/trees that grow fast and capture a lot of CO2, that you could just cut early, bury, plant another and repeat. Maybe a GMO kind of tree that just grows fast? I've read that it's the young trees that capture a lot of CO2. I guess one could imagine large areas dedicated for this kind of operation, but it's really difficult to know if it would really be effective, and those plants could becom…
Trees absorb while growing. Reach "max CO2" At which point you need to cut down the trees and plant the next generation. You somehow store the trees so they will not have any risk of releasing the CO2 again.(like if they burn) or at least that is was Neal Stephenson wrote in his latest book. (fiction is always great for scientific knowledge)
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Oil doesn’t come from huge caverns that we could drop trees into. Oil is often deep underground, soaked into porous rock. So wood would have to be liquified before attempting to pump it into oil wells, and it ruins the well for future use. Wood is valuable and other plant material is similar carbon/kg, so the low-hanging fruit is to take agricultural waste (currently burned or left to rot) and bury it. Hauling all th…
> so the low-hanging fruit is to take agricultural waste (currently burned or left to rot) and bury it. Which would, as in the case with 'cut and bury trees' deplete the soil of non-carbon nutrients. There's a reason farmers leave that waste 'to rot'.
My main problem with planting trees is - you're not planting seeds, but seedlings. These seedlings were already growing elsewhere, you just burned some fuel to transport them to another place. Additionally at least in my region whenever I leave a plot of land unattended for a few years - tree appear on it. If you leave it for more than a decade it becomes a forest. So - it seems the important part is assigning land f…
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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.
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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…
"start seriously considering a little bit of CRISPR" We should consider taking a collective pause to think things through. Our extensive technology use is pushing ecosystems out of balance at planet scale. Perhaps the solution is NOT more technology, with inherently unknown longterm consequences.
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…
Definitely.
But we should probably focus on stopping the major contributors of atmospheric carbon and greenhouse gasses. The idea that planting trees or saving whales will help us now is unrealistic. We'd make a huge dent if we double-timed replacing fossil fuel energy producers with clean energy production, whether geothermal, solar, wind, nuclear, or a little bit of everything, whatever. Then we should replace the entire global bunker oil burning shipping fleet. Then we should figure out how to replace or manufacture concrete cleanly, then glass. We should be using pure ethanol for air travel, how hard could it be to invent a clean airliner? Then we should regulate the meat industry into the ground, and figure out how to do agriculture cleanly without contributing to the problem. All ICE should be phased out within a decade. And we should do all these things with a mind towards global cooperation; if we want to remove a major contributor in a foreign country like China or South Africa or Turkey or Texas, we should be investing there in kind towards clean energy.
Most of all we need to sacrifice, even the damn libertarians. We are energy and travel and consumer hogs. Every new structure should generate its own power, everything else converted into doing so. If everything was off-grid and clean, the petroleum and coal energy industry would vanish. 90% of what we need should be produced locally. We need to stop the clearing of forests and natural ecosystems for more urban sprawl that everyone hates.
It is ridiculous how the elephants in the room are being ignored. If we'd just usher them out, it would be a lot easier on everyone and the planet.
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Regarding nitrogen fixing, my understanding is that 'green manure' & cover crops take from the air, leave in the soil - but microorganisms sounds like it's more in the context of composting, where whatever waste material is 'broken down'. So not 'soil' in the sense of 'it was already there anyway', but rather.. 'in the ground but needing to be made smaller and more available'.
Cover crops have a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen fixing bacteria that they maintain in their roots. When the crop is harvested (and the roots die), the nitrogen that was fixed by the bacteria in the roots remains in the soil. Free living, nitrogen fixing bacteria are free living and have a protein that allows them to fix nitrogen to allow faster growth than the bacteria that need to get their nitrogen through…