121–130 of 332 posts
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And lots of land. Suppose you can plant them in say 4m rows with 4m separation, it would be approx 60K trees per 1km2 or 20million km2 in total. Twice of the size of the US?
I guess some land may become available as permafrost melts?
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Why not do something more useful and sequester the trees in buildings? Timber-framed houses for everyone!
I wonder if the eventual fate of most lumber is to be burned, on the scale of tens of decades (as buildings deteriorate, are remodeled and older bits thrown out). In which case you're just postponing the need to sequester anyway.
Where I live (Kitchener-Waterloo), there are a lot of old factories with heavy timber frames and solid hardwood floors. These factories have since been converted into nice condos and commercial properties, with all of that wood preserved intact. The old timber beams and hardwood floors are actually very nice now.
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That's only 160 trees for every man, woman, and child on Earth... It doesn't seem like a particularly practical solution.
The cost of global warming and the benefits we've reaped from its cause (cheap power) are both a significant fraction of world GDP. Planting 160 trees per person would be cheap, and even easily do-able by an individual in a few weekends (though it's obviously way more efficient to hire specialists to do it en mass). The total suitable land area needed (more than the area of the USA, by my estimate) is much more likel…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's only 160 trees for every man, woman, and child on Earth... It doesn't seem like a particularly practical solution.
How hard is it to plant a tree? Especially if it's young and there is very clear guidance as to which native trees should be planted in which contexts you have available to you locally (account for full size growth and sunlight / water needs). If over one year everyone planted 3 trees per week, and we employed a work force of people to cultivate them further, we would make a huge dent in our catastrophic risk exposur…
Is an 80 years' work in any case.
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nuclear power is significantly more (space-, energy-, ..) efficient and clean than solar farms https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/23...
Except for those two huge externalities that are never priced in and always overlooked by people who say nuclear is 'clean': the waste that will remain toxic for a very long time, and the risk of accidents (slim, but the consequences are really, really, really bad).
We have the tech to deal with nuclear waste, we’ve just never spent the money to productionalize it. Look into “sub-critical nuclear reactors”, which “burn” nuclear waste for even more electricity!
https://www.trilliontreecampaign.org/ https://onetreeplanted.org/ anyone got any other suggestions for organizations to donate to to get trees planted fast ? Because I love trees regardless of whether they going to help save our home planet
Here is one I like: https://www.projectgreenhands.org they have Guinness record for most tree saplings planted in a day, over 28M planted so far.
Planting floating seaweed forests seems like a more feasible thing to do at scale. It might even help with marine ecology.
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All things considered, clearing a forest to help wean us of natural gas and oil is probably a net positive.
nuclear power is significantly more (space-, energy-, ..) efficient and clean than solar farms https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/23...
This makes me wonder - could trees be modified genetically to handle more CO2 in order to make this number lower? Could we, instead of trees, have huge walls made of plants that would consume our CO2?
I believe the Californian Redwoods are very good at this but one of their main disadvantages is they take forever to grow in their native climate. Ironically, they grow much faster on the other side of the world (New Zealand) due to its wetter climate but the wood is not as hard due to this so they aren't useful in construction. Basically the ultimate carbon sync and useless for humans.