A lot of farm land seems ripe for planting trees. Does anyone know of any organisations who work with farmers in the USA, Europe, Oceania, Asia, Africa or the Americas to help reforest farmland?
Tree planting: Where can I do it and which type is best?
121–130 of 218 posts
Re: Tree planting: Where can I do it and which type is best?
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Placing them in arid caves/mines would lock the carbon up much longer.
So, we could skip the hole drilling part, and set up shop near abandoned mines? That turns the idea from expensive to relatively trivial to do.
If/where suitable mines exist, railways may still exist and might be feasible from a carbon standpoint with the newer diesel locomotives or using an electric locomotive.
That said, you aren't going to make a considerably dent in the CO2 emitted in a given time period doing this. Used in combination with dozens of other things though...
Re: Tree planting: Where can I do it and which type is best?
#123I've been wondering about various carbon sequestration methods myself and am glad to see these topics on HN since it is an opportunity to harvest relevant knowledge from the community. Apologies for tangential topic, but give me a sec and it'll try to tie it back to some other discussions happening here - has anyone here heard of "Cryo Carbon Capture"? https://sesinnovation.com/faq.html This seems to involve feeding…
> This seems to involve feeding the exhaust of a power plant into a process which cools the exhaust to the point where CO2 dry ice (and other pollutants) desublimates out of the exhaust and is then extracted for various industrial/commercial applications. Based on what you said, the dry ice would sublimate and just re-release the carbon into the atmosphere. Or did you have a different place for this carbon to go? If…
The dry ice itself would be stored in well-insulated containers, and cold generated from these containers would be useful for refrigeration with the CO2 that does sublimate out as the containers heat up being feed-stock to enrich greenhouses, with the rest would being recycled into the pyrolysis exhaust, and thus back into the dry ice production.
One of the things I'm curious about is the efficiency of the dry ice production at various CO2 levels and the physical quantities of material that would be expected from such these kinds of processes.
The general idea is that you would be creating a system for accumulating/concentrating carbon as CO2 solid/gas, as well as in biomass, and at the same time creating two large energy differentials that could also be put to work. The major input to this system (assuming the numbers can work) would be photosynthetics and photovoltaics.
Re: Tree planting: Where can I do it and which type is best?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
No easy way to plot this - planting trees to sequester CO2 may or may not have a net positive impact at scale for a variety of reasons: 1) The timescale is very long - a single tree to drive carbon neutrality is MOST optimistically pegged at 40 - 100 years depending on species. With expanding populations planning or guaranteeing execution on that time scale is limited. AKA it's very unlikely that most efforts, unless…
How is using wood as a building material bad? I would think that putting carbon into our walls and patios would be as good a place as any to keep it out of the atmosphere?
The articles I linked expand on this and there are many resources to research this.
Short of cutting the tree down yourself, hauling it yourself, and then processing & building it:
The C02 cost of harvesting, hauling, and processing trees into wood is very costly.
Re: Tree planting: Where can I do it and which type is best?
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
No easy way to plot this - planting trees to sequester CO2 may or may not have a net positive impact at scale for a variety of reasons: 1) The timescale is very long - a single tree to drive carbon neutrality is MOST optimistically pegged at 40 - 100 years depending on species. With expanding populations planning or guaranteeing execution on that time scale is limited. AKA it's very unlikely that most efforts, unless…
Electricity from solar photovoltaic generation has life cycle emissions 90-95% lower than fossil-derived electricity, per median figures in the IPCC's 2014 tabulation of global warming potential of selected electricity sources. Geothermal, concentrated solar power, nuclear power, and wind power have even lower life cycle emissions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emis... Displacing fossil-deri…
I 100% agree. I originally started banging out a comment saying forget the trees, build more nuclear power but didn't want to invite a downvoting brigade, which I effectively walked into anyways :)
Re: Tree planting: Where can I do it and which type is best?
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
So for a one time $600 donation ($1/tree [1]) I can be a carbon neutral person for life? Seems like a bargain. Am I missing something? [1] https://www.nationalforests.org/get-involved/tree-planting-p...
I am not an expert (even an armchair expert), but I have to imagine it couldn't be that simple. When the trees die, they need to either be replaced, or self-replace. That means the land they are planted on needs to be protected. Further, when the trees die, they will release a portion of the sequestered CO2 back into the atmosphere. I wonder what percentage is re-released? Does this imply that we need an ever-growing…
I think the tree survival rate is baked into the numbers, and most of these trees will outlive me anyway, so year-over-year CO2 I think would be fine. The EOL question is discussed in sibling comments and seems to be the crux of the issue. It seems like it mostly hinges on whether permanently increase the % of land that's covered by forest, or whether it reverts to something else once the trees die.
Based on wikipedia ([1], [2]), worldwide tree density is about 750 trees/hectare, with 4B hectares total (30% of land area). We clearly can't add another 7B to offset global emissions, but seems like a good marginal investment as long as there's room to grow that number. [3]
The real question is whether that $1 is enough to permanently "create more forest" Even at 5x the price it seems like a bargain for a lifetime of carbon emissions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest
Re: Tree planting: Where can I do it and which type is best?
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
No easy way to plot this - planting trees to sequester CO2 may or may not have a net positive impact at scale for a variety of reasons: 1) The timescale is very long - a single tree to drive carbon neutrality is MOST optimistically pegged at 40 - 100 years depending on species. With expanding populations planning or guaranteeing execution on that time scale is limited. AKA it's very unlikely that most efforts, unless…
Electricity from solar photovoltaic generation has life cycle emissions 90-95% lower than fossil-derived electricity, per median figures in the IPCC's 2014 tabulation of global warming potential of selected electricity sources. Geothermal, concentrated solar power, nuclear power, and wind power have even lower life cycle emissions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life-cycle_greenhouse-gas_emis... Displacing fossil-deri…
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Re: Tree planting: Where can I do it and which type is best?
#128I really want to start planting trees because this planet needs more trees, it's not a joke or some hippy movement, the consequences are real. I just feel like doing so in the UK is a bureaucratic nightmare. Plus buying trees to plant isn't cheap. I might just start saving up for land and planting trees there if I can.
Can you please shed more light on why planting trees in UK is a bureaucratic nightmare?
Plating trees in your garden is always a recipe for future disputes with your neighbours, as petty as it sounds people get really uppity about keeping your shrubbery out of their view and boundaries. But that also depends where you live, I've seen a lot of trees cut down in my city over the past few years because they are a "nuisance". It's more likely that the city council just gave up on keeping them maintained or gave in on 1 or 2 complaints. Some of these trees were oaks that were most likely hundreds of years old and this is in public parks not close to any properties.
They are also trimmed down which is not as bad but not really helping the problem mentioned. Again these trees were hundreds of years old.
https://i2-prod.leicestermercury.co.uk/incoming/article16420...
Planting trees in public spaces seems like a recipe for the council just taking them down. I'm not sure if it's even allowed by law.
Seeking permission from land owners would be a pain. For one they could just say no, which is fair because it's their land. But how do you go about finding out who they are in the first place?
Re: Tree planting: Where can I do it and which type is best?
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can easily plant 1000 trees to cover some of the people who won't bother, but setting your thermostat 1000 degrees higher in the summer won't do anything more.
This is all well and good, except that you cannot easily plant 1000 trees and ensure they continue to exist in mature form forever. At least, you cannot for most values of "you." Maintaining 1000 mature trees is not a trivial matter.
I wonder about this too - all these charities for planting trees or renting carbon scrubbers or buying carbon offsets, they all have a certain level of capacity after which they'd be sold out. So buying carbon offsets don't really offset all your carbon.
Re: Tree planting: Where can I do it and which type is best?
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is using wood as a building material bad? I would think that putting carbon into our walls and patios would be as good a place as any to keep it out of the atmosphere?
The articles I linked expand on this and there are many resources to research this. Short of cutting the tree down yourself, hauling it yourself, and then processing & building it: The C02 cost of harvesting, hauling, and processing trees into wood is very costly.
Keep in mind that the current alternative to building with wood is to use concrete, which has a tremendous CO2 cost [1].