Planting trees not always an effective way of binding carbon dioxide • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by quixoticelixer- » Mon, Sep 12, 2022, 8:31 PM UTC

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #128

i5heu wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ever wonder why ancient ruins are buried under feet of dirt? Plants will grow the ground towards the sky given enough time. We could perform a high carbon sequestration crop rotation to pile up dirt in place rapidly.

Dirt is not just made from organic matter.

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

#152

Post by ajuc » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 5:02 AM UTC

quixoticelixer- wrote: post #149

ajuc wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it was growing already. The bottleneck is land allocated for trees, not the tree-planting procedure (in fact it's automatic once you have some trees in vicinity).

No, you get trees for planting from a nursery, not from the wild. And tree planting is not "automatic"

Are you sure? A forest grew on my grandpa's field automatically about 15 years after he stopped using it (mostly as a cow pasture). Nobody planted anything, we just left it be.

In 2008 this was a grass field, we made campfires there. Now it's a forest: https://goo.gl/maps/rSeprtz7orYAwVPY8

In fact if you don't mow a lawn for a few months saplings start appearing :) Forests are perfectly good at spreading by themselves, they evolved for millions of years to do that. If you want more trees you just need to let them grow.

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

#153

Post by pastacacioepepe » Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 7:59 PM UTC

wikfwikf wrote: post #134

pastacacioepepe wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't the goal just to take carbon out of the atmosphere? I disagree. We also want to avoid ecological cascade effects in our ecosystems.

Having huge forests full of trees and barren of much else is great if it allows us to protect other more interesting ecosystems. And perhaps the best way to create a sustainable ecosystem around the trees is to plant them and see what else develops, rather than try and curate a specific balance of organisms.

You just don't know what ecosystems are. You don't just plant hundreds of trees of the same species and call it an ecosystem, that is just a colony and lacks many characteristics that an ecosystem needs.