There used to be this series about "guerilla gardening" where people would throw all kinds of seeds in an urban area and weeks later it would be over-run with beautiful flowers. You could do the same thing to plant trees with a drone and even water them. Throw in some IOT sensors and incentives, and you've got yourself a crap coin for tree drones that might actually help the environment.
Planting 1.2T Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions
251–260 of 332 posts
Re: Planting 1.2T Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm fortunate enough to have a pond and some marshy area bordering my house. My neighbors sometimes wondered why I don't trim it up and make it look "nice" right up to the water like some folks do. I like it wild, lots of trees and wildlife. I even let the wildness take a bit more of the yard than when i moved in. A few big trees quickly sprung up, no maintenance (compared to a yard) it looks great wild. Perhaps if o…
> We even get visited by some beautiful red foxes from time to time It's funny how urban adaptation affects perceptions of rarity. I live in fairly-central London and you can hardly set foot outside after dark without tripping over a red fox or three. Out in the countryside they're still pretty wary (with reason, since farmers will shoot them). Are urban foxes a thing in the US too, or is this still a UK phenomenon?
I routinely come across coyotes in my neighborhood. Just this past week, I was out walking my dogs at 11AM and had one emerge from the bushes in the middle of a residential neighborhood. It was being harassed by a Blue Jay. It came within about 5 meters of my dogs and I, while we stood off the to the side to let it get past us and head towards the dry creek bed that they use to navigate the area. They're in our neighborhood for the rabbits.
Re: Planting 1.2T Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For example we have yet to see what can happen if a nuclear plant is sabotaged - that's not FUD That's FUD. What are you proposing is going to happen that would be worse? You can't get a nuclear explosion; the fuel isn't weapons grade. You can get a meltdown and a hydrogen explosion, but that is what happened at Chernobyl. It leaves behind a hot mess and a large cleanup bill but hardly anybody dies. Especially if y…
The soviet response to Chernobyl was in many respects phenomenal. They mobilized hundreds of thousands of people to risk their lives to mitigate it. One effort that stands out as "preventing something much worse" is that there was a risk of a potentially larger secondary explosion from steam buildup. They tunneled under the reactor and injected ~25 tons of liquid nitrogen a day (the tunnel started 6 days after the ex…
> you can absolutely get a nuclear explosion from a reactor, there is some suggestion that Chernobyl might have been a small one in fact (paper)
An explosion that's too weak to even blow apart its own assembly doesn't count.
Re: Planting 1.2T Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have coyotes in many suburban areas.
Chicago at least has many _urban_ coyotes. I see them at least once a month walking my dog & I live in a pretty dense area.
Which neighborhood? I'm downtown and I only ever see rats. I've never seen a coyote anywhere in the metro area.
Re: Planting 1.2T Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions
#255A good way to take part in increasing the number of trees, if you own your own home, is to improve the state of your shade trees. The trees absorb atmospheric carbon while also reducing home temperatures in summer, which in turn reduces the electricity people use for cooling. (And you save money!!) So a shade tree is a particularly effective way to reduce both atmospheric CO2 and electric bills. You might think of sh…
Reminda me of flying into Georgia as part of a trip leg. Much of the surrounding area looked like it was a suburban area overlaid on a forest or what modernn fantasy elves or something as houses were trqnsplanted to modern America - it was so filled with trees - given the heat and history it makes sense and was even oddly beautiful from the sky. Really I think part of the cultural problem with home design environment…
I think that's a side effect of the modern expectation that everyone move cross country on a dime if it makes sense economically. Kinda hard to figure out ecological best practices when families can barely stick around for a generation and people constantly move into areas they're just not familiar or comfortable with.
It takes a long time for best practices to become accepted and normal, and there just isn't the geneological inertia to develop that anymore
Re: Planting 1.2T Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not all of it, that's the point. Some pure carbon (charcoal) is left that makes good soil amendment. That carbon doesn't make it back to the atmosphere unless somehow burned.
But the comment said we could get energy out. Wouldn't we burn it to get energy?
The wood has lots of hydrogen in it that is burned off, leaving most of the carbon.
Re: Planting 1.2T Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions
#257Earlier 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.
It seems incredibly practical to me. I've seen a quote for 40 dollars to plant a thousand trees. That's something like 50 billion to offset a decade of global warming? Doesn't sound so bad. Spread the cost out worldwide, 5 billion a year, split between a few big countries? http://forestandrange.org/southernpine/magement/planting/rea...
> 40 dollars to plant a thousand trees
Presumably these would be some of the cheapest trees to plant. When that space is used up but the first few billion trees, where will the next billion go? How much will that cost?
Re: Planting 1.2T Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems incredibly practical to me. I've seen a quote for 40 dollars to plant a thousand trees. That's something like 50 billion to offset a decade of global warming? Doesn't sound so bad. Spread the cost out worldwide, 5 billion a year, split between a few big countries? http://forestandrange.org/southernpine/magement/planting/rea...
trees are only a co2 buffer, they don't make it dissappear. and trees require water, and the burn up (which puts the c02 back also)
Even if we had to replant the trees every decade, that would only be 5 billion dollars a year, forever. Trivially affordable at "world power" scale.
Lack of water is a much more real blocker, with space not far behind.
Re: Planting 1.2T Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not necessarily. As other posters in this discussion point out, you can for instance create biochar from trees, which can be permanently planted in the ground, thus finally returning in the place of origin the carbon we earlier dug out in the form of oil and natural gas.
but biochar requieres high temperatures, which usually produces co2... The problem with all this CO2 Storage is that we have a perfect storage for co2: Oil. Since we burn this storage, we release more and more of that CO2 without anyway to put it back to storage. The tree idea can maybe slow down the climate change, but it is in no way a solution, merely a short stopgap.
Biochar can be produced (and is) by burning off the hydrogen. This is done by restricting oxygen availability, which the hydrogen preferentially bonds with. When the hydrogen is used up, you are left with charcoal, which powdered and mixed into the soil improves it wonderfully.
Look up "terra nigra", invented in the Amazon basin.
Re: Planting 1.2T Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions
#260The great thing about a million nay-sayers is they tend to drown by each other out. Almost all unintended consequences or downsides will play out, but in a Darwinian sense what remains will be the tractable part. Trillions of plantings will only leave behind hundreds of billions of trees but also millions of jobs and effective enriched lives and for every damaged water table depleted another will be renewed and remediated. The downside of inaction is staying depressed about a solvable problem. The downside of acting is dying on your feet not on your knees. The far more likely upside is succeeding in some places and learning everywhere.
I'm tired of the jeremiad of gloom from Eeyore. Boastful optimism is tiring too, but somewhere in-between is a nice place. Can we have some realism tempered optimism in our kids ability to un-fuck-up the last 100 years? Please?