281–290 of 332 posts
Planting floating seaweed forests seems like a more feasible thing to do at scale. It might even help with marine ecology.
Eg https://medium.com/invironment/an-army-of-ocean-farmers-on-t...
Also floating solar, with compressed-air energy storage in under-sea airbags (could work on hydro reservoirs too)
Australia has announced a plan to plant a billion more by 2050 as part of its effort to meet the country’s Paris Agreement climate targets.
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This is total non-sense. There are so many deserted areas in the US and all over the planet -where radiance is actually a lot higher- where to install solar panels.
Transmission losses are not negligible, so power generation generally needs to be near people. If the power could be used to create and concentrate ammonia, much of needed generation could be shifted to farms. Of course farms have other uses for sunlight, so wind is a better choice there. Generating ammonia with wind power eliminates the problem of intermittent availability. You only produce ammonia when there is pow…
A 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…
Where do you live where shade trees are a thing?
Although not everyone is onboard. To be sure, there are still drab boxy houses with nothing but lawn that run their sprinklers every morning and the A/C all day. Preferable to spending two hours a year raking up leaves in fall, I'm told.
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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…
> A few other neighbors who were maliciously caring for their lawn I think you meant meticulously, but it works either way. :)
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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...
I don't think planting trees is the biggest issue. Access to water is. More practical solution would be to fill some desert with sea water and grow plankton, kelp etc.
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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…
It is not difficult but doing it without the right machinery requires back-breaking labor. It looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUzeruQT8xE I did it one full weekend and I was totally exhausted. Of course, there exists machines to do that, but then you can't have every person in the world chipping in. But planting is just the first step. If you own a growing forest it needs to be culled periodically, m…
Australia has announced a plan to plant a billion more by 2050 as part of its effort to meet the country’s Paris Agreement climate targets. Laudable, but a tiny fraction of the 1.2 trillion mentioned as offsetting a decade of co2, and over a period of 3 decades.
But, wait... some places are clearing forest for solar farms. Georgetown https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/01/georgetow... Rhode Island https://www.providencejournal.com/news/20190414/proposed-ri-... Prineville Oregon(I dont' know how many trees will be cleared for this, maybe it will be on existing farmland) https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2018/07/massive_so...
Overall, you're over-reaching with the RI claim that we're clearing forest for solar farms, as I've been local for decades and seen no evidence of that.
That's a lot of trees though and it cancels out only a decade. EDIT: I just looked it up: there are roughly 4-10 trillion trees on earth right now.
That is a lot of trees, but a decade’s worth is a lot of emissions