71–80 of 332 posts
For reference, there’s about 500 trillion square meters of land area on the planet; so even if trees are crowded together one per square meter, this is talking about a 500th of that. But perhaps we can find a way to make the Sahara into a forest? That’s about what it would take.
This is a great illustration of how there is no hope of sequestration as a solution. We're unlikely to plant even just a billion trees.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, but if the point of planting the trees is carbon amelioration, than carbon neutral would somewhat defeat the point. I've seen this argument before, and I think the real place it falls down is that there just isn't that much space. For mature growth forest, you have something like 40-ish big hardwood trees per acre [1]. Those are, to my understanding, the only ones that are really relevant because they make up…
That only holds true if you assume that every tree ever planted burns down within ten years. Many, possibly even most, of them will be harvested for wood, becoming a permanent carbon sink, or will be left alone to grow to maturity.
At any rate, if that's what the research is getting at, they probably need to title it differently, or explain early on that merely planting the trees is a necessary but not sufficient condition to achieve the wins they envision.
Not to be too snarky, but my first reaction to the headline was, “ only 1.2 trillion? What are we waiting for!” More seriously, though: the article claims there’s “ample acreage” for such an endeavor but I didn’t see where exactly they’re referring to. Are we supposed to imagine these are sprinkled here and there around the earth, and that there’s plenty of space just waiting for a tree to be planted, or is this some…
It doesn't seem like a particularly practical solution.
In my mind a solution needs to be implementable in a meaningful way by single actors. I'm not sure about the state of the art of direct air carbon capture, but for me it seems like a much easier solution. "Just" push X billion/trillion USD into an enormous plant somewhere in a dessert with access to solar/nuclear power and suck it up.
Maybe negative emission solutions will turn out to be not feasible anyways, and the best we can do is to focus our efforts on reaching close to zero new emissions.
Go through every forest on earth and cut down every third tree and sequester it so it won’t decompose and release the carbon. Then the forest rengerates itself and pulls all that carbon out of the atmosphere.
Or an idea for a billionaire. Buy out the entire worlds annual output of lumber and sequester it.
How about creating giant floating tracts of mangrove trees. They’re naturally able to live in saltwater.
Maybe make the islands out of waste plastic.
For reference, there’s about 500 trillion square meters of land area on the planet; so even if trees are crowded together one per square meter, this is talking about a 500th of that. But perhaps we can find a way to make the Sahara into a forest? That’s about what it would take.
- Plant heliostat molten salt reactors in desert coastal areas (the concentrated solar kind)
- Use generated heat to desalinate water
- Use desalinated water to provide irrigation
- Plant (potentially GMO'ed) bootstrapping organisms to create a soil (greening)
- Plant trees
- Rinse repeat.