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MatrioticMuckraker t1_j5upow2 wrote

Still more expensive than trees, but getting closer (and surely faster).

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Mflms t1_j5v8hwb wrote

Definitely faster, depending on location planting and worse yet, replanting can take up to 20 years to be carbon negative.

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lilrabbitfoofoo t1_j5v9ws4 wrote

Actually it's closer to a century for a forest. :(

But, yes, let's do both...and throw in a whole lot of algae farms to boot!

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Yotsubato t1_j5wo773 wrote

And monoculture forests are really crappy for biodiversity and the ecology of the area

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RaffiaWorkBase t1_j5vg6ht wrote

I thought the trees took care of replanting?

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Kioskwar t1_j5vryme wrote

Not since the entwives left

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Nimoy2313 t1_j601qcq wrote

The poor entwives. Makes me sad thinking about it.

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Kioskwar t1_j604r4l wrote

I like to think this theory is true:

https://www.reddit.com/r/FanTheories/comments/20ojbk/hobbits_are_entwives/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

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Nimoy2313 t1_j61kdwy wrote

Interesting. I always thought having them all be dead was a mistake. The elves at least the Silvan or Sindar would have been close friends and allies and maybe even live alongside each other. They would have had a safe place in elven kingdoms.

My theory based on lore is that when they moved east, they moved too close to Mordor. Which was a deadly mistake. If Mordor didn't finish them off then the people (forgot the name, something riders?) who attacked Rohan from the Sea of Ruhn area finished them off on the way to attack the men.

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Mflms t1_j5vh2r9 wrote

I mean replanting in the sense trees are cleared and replanted like in forestry. Or tree are cleared and substitute trees are planted elsewhere.

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danielravennest t1_j5vv6rz wrote

Clearcutting is not good forestry practice. You want to do selective cutting, so enough trees remain to hold the soil in place and allow natural regeneration from the remaining trees. You can plant some new seedlings if you want to alter the species mix.

Then you need to turn the harvested trees into durable wood products, not cheap particleboard crap that end up in a landfill in a few years. You want to store the carbon.

Depending on the soil types and species, you may need to fertilize to maintain forest production. Removing harvested logs removes nutrients.

Source: used to own a tree farm.

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Mflms t1_j5wue45 wrote

>Clearcutting is not good forestry practice. You want to do selective cutting, so enough trees remain to hold the soil in place and allow natural regeneration from the remaining trees. You can plant some new seedlings if you want to alter the species mix.

Agreed, you should tell the Brazilians.

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Nearatree t1_j5xnz6o wrote

Tell them what exactly? The rain forest is getting cut down to make room for soy feed for cattle, not because people desperately need wood.

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danielravennest t1_j5zndge wrote

Alas, I live in the US state of Georgia, so they won't listen. The most I can do is inform them of a fugitive working in the US Capitol under an assumed name.

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stappertheborder t1_j5xqe3j wrote

Tell this to the current foresters please. I studied forestry and couldn't agree more.

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danielravennest t1_j5zo6ce wrote

Which foresters? There are ten million private forest owners in the US, not to mention government land. The best I can do is get together with some local people and protect a part of it.

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Fhotaku t1_j5xyxqp wrote

Is the cheap particle board, thrown into a landfill and buried, not "stored carbon"?

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danielravennest t1_j5zp0o4 wrote

Organic material buried in a landfill tends to decompose. Dry wood, like the frame of a house, can last a long time. But bury it with household trash like food scraps and there is enough water to cause it to break down.

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WilsonPB t1_j5xzf7q wrote

What about methane release? More harmful than CO2.

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sgent t1_j5zmdpc wrote

More harmful in the short term, and at least some landfills have methane capture which is either sold or used for local power.

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FrostyYouCunt t1_j5xihc5 wrote

You can also pump it underground beneath basalt layers and it binds to the basalt as it percolates upwards, forming carbonate rocks.

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HoosierDev t1_j5yox0c wrote

The issue with things like that is they can trigger earth quakes. Pressurized waste water injection wells from fracking water disposals created a series of earthquakes in Oklahoma. Putting new or changing pressures at scale on rocks is going to be a problem

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FrostyYouCunt t1_j61muij wrote

It’s already being done.

I’m not an expert, but I think you’re talking out your ass.

Hydraulic fracturing is different from pumping gas into the ground because liquids are incompressible. Gasses are extremely compressible.

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Nothingtoseeheremmk t1_j5v47oq wrote

Let’s do both

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ExquisiteFacade t1_j5von20 wrote

Poppycosh! We won't do anything until we find the one and only perfect solution that fixes all problems. Doing anything less than perfect is basically worse than doing nothing at all!

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i_am_bromega t1_j5vrs8h wrote

That’s what I hate when people say we shouldn’t invest in the new small modular nuclear reactors, and should rely only on solar/wind + battery storage. We should do both now and decarbonize as much as possible! We have an insane amount of energy production to replace. Let’s attack it from as many angles as we can.

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ukezi t1_j5y0dez wrote

The SMRs are however more costly then solar plus storage. If we build SMRs a lot of capital gets bound there that could have build more solar and storage instead.

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i_am_bromega t1_j5yfbwr wrote

I don’t think the cost of SMRs are settled, but the one thing that I keep hearing is that solar + storage is cheaper than everything. Where are you seeing this because it doesn’t add up. Solar can be cheaper without storage. The battery storage for utility scale systems combined with over building solar to charge the batteries so they are available when the sun doesn’t shine is way more expensive than other sources.

Then you have to look at Lithium mining. Demand is growing and we already will have to produce much more lithium than we do today for the tiny % of EV cars that are produced. Demand is growing and everyone is hoping that new tech will allow us to meet that demand in the coming decades. The problem is that tech is not proven yet. If lithium prices triple due to demand, battery storage is less economical with current tech.

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shanem t1_j5w23hb wrote

Trees aren't a silver bullet though .They're slow on up take and then eventually die and release the carbon.

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Hot_Egg5840 t1_j5wmg8p wrote

Not if you put them underground and compress them to take up less room.

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merlinsbeers t1_j5xhkiz wrote

Or build a house.

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shanem t1_j5yqex4 wrote

You likely can't build enough houses to matter as well it will still decay at some point that's too soon

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shanem t1_j5yq8gp wrote

That doesn't address their slow up take.

Farming then Harvesting the trees in a sustainable and scalable way that doesn't destroy forests seems prohibitive. Do you have a citation otherwise?

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Hot_Egg5840 t1_j5yxpnw wrote

No citation, just a guess that the "fossil fuel" started off as trees that were eventually buried and crushed.

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shanem t1_j607ee2 wrote

It was, but that process took millions of years and compression we likely can't replicate or sustainability

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SexyOldHobo t1_j5vnelc wrote

Trees also exist at the whim of whoever manages that property. A lot can happen in 50 years, you can’t guarantee favorable political winds or rule out accidents.

Just look what Bolsonaro did to the Amazon in a short amount of time. Additionally, as global warming increases the severity of droughts, we should be expecting more forest fires.

Unfortunately I don’t think trees alone will be enough, although we should definitely be doing it anyways

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Sharp_Iodine t1_j5wa0rh wrote

I am still rooting for genetically modified trees that grow fast and capture huge amounts of carbon.

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keestie t1_j5xjtmb wrote

The faster a tree grows, the weaker the wood is, and the more quickly it rots and releases a good amount of that carbon. I doubt there's a genetic hack to change that correlation, tho I might be wrong.

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Skatterbrayne t1_j5xmnqg wrote

The wood wouldn't be allowed to rot, genetically altered or not. It would get stored in some hermetic location and become a permanent carbon sink.

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Sharp_Iodine t1_j5xujys wrote

I was hoping more for carbon fixation in the form of sugars.

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L1ttle_Joe t1_j5vgrls wrote

We still need to offset all the CO2 pumped in the air by burning fossile fuels.

We need to grow trees that capture co2 fast and efficient in a controlled environment (especially if we genetically alter trees to do just that), then coal them, grind that to powder and dump that in the cavities we left in the earth when we removed the fossile fuels.

I have no idea of this is doable but we have to start asap lowering our output and reversing the damage we have done. We screwed up in about 170 years, that are allmost 6 cycles of 30 year old trees.

There is the problem of squares vs cubes, as in we only have square kilometers to grow trees to fill cubic kilometers.

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DearJudge t1_j5xlb3d wrote

There are species of seaweed that can grow up to 2m in a day. Pulling CO2 from the oceans might be a better long term strategy than pulling CO2 from the atmosphere (since oceanic CO2 comes from the atmosphere), since it's more heavily concentrated. Atmospheric CO2 capture sounds great until you realize that putting it on a smokestack is just inherently better, at which point it just becomes CCS.

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