Never mind the fact it takes trees decades to get to their maximum annual CO2 uptake levels and that species vary wildly in the levels of CO2 they take up...
Planting trees isn't the answer, drastically reducing emissions immediately, drastically reducing construction levels (creating concrete is a huge source of CO2), cessation of paving over square mile after square mile of soil to create roads and housing additions, ceasing the practice of removing all of the top soil from ecologically diverse fields to sell and then throwing Kentucky blue grass sod down and putting up cookie-cutter houses, ceasing coastal fishing that has been damaging kelp and seaweed 'forests' and actively repopulating them via sustainable farming of kelp and seaweed which will drastically increase local marine species populations over time.
Hell, abandoning foolish technologies like cryptocurrency will have IMMEDIATE impact. Bitcoin alone uses an insane amount of electricity. One estimate [1] puts a single bitcoin transaction at using as much electricity as it takes to stream 48,011 hours of YouTube which is nearly 21 days of average U.S. household electricity usage! The network has had an annualized carbon footprint equal to Denmark and an electricity consumption equal to Austria. For imaginary flippin' internet money that is largely used for speculation, ransomware and illicit drug trade!!!
Yes, replacing the forests we've cut down in the past several centuries is imperative but it isn't a solution. You can plant all the trees you want but as long as you're producing nearly 40 gigatons of CO2 a year, you're just making yourself feel good and getting some PR for your company/party/country.
Wouldn't carbon capture be a much better solution than slowing down production in the long run? We can potentially restore a large amount of ecosystem within forests as humanity move towards further urbanization.
I don't want to be too pessimistic, but even if the US and EU become carbon neutral tomorrow, China and India with their 3 billion people will cause an explosion of CO2 emissions as their population enter the middle class with disposable income. China is about to overtake US as the biggest air travel market in 2020, and India is just beginning its mass industrial revolution. No amount of external political pressure will make these countries to halt its GDP machine.
- It takes trees decades to reach optimum uptake levels
- It requires more than just a tree to make a healthy trees. Fungi in the soil, insects, adequate rainfall and all sorts of other biodiversity
- [1] Young trees absorb around 13lbs a year of CO2 (this is going to vary considerably by species) and at a decade old around 48lbs a year
>better solution than slowing down production
It appears in the past 2 decades CO2 emissions are up 25%. In the past decade about 6%. [2]
>I don't want to be too pessimistic, but even if the US and EU become carbon neutral tomorrow,
Where did I say the US and EU. Climate change isn't a single country's problem, or a dozen countries, it's a human problem. Planting trees is being 'too optimistic'
>China is about to overtake US as the biggest air travel market in 2020
Between 1986 and 2012 aviation fuel usage more than DOUBLED going from 2.6 million barrels a day to 5.3 million barrels a day [3], and IIRC from past research for another thread earlier this year. 42 gallons per barrel.
1 gallon of jet fuel will prorduce about 20lbs of CO2 [4]. If we average out the above tree figures we get 30.5 lbs a year per tree. The United States alone used 17.866 billion gallons for air travel in 2018 [5] meaning, if my math is right, 11.71 billion trees are needed just to handle that. Just between 2017 and 2018 the United States alone used half a billion more gallons.
Trees aren't a solution. They are a dollar store bandaid that you've removed 3 times and them tried to press back onto your skin after you got out of the pool.
I am not necessarily advocating on the tree solution, as someone else has pointed out, it's terribly inefficient as a carbon capture method. I am more arguing that it's more effective to say "how can we find a better alternative" than "How can we change the way everyone does thing". General population does not behave in a rational manner and its often short sighted, we can't expect societal self discipline as the main solution against climate change.
In the US and EU we are generally conscious about environment on a personal level (lifestyle etc), but the majority of the growing pollution will come from the upcoming superpowers, and they have very little intention of hindering their economic development with very radical environmental policies.
Take air travel for example, there is absolutely no way China and India will slow down their airline industry's growth. We need to start treating this fact as roadblocks, and must find solutions around it.
Of course we need an "All of the above" strategy. Sequestering 2/3rds of all the carbon we have burnt since the industrial age began will help for sure.
This is a business opportunity. I've calculated my footprint and would be willing to pay for the 1000 trees that offset my footprint. I'd pressure my wife to pay for her 1000 trees. I know that's just the start thou. In a couple of years I would pay for another 1000 trees to offset one of my parents and then hopefully before I die another 1000 trees for the other one. I know I am affluent and able to afford this and people on minimum wage couldn't, I would hope that some of the millionaires and billionaires of the world would pitch in. I know, how wonderfully naive of me.
> Planting trees isn't the answer, drastically reducing emissions immediately, drastically reducing construction levels (creating concrete is a huge source of CO2), cessation of paving over square mile after square mile of soil to create roads and housing additions, ceasing the practice of removing all of the top soil from ecologically diverse fields to sell and then throwing Kentucky blue grass sod down and putting up cookie-cutter houses, ceasing coastal fishing that has been damaging kelp and seaweed 'forests' and actively repopulating them via sustainable farming of kelp and seaweed which will drastically increase local marine species populations over time.
Solutions like these are so insidiously evil, I'm not sure where to start.
We currently have a major housing shortage and homelessness problem in this country. The last thing we need to do is build less housing. We can have a debate about construction practices, but we need more construction (perhaps denser construction) to support our population.
> You can plant all the trees you want but as long as you're producing nearly 40 gigatons of CO2 a year, you're just making yourself feel good and getting some PR for your company/party/country.
Wouldn’t planting enough trees to gobble up 40+1 GT of carbon a year do the trick? I think this is the point of TFA.
China is adding millions of new drivers a year (they've had to institute a lottery to see who gets to apply for a new license because of the demand), they almost have more drivers than the United States does people now. They are also actively constructing new coal power plants and creating insane numbers of new roads. All of these things are increasing their CO2 output and with creation of massive amounts of road, removing the ability of vast swaths of land to sequester CO2. That's just China.
Never mind the fact that trees don't immediately start sucking up their maximum amount of CO2 as saplings, it takes a decade or more for them to start doing that depending on the species.
We can also cut them to make room for new trees. If we don't burn the C in them to CO2, but use them as raw materials (buildings, alternative to plastics, etc.) there is even more potential for carbon capture in this way.
Of course, the long term solution is to grow as many new trees per year as we emit CO2, so there is an upper limit for our CO2 budget, but this should give use time to convert to carbon neutral energy production and consumption without hampering the the GDP growth too much. In fact, it has been estimated that world GDP can actually grow even during the transition, due to, for example, positive effects of improved environment (health improvements lead to productivity improvements and so on).
You're right. We should do a shitload of different things to rectify the situation. Alas actions that have immediate and major impact on the situation requires international cooperation at a previously unprecedented level, and it's therefore unlikely that it's going to happen anytime soon, if ever.
What we can do is to start doing things on an individual- and community-level and hoping that awareness is spread fast and wide enough for others to wake up and join. Incidentally, planting trees and using the finished product for construction is one of the easier things to get started, even if it's not the most effective solution on the board.
It's the only way -- if we're going to wait for things like China stopping to use concrete for gigantic projects, then nothing will happen until it's too late anyway.
Planting trees isn't the answer, drastically reducing emissions immediately, drastically reducing construction levels (creating concrete is a huge source of CO2), cessation of paving over square mile after square mile of soil to create roads and housing additions, ceasing the practice of removing all of the top soil from ecologically diverse fields to sell and then throwing Kentucky blue grass sod down and putting up cookie-cutter houses, ceasing coastal fishing that has been damaging kelp and seaweed 'forests' and actively repopulating them via sustainable farming of kelp and seaweed which will drastically increase local marine species populations over time.
Hell, abandoning foolish technologies like cryptocurrency will have IMMEDIATE impact. Bitcoin alone uses an insane amount of electricity. One estimate [1] puts a single bitcoin transaction at using as much electricity as it takes to stream 48,011 hours of YouTube which is nearly 21 days of average U.S. household electricity usage! The network has had an annualized carbon footprint equal to Denmark and an electricity consumption equal to Austria. For imaginary flippin' internet money that is largely used for speculation, ransomware and illicit drug trade!!!
Yes, replacing the forests we've cut down in the past several centuries is imperative but it isn't a solution. You can plant all the trees you want but as long as you're producing nearly 40 gigatons of CO2 a year, you're just making yourself feel good and getting some PR for your company/party/country.
[1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption