So having read the article summary, then the research paper, then reading the article summary again... it seems that the summary isn't at all an accurate summary of the research paper, but rather a narrow focus on the suboptimal cases where tree growing isn't super effective at sequestering carbon. It sort of completely ignores the cases where they observed enhanced carbon sequestration, increases in soil organic carbon, enhanced soil nitrogen availability, etc.
The emphatic message of the research paper is basically like, "tree growing to sequester carbon is very complicated, there's a lot we don't know, and there are a ton of different outcomes depending on how/where the tree growing is carried out."
One part of the paper I found most interesting was the section on nitrogen fixing microorganisms; they made it seem like the nitrogen fixation occurs via microbes pulling nitrogen from the soil and making it available to the plants. However my understanding is that those nitrogen fixing microbes pull N from the air, not the soil. Even good ol' wikipedia says "The bacteria are filamentous and convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia via the enzyme nitrogenase, a process known as nitrogen fixation." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankia) ... Undoubtedly there are microbes that can mine nitrogen from the soil, but why focus on those when the real bang-for-your-buck nitrogen fixation occurs when pulling nitrogen from the atmosphere.
"...tree growing to sequester carbon is very complicated, there's a lot we don't know, and there are a ton of different outcomes depending on how/where the tree growing is carried out.."
My guess is they say that because that's a much as they can say with full evidence backing. But suspect that most ecologists actually want to say "planting tree is a dumb solution for carbon sequestering or anything, please stop". That's what my ecologists say, certainly.
I mean, consider:
A) Trees are very good at spreading themselves. A tree adapted to it's environment will spread everywhere.
B) You can't get more carbon into an environment than ecosystem naturally sequesters - what it sequesters in long term, what's at the end of forest succession [1]. I'm in the California Sierras now and a lot of areas have a higher density of trees than the long term average and this along with global warming has contributed to the massive summer fires we've had. If anything, what this area's ecology needs is a thinning of the stick-like trees that have grown over the last 100 since all the existing trees were cut down during the Gold Rush. That can happen through fire or through human intervention but since human intervention is costly, fire is what it will be - fires made worse by fire suppression over many years. California's ecology is "fire based", etc.
Regarding nitrogen fixing, my understanding is that 'green manure' & cover crops take from the air, leave in the soil - but microorganisms sounds like it's more in the context of composting, where whatever waste material is 'broken down'. So not 'soil' in the sense of 'it was already there anyway', but rather.. 'in the ground but needing to be made smaller and more available'.
Cover crops have a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen fixing bacteria that they maintain in their roots. When the crop is harvested (and the roots die), the nitrogen that was fixed by the bacteria in the roots remains in the soil.
Free living, nitrogen fixing bacteria are free living and have a protein that allows them to fix nitrogen to allow faster growth than the bacteria that need to get their nitrogen through other processes. They are often anaerobic (or functionally anaerobic) and so flourish in areas that are oxygen poor (like soil and decomposing organic matter) and by fixing the nitrogen present they enable other organisms to live there (their nitrogen fixing allows fungus to become established in the decomposing organic matter - the bacteria themselves aren't doing the decomposition). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paenibacillus_polymyxa is one such species of nitrogen fixing bacteria that forms a biofilm on plant roots, fixes nitrogen, and produces a substance that makes the plant roots more resistant to other pathogens.
Thanks for that explanation. I assume by "free living" you mean they can exist by themselves in soil apart from plant roots (or at least for part of their lifecycle)? I'm more familiar with the ones that are symbiotic with plants, especially the ones for woody plants (Frankia, etc), which I think are largely of a different type than the ones that live on cover crop plants like clover.
Soil and decomposing organic matter aren't necessarily oxygen poor environments, and in ideal conditions they aren't at all. Depending on factors like soil porosity, and rate/frequency of precipitation, there can actually be quite a lot of gas mechanically exchanged between the soil and the atmosphere (water fills up soil pore spaces and pushes out air, then water drains out of soil pore spaces, pulling air back in). Plant roots can respire atmospheric gases into soil as well. Part of the reason why compacted (ie minimal pore space) soil is harder to grow in than the same soil made friable, is because the lack of porosity causes the soil to go anaerobic, which is inhospitable to a lot of beneficial soil microorganisms.
> “Industrial hemp absorbs between 8 to 15 tonnes of CO2 per hectare (3 to 6 tonnes per acre) of cultivation.”
> Comparatively, forests capture 2 to 6 tonnes of carbon per hectare (0.8 to 2.4 tonnes per acre), depending on the region, number of years of growth, type of trees and other factors, Shah said.
> Shah, who studies engineered wood, bamboo, natural fiber composites and hemp [at Cambridge, UK], said hemp “offers an incredible scope to grow a better future” while producing fewer emissions than conventional crops and more usable fibers per hectare than forestry.
> And limestone isn’t the only product microalgae can create: microalgae’s lipids, proteins, sugars and carbohydrates can be used to produce biofuels, food and cosmetics, meaning these microalgae could also be a source of other, more expensive co-products—helping to offset the costs of limestone production.
The efficient thing to do is render them into charcoal, yes.
Biochar is a great soil amendment, and doesn't oxidize over decades or even centuries, depending. Putting it back in the mines is an option, if we ever need to stop rebuilding topsoil, which is itself getting urgent.
Hemp is compostable, though because it's so tough, shredding and waiting for it to compost trades (vertical) space & time for far less energy use than biocharification unless it's waste heat from a different process.
> Biomass sources used in BECCS include agricultural residues & waste, forestry residue & waste, industrial & municipal wastes, and energy crops specifically grown for use as fuel. Current BECCS projects capture CO2 from ethanol bio-refinery plants and municipal solid waste (MSW) recycling center.
> A variety of challenges must be faced to ensure that biomass-based carbon capture is feasible and carbon neutral. Biomass stocks require availability of water and fertilizer inputs, which themselves exist at a nexus of environmental challenges in terms of resource disruption, conflict, and fertilizer runoff.
If you keep taking hemp off a field without leaving some down, you'll probably need fertilizer (see: KNF, JADAM,) and/or soil amendments to be able to rotate something else through; though it's true that hemp grows without fertilizer.
> A second major challenge is logistical: bulky biomass products require transportation to geographical features that enable sequestration. [27]
Composting oxidizes a lot of the carbon. And since you have to replant, harvest and fertilise everyyear it is a lot more intensive than forestry where you do that ever 30 (15-100) years
Ever wonder why ancient ruins are buried under feet of dirt? Plants will grow the ground towards the sky given enough time. We could perform a high carbon sequestration crop rotation to pile up dirt in place rapidly.
> > “Industrial hemp absorbs between 8 to 15 tonnes of CO2 per hectare (3 to 6 tonnes per acre) of cultivation.”
> Comparatively, forests capture 2 to 6 tonnes of carbon per hectare (0.8 to 2.4 tonnes per acre), depending on the region, number of years of growth, type of trees and other factors, Shah said.
Per hectare PER YEAR.
Trees can store much much more carbon per hectare.
Do you know of any papers investigating how kelp or other seaweeds compare? I've heard some biologists informally claim that they would be even more effective because they can grow incredibly fast.
I thought trees were somewhat ideal because the carbon sequestered in them can be used as long-lived lumber. If the kelp sequesters carbon but then it gets released immediately when it decomposes or someone eats it, then it doesn't really solve the problem.
We need to be putting carbon back into the ground where we got it, or at least converting into forms where it lives a long time on the surface (decades or centuries).
> We need to be putting carbon back into the ground where we got it, or at least converting into forms where it lives a long time on the surface (decades or centuries).
Building soil organic matter does result in some amount of carbon remaining in the soil, and has the added benefit of increasing the productivity of the land. I imagine a phased approach where the first effort is to increase soil organic matter on a large scale, and then transition to using some of that improved soil to grow a second phase (maybe, trees, maybe hemp, maybe something else) to capture even more. It seems to me that widespread improvement of soil organic matter is the lower hanging fruit, so to speak.
> I thought trees were somewhat ideal because the carbon sequestered in them can be used as long-lived lumber.
This is why hempcrete is ideal. But hemp, by comparison, doesn't result in a root-bound tree farm for wind break and erosion control; hemp can be left down to return nutrients to the soil or for soil remediation as it's a very absorbent plant (that draws e.g. heavy metals out of soil and into the plant)
> Hemp can be left down to return nutrients to the soil or for soil remediation as it's a very absorbent plant (that draws e.g. heavy metals out of soil and into the plant)
It won't remove heavy metals from the soil if you leave it there. You also can't turn it into a product if you leave it there.
If you sink the kelp in the deep ocean apparently it likely takes quite a while for that carbon to make its way back through the ecosystem to the surface (decades, if not centuries). Don't have a source on that though.
Alternatively, convert kelp to biofuel and biodegradable plastic, reducing need for both CO2-intensive industries
I think the idea with kelp would be to harvest it and use it for soil creation, but again this is from vague memory of an informal conversation with some biologists
Biochar [1] is a potential approach to long term carbon sequestration using waste biomass that has the positive side effect of enriching agriculture soils and producing biofuels, and it does not require special caverns like CCS.
There are potential unknown negative side effects of reducing environmental plant residues from current levels, however, so the choice of feedstock biomass shouldn't be taken lightly. Perhaps it should be made from human waste streams or fast growing grasses from areas that have high regeneration potential.
Then again, agriculture itself has fundamentally modified ecosystems for centuries, so there's not much that is timeless or sacred about the current state of industrial agricultural land. If it's a question of whether the leftover crop matter rots and CO2 is released, or is captured long term in biochar, then its compelling to consider it.
My native plant friend has a rant I've heard twice and I gather he's given countless times.
The logistics of a wetland restoration are that you get a lump of money to get a group to go out and stick plants in the ground, but the problem is that in an intact habitat plants compliment each other. Some won't grow next to tall plants, others will only grow next to tall plants. So a restoration should ideally be a series of planting events over three or four years, but that's either not 'sexy' enough for the financial and public policy people, or doesn't have the sense of closure they're chasing.
Mass tree plantings aren't fundamentally different, and doing mass anything means disturbing the soil. The current wisdom is that there's a point of no return with soil compaction, where if you cross it, there are only two solutions: One is to raise the surface area of the soil to increase the distance, the other is is to wait for the next ice age to scrape it all up and precipitate it back out. Those compaction layers also affect the flow of groundwater, so building upward only solves part of your problem. And it's heavy work, so you're again tromping the ecosystem you're trying to save.
The moral of the story is that if you disturb an area and end up with 90% dead trees, you may have done more harm than good.
I've been doing this to my lawn (central Texas): putting in a turf varietal of the native Texas Buffalo grass. This year, we had a 5ish month drought with a couple months of 105° daytime temps. My Buffalo went dormant; all of my neighbors' Bermuda died: the soil temp went too high for it. Soil temp death is something I've been warning people about for years.
It started raining, again, a couple weeks ago: my lawn is a lush, bright green, native surface (with Butterflies, again!); the rest of the street is gray mush.
Sequestring CO2 is a huge scale problem, and all solutions have significant flaws. Forests require vasts amounts of land, and storage is only assured as long as nobody decides to chop down the forest for other more pressing purposes (looking at you, Brazil). Storing CO2 in oceans (either in the form of "ocean fertilization" or by directly dissolving CO2 in seawater) could have huge and unknown consequences for marine ecosystems. Other solutions such as biochar and enhanced weathering of minerals have limited scalability.
As I see it, Geological CO2 storage (CCS) may be the only large-scale practical way going forward, despite all the bad rap it gets due to its historical association with the fossile fuel industry. After all, the excess C in the system came from the ground, and the ground may be the only place able to re-absorb it without significant environmental consequences.
> storage is only assured as long as nobody decides to chop down the forest for other more pressing purposes
Yes and no; if we're talking about logging for lumber then it's really a question of efficiency. Logging in optimal ways helps you minimize carbon release and maximize wood production long-term. If most of the wood is used in construction the carbon remains captured so long as the building stands or the timber is re-used or eventually buried, i.e. scrap wood from a tear-down or remodel isn't burned or left near enough to the surface to rot.
Setting aside land for logging this way has the benefit of using economic activity to our advantage. There are obviously limits but there is no one magic solution to climate change.
"storage is only assured as long as nobody decides to chop down the forest"
In 2020 "the Lionshead Fire [...] have almost completely engulfed the largest forest dedicated to sequestering carbon dioxide in the state [of Oregon]". Turns out that Nature may also decide to destroy a forest. Biomass comes and goes. As you stated, geostorage is the only solution that makes sense from a first principles perspective.
Wildfire is a natural part of many forest ecosystems, so it is definitely worth factoring that into plans for CO2 capture. Perhaps we can lean more heavily on high carbon capturing forests for construction and furniture again.
>despite all the bad rap it gets due to its historical association with the fossile fuel industry.
It's not really historical as in far in the past.
The relatively recent bill pushed by Trump that gives massive tax credits for CO2 sequestration were a veiled subsidy(or whatever you wish to call it) towards extracting more oil with enhanced oil recovery.
Even if proposed for vicarious motives, the technology as such may still be the right way to go.
From an environmental perspective, CO2 sequestration for EOR (enhanced oil recovery) makes little sense, other than reducing the carbon footprint of production a bit, demonstrating the storage principle and further developing key technology.
What makes more sense is to use geological storage for CO2 captured from industrial processes other than power generation - production of cement, steel and chemicals, in other words processes that would release large amounts of CO2 even if switching 100% to renewable energy.
Also, we need some place to store all that CO2 that purportedly would be captured using DAC (direct air capture) in the future.
I feel like artificial DAC will be a pipedream. Especially when we can't even stop ourselves from emitting now which is ridiculously much easier I don't see us capturing co2 at 412ppm on an almost unfathomable scale.
When people say this they typically mean the land is no longer usable for another purpose. I don't think this is the case with 'forests,' let alone adding more trees to empty spaces in currently populated areas.
> may be the only large-scale practical way going forward
Why must it be "large-scale?" "We could plant trees, in addition to implementing many other common sense measures and improvements collectively." "Yes, but is it web-scale?"
The only reason to do this is to create a large for profit industry driven solely by monopoly granting regulatory bodies as opposed to many individual markets driven by reasonable and non-discriminatory laws and enforcement.
The earth is currently losing 3kg/s hydrogen and 50g/s of helium because that's what is in the upper atmosphere where a molecule can gain sufficient velocity to escape the orbit.
The issue with CO2 is that it is a heavier gas and so takes more energy to escape and is also more likely to fall. Left on its own over a sufficiently long time period, you'll end up with an atmosphere that is mostly rarefied carbon dioxide (see Mars).
Ejecting CO2 from ground level to the upper atmosphere and beyond in the quantities that are talked about when dealing with carbon sequestration (tons - not kilograms or grams) would be very energy intensive and using current technologies (we don't have surplus non-carbon based energy) would mean that we are adding to the total amount of carbon instead of reducing it.
Short answer is no.
CO2 is sitting at about 400ppm( parts per million(. So take a million things, say golf balls, and paint 400 of them red. The rest white. Put them in a container, then search for the red balls. The goal is to get at least ~150 to 200 before you have to look at the next batch. There's not really a quick way to do that.
Green house gas is such a hard problem because it's a dispersed problem. This is where we need to stop removing plant life from the earth, and start seriously considering a little bit of CRISPR to tweak plants to grow fast and absorb as much co2 as possible.
It'd also be great if we started iron seeding the southern ocean to kick that ecosystem into gear as we really need evertying to start sequestering carbon.
"start seriously considering a little bit of CRISPR"
We should consider taking a collective pause to think things through. Our extensive technology use is pushing ecosystems out of balance at planet scale. Perhaps the solution is NOT more technology, with inherently unknown longterm consequences.
It actually is more technology. Our extensive techonology use it not pushing ecosystems out of balance. It's our massive land use changes and requirements for land that are.
Unless we quickly get much better at this at some point not long from now we are going to end up in a situation where such reckless solutions might be the only options we have left.
I don't think this is a great explanation. I could build a machine that would get rid of 200 red balls (out of a million) in 30 minutes. It's a linearly parallelizable problem, so with enough machines, I could make it go as quickly as you'd like.
Maybe we could use a massively scalable set of machinery that uses sunlight to produce energy and sequester carbon. Seems like the machinery could be nature inspired… or maybe just natural. Plants could just be the answer we are all reaching for here.
You want to find an answer? I believe the solution (if any is to be found) is going to be a combination of dozens of different actions. So grow plants and build machines and dump iron in the ocean and cut down on oil use and move people away from coasts around the equator and come up with some type of global basic income and build nuclear reactors and windmills and geothermal and move to electric cars and redesign cities to reduce the need for cars and come up with a plan for colonizing the stars and embrace GMOs to reduced the impact of agriculture and encourage people to eat less meat and so on.
One of my favorite channels on YouTube is Kurzgesagt and they recently (looking at date, well, last year - still recent in the scale of things) had a video on global warming - Can YOU Fix Climate Change? https://youtu.be/yiw6_JakZFc
As you are doing this, you need energy. You either need it from a source that doesn't generate red balls and thus is sufficiently dense energy to be useful, or leave the density of red balls after you've identified 200 to be remove lower than it was before you started.
Trees are enduring. Certain trees take forever to decay.
It's "slow sequestration" but it lasts a long time. Hardwood is very valuable, and growing more valuable, and trees are pretty.
Everything else might sequester the carbon faster, but a tree is "forever."
And you wouldn't just plant trees on that piece of land. You could interplant other sequestration for probably 15 years before it was no longer viable, or raise livestock, whatever.
I found the arguments in the article rather weak. One was that trees die. True enough. But if you plant 100 trees and 10 die within ten years, that's still quite a bit of CO2 converted into O2. It may not scale so well, sure. But as far as I can tell, neither do wind & solar. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make the best use of them.
Yes you need to build ecosystems not just plant trees. Monoculture tree stands are often mostly empty of other life.
You need to plant a variety of native species keeping track of keystone species and year round food production so that your forest supports other life.
Absolutely. Our ways of thinking about the environment are trapped in the past. Where we focus on one variable and miss the importance and resilience that comes from a holistic approach. We need to be encouraging the right ecosystems for the right environment. For example, we need to be encouraging native grassland ecosystems in the great plains, not forests. Native grasses can have root systems 8 feet deep to deal with droughts and erosion, a forest just doesn't make sense there
I think this way of thinking is trapped in the past.
The reality of atmospheric carbon is that we have to get rid of it or face mass extinction. Trying to build some nostalgic idea of a untouched ecosystem in tune with 'nature' is just a feelgood ideology.
We're actually faced with an engineering project - the first planet that our species will terraform.
There is a grove of red pine near where I grew up that was planted row on row about 15 feet apart. These trees are 70+ years old but most of them are only 7-8 inches in diameter. The floor of this grove is just red with pine needles, nothing else can grow and any animals are just passing through.
Whenever I hear about planting trees for "carbon sequestration", I immediately remember walking through that forest and thinking how quiet and dead it felt.
The great simplification of the forest into a "one-commodity machine" was precisely the step that allowed German forestry science to become a rigorous technical and commercial discipline that could be codified and taught. A condition of its rigor was that it severely bracketed, or assumed to be constant, all variables except those bearing directly on the yield of the selected species and on the cost of growing and extracting them. As we shall see with urban planning, revolutionary theory, collectivization, and rural resettlement, a whole world lying "outside the brackets" returned to haunt this technical vision.
In the German case, the negative biological and ultimately commercial consequences of the stripped-down forest became painfully obvious only after the second rotation of conifers had been planted. "It took about one century for them [the negative consequences] to show up clearly. Many of the pure stands grew excellently in the first generation but already showed an amazing retrogression in the second generation. The reason for this is a very complex one and only a simplified explanation can be given.... Then the whole nutrient cycle got out of order and eventually was nearly stopped.... Anyway, the drop of one or two site classes [used for grading the quality of timber] during two or three generations of pure spruce is a well known and frequently observed fact. This represents a production loss of 20 to 30 percent."
A new term, Waldsterben (forest death), entered the German vocabulary to describe the worst cases. An exceptionally complex process involving soil building, nutrient uptake, and symbiotic relations among fungi, insects, mammals, and flora--which were, and still are, not entirely understood--was apparently disrupted, with serious consequences. Most of these consequences can be traced to the radical simplicity of the scientific forest.
A "keystone species" that is important for a lot of ecosystems but on the surface seems contradictory to the goal of carbon sequestration is wild fires. A stand of coniferous trees can block out light year round, limiting all other species of plants from growing underneath, but a fire will make the holes in the canopy that they need to spring up. Likewise, grasslands, which sequester a lot of carbon in their roots/soil, depend on fire to keep out trees and letting prairie plants thrive.
Ecosystems grow, maintain themselves, and can be better at sequestering carbon.
Random example: blue jays plant oak trees. They like acorns, pick them off trees and bury them for later, and forget some. If you have an ecosystem that supports blue jays your forest will expand without fundraisers and government programs.
Ecosystems fix carbon in more active biomass than just tree trunks. If you get soil building ecosystems and ecosystems that put more carbon in living creatures, you have less carbon in the atmosphere. The extra CO2 in the atmosphere is like fertilizer, and you can get life to utilize it more and grab more of it out of the atmosphere by supporting it in small ways so it can go on to support itself.
In a forest full of large trees, the carbon in the non-tree biomass is a rounding error. If you can pack the trees slightly closer and almost everything else now finds the environment too hostile to survive, it's probably a net win from a carbon point of view.
Having huge forests full of trees and barren of much else is great if it allows us to protect other more interesting ecosystems.
And perhaps the best way to create a sustainable ecosystem around the trees is to plant them and see what else develops, rather than try and curate a specific balance of organisms.
You just don't know what ecosystems are. You don't just plant hundreds of trees of the same species and call it an ecosystem, that is just a colony and lacks many characteristics that an ecosystem needs.
Planting monocultures of trees is probably not ideal for plenty of reasons. Maybe there is some argument for re-wilding, allowing land to return to its natural (or as natural as it can given the proliferation of non-native species in the adjacent area).
I recently looked up the difference in CO2 emissions between burning 1kg wood vs 1kg petrol. Surprisingly, the values are relatively close:
Burning 1kg wood releases 1.65 - 1.8 kg of CO2. [0]
Burning 1kg of crude oil releases 3.16 kg of CO2. [1][2]
I would have expected the carbon density of oil to be much higher! To me, this suggests that a very naïve approach of growing trees and storing them in the places where we obtained the oil would be a hypothetically feasible way of significantly reducing the CO2 content in the air. And that is before the wood has been turned into charcoal etc. What am I missing?
Oil doesn’t come from huge caverns that we could drop trees into. Oil is often deep underground, soaked into porous rock. So wood would have to be liquified before attempting to pump it into oil wells, and it ruins the well for future use.
Wood is valuable and other plant material is similar carbon/kg, so the low-hanging fruit is to take agricultural waste (currently burned or left to rot) and bury it. Hauling all that straw around burns a lot of fuel, so it’s not clear how well it scales compared to other approaches.
>I would have expected the carbon density of oil to be much higher!
You're comparing by weight, so density (which is mass/volume) isn't a part of it. 1kg of wood will take up more space than 1kg of oil. So the density is higher but equal weights of 'mostly hydro-carbon' will release equal amounts of CO2.
That’s a very good point. It seems like the densities are relatively similar as well though [0][1]. Not saying they’re the same, but even the fact that they’re in the same order of magnitude was surprising to me. Seems like filling a 1km^3 with wood could offset all CO2 emitted for over 20 years!
which is precisely why I've spent the last 15 years petitioning the government for an all-wood generational ship to take us to the nearest extrasolar goldilocks planet
I don't understand people who like to point out the planting trees is not always as green as people think it is. Planting trees is always good in my book. We can plant trees and do the better thing.
"quitting smoking is not always an effective way of avoiding cancer"
"walking in nature is not always effective in preventing heart attack"
"quitting gambling is not always an effective way of avoiding bankruptcy"
If done incorrectly, it can cause ecological harm and provide little benefit. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, just that it should be done carefully.
Something something about common sense isn't all that common. :) China has had some issues with planting absolutely massive monocultures that end up looking nice on paper but being bad in the long run.
The CCP aren't exactly experts on the environment. They are quite careless about disposing toxic waste in rivers. A friend of mine told me this story recently. While he was working for Apple, he visited a factory and the owner started crying in his presence how Apple was telling them they would be dropped if they didn't stop polluting and he said it was too late, that the land they were on was toxic and Apple dropping them would put hundreds out of work.
> The researchers also warn that the actual planting of trees can have major negative effects. A heath or tundra-like land is a good carbon sink as it is. If machines roll in to prepare the soil for planting, there is a high risk that the carbon bound in the soil will be released into the atmosphere.
X is harmful if you go out of your way to do X in the most harmful way. How insightful! /s
Perennial grasses are a great option for CO2 capture, and one that has been removed across large areas of the Midwest for farms and pastures. But I don't know if it would perform better in poor soil?
'Oceans take up carbon dioxide through photosynthesis by plant-like organisms (phytoplankton), as well as by simple chemistry: carbon dioxide dissolves in water. It reacts with seawater, creating carbonic acid. Carbonic acid releases hydrogen ions, which combine with carbonate in seawater to form bicarbonate, a form of carbon that doesn’t escape the ocean easily'.
We need to be doing more to enhance the performance of the half of the planet that is covered by water and which is the primary source of carbon dioxide processing imo
I wonder if there are plants/trees that grow fast and capture a lot of CO2, that you could just cut early, bury, plant another and repeat.
Maybe a GMO kind of tree that just grows fast? I've read that it's the young trees that capture a lot of CO2.
I guess one could imagine large areas dedicated for this kind of operation, but it's really difficult to know if it would really be effective, and those plants could become invasive.
The best solution is still to stop using cars and airplanes, ban plastics, force companies to make durable and repairable products, degrowing the economy and enforce sobriety everywhere.
I know most americans refuse to listen to de-growth, but they need to change their mind quickly.
When the trees are logged for use as lumber, the carbon is sequestered into structures and new trees are typically planted (or allowed to grow) for future logging, capturing carbon in the meantime.
I recall reading somewhere that trees follow a sigmoid growth pattern, reaching a maturity where they no longer create a whole lot more biomass. I think the 20 separate trees would do better.
Giant Sequoias need forrest fires to reproduce. Their pine cones won't open without sufficient heat. This makes sense, if you consider the dense forests these trees create.
That is less and less true. The intensity of the fires has changed due to the recent history of excessive fire suppression and the resulting fuel accumulation.
My main problem with planting trees is - you're not planting seeds, but seedlings. These seedlings were already growing elsewhere, you just burned some fuel to transport them to another place.
Additionally at least in my region whenever I leave a plot of land unattended for a few years - tree appear on it. If you leave it for more than a decade it becomes a forest.
So - it seems the important part is assigning land for forests and not bothering the trees that will grow there. The tree-planting is optional.
But it was growing already. The bottleneck is land allocated for trees, not the tree-planting procedure (in fact it's automatic once you have some trees in vicinity).
Are you sure? A forest grew on my grandpa's field automatically about 15 years after he stopped using it (mostly as a cow pasture). Nobody planted anything, we just left it be.
In fact if you don't mow a lawn for a few months saplings start appearing :) Forests are perfectly good at spreading by themselves, they evolved for millions of years to do that. If you want more trees you just need to let them grow.
> When it comes to saving the planet, one whale is worth thousands of trees.
> Marine biologists have recently discovered that whales—especially the great whales—play a significant role in capturing carbon from the atmosphere.
> In recent years, scientists have discovered that whales have a multiplier effect of increasing phytoplankton production wherever they go. How? It turns out that whales’ waste products contain exactly the substances—notably iron and nitrogen—phytoplankton need to grow.
In addition to this, it's a belief of mine that we need to make shipping quieter too, so that we don't bother large sea creatures so much.
If there's one use-case for civilian small-scale nuclear reactors in trasport, it's behemoth cargo ships. And yes, I get how complicating a matter that is in the short-term. Here's hoping one day (soon-ish) we can make hugely contained fail-safe reactors that don't act as a high prize for trrrsts and such... .
But we should probably focus on stopping the major contributors of atmospheric carbon and greenhouse gasses. The idea that planting trees or saving whales will help us now is unrealistic. We'd make a huge dent if we double-timed replacing fossil fuel energy producers with clean energy production, whether geothermal, solar, wind, nuclear, or a little bit of everything, whatever. Then we should replace the entire global bunker oil burning shipping fleet. Then we should figure out how to replace or manufacture concrete cleanly, then glass. We should be using pure ethanol for air travel, how hard could it be to invent a clean airliner? Then we should regulate the meat industry into the ground, and figure out how to do agriculture cleanly without contributing to the problem. All ICE should be phased out within a decade. And we should do all these things with a mind towards global cooperation; if we want to remove a major contributor in a foreign country like China or South Africa or Turkey or Texas, we should be investing there in kind towards clean energy.
Most of all we need to sacrifice, even the damn libertarians. We are energy and travel and consumer hogs. Every new structure should generate its own power, everything else converted into doing so. If everything was off-grid and clean, the petroleum and coal energy industry would vanish. 90% of what we need should be produced locally. We need to stop the clearing of forests and natural ecosystems for more urban sprawl that everyone hates.
It is ridiculous how the elephants in the room are being ignored. If we'd just usher them out, it would be a lot easier on everyone and the planet.
Trees absorb while growing.
Reach "max CO2"
At which point you need to cut down the trees
and plant the next generation.
You somehow store the trees so they will not have any
risk of releasing the CO2 again.(like if they burn)
or at least that is was Neal Stephenson wrote in his latest book.
(fiction is always great for scientific knowledge)
Building with the lumber from them is one way of storing them. Even that is not infinite though, though it could buy you a lot more time until renewables and possibly CCS become more viable.
The biosphere is essentially in steady-state on human lifetime scales. Estimates are that 100 gigatons of carbon are released to the atmosphere as CO2 by fungal and animal and bacterial action on plant material, and an equivalent 100 gigatons are taken up by photosynthesis.
There were periods in the geological timeline where photosynthesis >> respiration and the result was massive accumulation of coal and oil deposits, such as the during the Carboniferous era (~350 million years ago).
Of course there are many good reasons to do reforestation - prevention of erosion, a supply of timber, habitat for wildlife, retention of water, etc. Offsetting fossil fuel emissions is not one of those reasons.
[edit: on medium length (10K year) timescales, there is an effect of storage of photosynthesis products, one that's involved in the past ~2 million year ice age cycle (with periods of around 100K years). There are two processes: storage of photosynthetic products in the deep ocean, related to decreased circulation, and storage in permafrost, related to growth of permanent ice, that slowly decrease atmospheric CO2 during the descent into ice ages.]
It's not meaningless, but it's an example of humanity chasing its own tail.
Photosynthesis is not the most efficient process in the equation by far. It is competing against two things; a system that can use lots of oxygen as an oxidizer to release energy, and titanic stockpiles of hydrocarbons waiting to be burned. An animal can either consume plants after they've done their job or consume other animals, and use animated lungs to consume a constant stream of oxygen that can be used to oxidize the energy substrate. Plants can only use photosynthesis, which is much less efficient of an energy transfer than respiration (creating molecules instead of breaking them apart). Because plants are stuck with photosynthesis as a food source, they are limited by its speed. Plants still need oxygen to respirate the food they create for themselves, but they cannot afford lungs and a cardiovascular system to utilize more oxygen. If they could, then they might as well be eating other organisms that already performed the hard work for them.
What I'm saying is that humans, being respiration animals, are always competing with plants, and do even more so when they release carbon from reserves in the earth. The ability of artificially propagated plants to compete against that system is minuscule. It can only compete with surface area, and for humans to be able to even make a dent in atmospheric CO2 by planting trees would mean planting way more trees than is likely worth their own expended energy. In such a scenario, the tables are flipped, and the animals (humans) are competing against the inefficiency of photosynthesis and must use enough energy to compensate. That is neither a proven strategy nor sustainable. Just as body fat can in theory be lost entirely through exercise, it is orders of magnitude more efficient to simply not introduce more energy into the system (i.e. consume less food, and eat food with fewer if any deleterious side effects).
Certainly it gives a perspective: I've read that the amount of fossil fuels we've burned is already greater than the currently living biomass on the whole planet. We've burned almost all of it during the last 100 years.
So yes we can't operate as we do and fix it by on the side planting a few trees.
The point is, plant matter is not geologically sequestrated in the present world. The oceans are oxygenated and circulation is pretty strong, and permafrost is decreasing, not increasing. Hence, any photosynthesized carbon material will be returned to the atmosphere as CO2 relatively quickly.
The only way to sequester carbon is to make something like limestone (Ca/Mg + CO2 + H2O -> (Ca/Mg)CO3) and that requires calcium or magnesium ions. There are some sources of those ions, but not that many. Another option is production of something like carbon fiber material, or even better, blocks of diamond.
Well, the only reason to do that is to combust those products to create energy, right? If you want to bury the oil or coal as a means of carbon sequestration, well I suppose you could do that with wood instead, but if people really want to stablilize atmospheric CO2, the first step is to stop using fossil fuels entirely.
This looks like an article that wanted to give a particular outcome (that trees are not enough) and backed into that out with a study that “proved” it.
However I can’t find a link to the actual study in the article.
Has there ever been a study that linked the increase in CO2 to the increased logging efforts in places around the world?
It's alarming how much ignorance there is about forests being carbon neutral in steady state. The sooner we can get cars and power plants off fossil fuels the better.
If the nitrogen is the factor limiting the growth then there is a simple trick: plant trees able to fix nitrogen. Like plenty of tree species from the Fabaceae (pea) family. Probably using species with low water rquirements.
No matter what the paper says. Growing trees is good for the environment in large. It caputures some carbon and gives shade as a result you are required to run AC less and they can also become homes for birds and ants
Ironically, ice fracking large amounts of stone and filtering atmosphere gas rich water through that is more effective. But you goto expell large amounts of energy to turn the rock "spongy".
We need to plant trees to "ride the wave" of climate change by mitigating ecological collapse and desertification. Carbon sequestration is just gravy; from the estimates I've seen the time scale is, IMO, beyond the scope of our species.
The emphatic message of the research paper is basically like, "tree growing to sequester carbon is very complicated, there's a lot we don't know, and there are a ton of different outcomes depending on how/where the tree growing is carried out."
One part of the paper I found most interesting was the section on nitrogen fixing microorganisms; they made it seem like the nitrogen fixation occurs via microbes pulling nitrogen from the soil and making it available to the plants. However my understanding is that those nitrogen fixing microbes pull N from the air, not the soil. Even good ol' wikipedia says "The bacteria are filamentous and convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia via the enzyme nitrogenase, a process known as nitrogen fixation." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankia) ... Undoubtedly there are microbes that can mine nitrogen from the soil, but why focus on those when the real bang-for-your-buck nitrogen fixation occurs when pulling nitrogen from the atmosphere.
Anyhow, great research paper, crappy summary.