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DocWsky t1_j5xoj87 wrote

And yet trees are nearly free.

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-ragingpotato- t1_j5yh0kr wrote

No matter what we do we're always going to be taking up a crapton of land that used to be trees. If its possible to make a machine equivalent to a crapton of trees but that fits in a normal sized building it would go a great length towards mitigating the impacts of our permanent scars on the landscape.

Its worth exploring.

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publicdefecation t1_j5yqbf9 wrote

Practically speaking trees won't grow fast enough to offset our emissions. We would need to plant 200 billion trees to stop climate change.

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2dozen22s t1_j5zamh4 wrote

Bamboo grows ridiculously fast and might be better suited tbh Could grow that, dry it, mix it with sand, and fill in old open pit mines.

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hearnia_2k t1_j60jips wrote

You'd have to be careful though, as cutting it and shipping it to the mines, placing it, etc would have pretty high emissions potentially.

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2dozen22s t1_j60yllo wrote

Drying the ground bamboo in a high temp greenhouse would reduce the weight substantially. You'd basically be shipping fuel around. Bamboo is already 50% carbon.

Then mixing can be done on-site and gathered locally to reduce carried weight further.

Grinding can be solar powered, green house is sunlight, cutting can be electric powertools, etc.

Emission wise its probably very sound, but maintaining and replanting bamboo which can grow like, 1m a day, might be the hard part in terms of scaling things up.

(Edit: a 100m2 area with 25% area utilization should yield 8750kg of bamboo a day. Or 4.375 tons of carbon.

Idk how accurate those numbers are, and that's a best guess using online resources)

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Fivethenoname t1_j61npqq wrote

But they do offset emissions/contribute to drawdown and there are many other functions that forest and tree cover provide to maintain critical ecosystem functions. Idiots looking for a panacea to ecosystem service degradation and torpedoing good ideas for not being such a panacea are literally holding us back from taking steps in the correct direction. You're expertise in this field must be minimal if you are criticizing planting trees. I understand that criticizing other people is one way to get a seat at the table if you don't have any ideas of your own, but criticism for criticism sake is unwanted.

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publicdefecation t1_j61p722 wrote

I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. I'm not against planting trees. I think they're important.

Just like you, I don't think there's one solution to fixing climate change which means we can't dismiss technological solutions by saying "Why don't we just plant trees?"

We have to plant trees AND do everything else possible to reduce emissions and sequester carbon.

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sg3niner t1_j5yevkd wrote

You could plant a billion trees tomorrow and they'd have a negligible impact on the amount of carbon that we need to worry about.

I'm all for planting more, but we need multiple solutions, and some of those are expensive.

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xmnstr t1_j5ztrkz wrote

The issue with trees isn't planting them, it's land to plant them on. And, of course, preventing people from cutting them down.

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quarterque t1_j5ysnrp wrote

Free and unaccountable. Most* tree planting programs are like drugs off the web. You never know if they’ll just make things worse.

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Dorocche t1_j60528t wrote

To be clear, that article is about one single company who simply doesn't plant the trees, and is paid by big corporations so that those corporations can pretend they're carbon neutral.

It's not a reason that you, personally, should feel bad about donating to a tree charity, because that tree charity was probably not Verra. It means that our system for incentivizing corporations to be carbon neutral via planting trees does not work at all.

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StoneTwin t1_j5xup7i wrote

But they want to cut them down and sell them once they are big enough to really suck up a good dose of carbon each year.

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Standard-Prize-8928 t1_j5y4cq9 wrote

I thought juvenile trees were the best for carbon intake

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Manilikefungi t1_j5ye8ir wrote

They are the best purely for carbon capture rates since grow quik

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Illustrious_Crab1060 t1_j606ve2 wrote

... and also traps carbon in buildings instead of decaying and releasing all the C02 back

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DocWsky t1_j5xusaz wrote

Painfully true

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Dorocche t1_j6042xo wrote

It's not true at all lol, that's not how trees or carbon work.

Trees don't passively remove carbon dioxide from the air. Trees remove carbon dioxide by growing and turning that carbon into bark, stems, leaves, etc. And they release carbon when they burn or decompose.

Planting a tree sucks up exactly as much carbon as is the size of that tree, and no more once it stops growing. Replacing it with a baby tree will suck up way more carbon, and if we turn it into chairs instead of burning it then those tons of carbon are gone from the atmosphere for the foreseeable future.

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Aezyre t1_j5yls4g wrote

Let them do that, then just stop recycling any cardboard or paper and instead pump it into old oil wells.

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Kradget t1_j6071ow wrote

True, but we're going to need to approach this from multiple angles. There's not one thing we can practically do that will just resolve the problem in a human-ish timescale.

So, yes trees, grassland, and wetlands. But also yes renewable energy, higher efficiency transportation, carbon capture, regulation, and improved agricultural practices.

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Tobias_Atwood t1_j60qene wrote

Planting them has a labor and material cost and they won't start making headway on real carbon deficits for many years.

Meanwhile this technology continues to be experimented with and improved upon. It's only going to get easier and cheaper as we work on it harder and harder. Combine it with reducing our carbon emissions and we'll make some good headway on not burning the world to a fucking crisp.

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