It's not either one solution or another, or what is the best solution, there is not one single solution for solving climate change, it's not that simple.
This is a thought fallacy that leads us nowhere, it's a complex problem with many causes and lots of moving parts.
We can't just plant a bunch of trees and keep living like before, growing to 10 billions and beyond.
We need to plant a bunch of trees AND reduce traveling AND stop eating so much meat, AND stop fishing so much, AND stop creating to much waste, AND keep the world population under control, etc. It's not OR, its AND.
Thinking "Oh well someone is just going to plant a bunch of trees and fix it, I'll just back to eating my cheeseburger" is not a productive message at this point in time, when so much is still to be done to convince the general public that lifestyle changes are urgently needed.
If I play devils advocate here for a moment: Why is it that everybody is so interested in “lifestyle” changes, and so uninterested in things like OP or Project Vesta [1]? I sometimes get the feeling that some people just see this whole climate thing as a good opportunity to force their (pre-existing) values/virtues on others...
Exactly. People (not necessarily the parent comment) love to focus on the lifestyle choices because they allow them to paint those advocating change as hypocrites, and so dismiss the entire message.
The vast majority (~80%, [1]) of the greenhouse gas emissions do not come from "lifestyle" choices such as eating meat, but from transportation, industrial use and electrical production. These require changes at the policy level that individuals can't create by themselves but only by calling for action by legislators. Planting more trees on a national scale can absolutely be one of the many policy changes that we call for to help balance the scales, because we will never get those three sectors down to zero.
As for the specific question of meat, it would undoubtably help for everyone to eat less meat, but in fact if every single person in the US went vegetarian, it's estimated that it would only reduce the US's CO2 output by about 5%. [2]
I wouldn't say people are uninterested, I would say we need to do more than hope for "silver bullet" technology solutions to address the problem after the fact. Especially when it involves geoengineering on a scale orders of magnitude larger than have ever been attempted, and doesn't address the reason we'd even geoengineer.
Humans do not have a great track record of predicting the secondary effects of their actions on the earth.
Meanwhile our society is incredibly wasteful of energy, and has a ton of low hanging fruit via reduction and efficiencies. The less emissions we produce now, the less we have to clean up with solutions like the linked above.
I'll also repeat this again because it's a common accusation leveled on HN. Most people interested in addressing environmental issues are not doing it to "virtue signal" or impose arbitrary values but because they want a healthier environment and to make the world sustainable for future generations.
I think it’s because most current futuretech solutions are pipe dreams at best. The scale of the problem is such that we need to learn how to essentially execute a planned terraform of a planet in the near term (as opposed to the current unintentional terraforming), using tech we don’t yet even have scribbled on a the back of a napkin to create massive effects on the planet using processes we don’t fully understand. It’s the equivalent of saying “to fix this we need to invent warp drive and genetically bioengineer human bodies to withstand prolonged periods of 100G acceleration and figure out how to extend human lifetimes to thousands of years, and we need to get it done in the next century.” It’s a fun fairy tale.
The alternative, lifestyle changes, is better understood and the effects of which are easily predicted, but is only effective if done in a unified manner at a scale that current human nature will not allow. We can’t even figure out how to cure hunger and poverty in a world of plenty, good luck getting everyone to make the dramatic changes to even get us to stabilize at mostly broken planet.
The real answer is that beyond a deus ex machina there is no answer and that the inevitable easily and indisputably modeled result of the current situation is dramatic near-term biosphere changes, ecosystems collapse and likely the end of most advanced human civilization within a couple centuries, conservatively.
It must be a weird time to be a climate scientists, with the best computer models that have ever existed essentially returning a result that ends the world within a half dozen generations.
1. They are not lifestyle changes, they are fundamental reductions in carbon footprint.
2. They are proven to reduce your impact at a level that most consider manageable
3. The other poster said AND - eat less meat AND get involved in other mechanisms for change
I dont have any interest in virtue or signalling: i just want people to impact the planet less so we dont trigger any unwanted changes. Is that a valid enough reason to ask everyone to try their best or do we keep having to have philosophical arguments about how individual free choice (shaped often by the corporations themselves!) trumps any imperative to collectively sacrifice?
Or that it results in a more sustainable world? I support a multitude of solutions but it’s also clear to me that unless we change our lifestyle to match the very long term future sustainability every solution is going to breakdown - just a matter of when.
For example, we can plant as many trees as we want but if population grows even at the current rate we are gonna need another planet. So what’s wrong in saying we need to slow down our own expansion. Same for industrial scale agriculture.
What I always find puzzling in all these conversations is the attachment people have to their lifestyle which probably evolved to where it is only in the last five decades - at most. Meat was never this readily available in history. Neither was energy. These are incredibly recent in our evolutionary period and yet they wreak havoc like nothing else.
Yep. The same reason they ignore Gen-4 nuclear, and sucking carbon out of the air. Politicians frankly don't want to solve global warming; they want more money and power. They want to pass laws telling the masses what they can and can't do (see how after the GND was published, AOC was spotted with a friend eating cheeseburgers), and they want an excuse to raise taxes on anybody they can get away with taxing more.
But if you actually have something that will reduce emissions? Well that's a threat to their plan to get more money and power.
Many climate control projects have hard-to-judge side effects and are currently either hard/expensive or impossible. It is cheaper to not burn the carbon in the first place.
Carbon capture might be easier to control as a single entity (a definite benefit), but there is no money in it as of now, so research is slow.
On the other hand, all current IPCC scenarios require both lifestyle changes and a staggering amount of carbon capture, starting from 2030 peaking with up to 20 Gt/CO2/year in 2050 for the worst scenario (which we are very much on track for) [0]. (Current emissions are around 40 Gt/CO2/year. [1])
Nobody knows how, and especially not how without side effects. That does not mean we should not try - we need to - but that means we have to pull all the stops, now.
Look at those plots, this is a desperate situation, and the IPCC reports are actually optimistic. [2]/[3]
I think it's because 'lifestyle' changes slow or reverse the origin deleterious behavior that is (perceived to be) causing the problem, while dumping 7 cubic miles of foreign material on beaches seems like a radical approach with a high likelihood of unintended ecological consequences.
If I understand correctly, ecoforestry, biochar, reducing carbon emissions 50% each year, renewable energy sources, “green sand” beaches, etc together still don’t revert the damage already done in time to prevent a major ecological crisis.
There is an interesting angle to geoengineering. Once you start applying it (assuming we master the technology) you get into the argument of what is the "right" temperature for the Earth. Some countries (Russia) might prefer it a little warmer, some others (U.S., India) a little colder. Do we really want to get into a new Cold War?
Some geoengineering solutions don't seem to be all that expensive (e.g. spraying sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere), and if things get really bad in some particularly hot places, somebody (India?) may decide to apply them unilaterally. Will we be happy about that?
Read about TWR (Traveling Wave Reactor) designed by these guys, financed by Bill Gates. It runs on depleted uranium, not enriched uranium. It's amazing how it works.
There's so many solutions being developed like this on so many fronts. But we're not doing any of them. I don't understand it. Government is not even being asked to finance this, but yet they won't approve it because of politics.
For the example you shared, the paint is still fresh on project Vesta. Mining, crushing, transporting will have a non-neutral carbon impact which is not taken into account into their model afaik.
Overall our atmospheric models are not yet mature, which make carbon-trapping mechanisms from the atmostphere hard to gauge. Easier if we reduce or trap carbon emissions before it is spread into the atmosphere.
Please also consider we will eventually run out of fuel/oil/gas/coal; carbon dioxide savings is the long term strategy.
> Why is it that everybody is so interested in “lifestyle” changes, and so uninterested in things like OP or Project Vesta [1]?
Project Vesta hasn't proved efficacy or ability to scale. It's reminiscent of the "solar roadways" hype from earlier this decade.
Most greenhouse gas emissions come from industry and transportation of goods.
It's less politically expedient to blame entrenched powers for their hand in climate change than it is to blame Joe Nobody for driving instead of walking to work.
I absolutely agree with this. I (obviously?) want to see solutions to climate issues, but I also very much enjoy taking several plane trips per year, both for vacation and to visit family. I also enjoy the taste of meat.
So yes, I am a part of the problem. But we've gotten into this mess with technology; why can't we use technology to get out of it? Part of the problem is that, in taking part in these activities that increase our carbon footprint, we're not actually paying for the true impact of our actions. I'd be fine with paying more for my plane tickets if I knew that extra money was going toward carbon capture, or other technologies that are in development to reduce the impact of these -- by now very common -- activities.
I'm reminded of the checkbox memes; "You are attempting to apply an X solution to Y. Your idea will not work because:" -- one of my favorite checkboxes on those, was always "You are attempting to change the behavior of everyone, which does not work". I feel like this applies to most climate issues.
Implementing worldwide population controls is a non-starter. Implementing restrictions on air travel is a non-starter. Outlawing meat consumption is a non-starter. I love that companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are trying to come up with more sustainable meat substitutes. I think they have a ways to go, but I'd be happy to switch over to them at some point. That's a great example of using technology to reduce carbon footprint, while still allowing people to have the same (or nearly the same) experiences. Can't we do more of this?
At the end of the day, people are going to do what they're going to do, as long as they can (financially) afford it. Cultural/societal change on this level, in the time frame necessary, just isn't realistic.
That's just another oversimplification. So we can just keep overexploiting the natural resources of the planet, and solve everything by further environmental manipulation, like by creating a huge amount of green-sand beaches.
We have no idea how that further manipulation would affect the environment, in a thousand unforeseen ways that would only be apparent decades down the line.
Half of the earth habitable area is used for animal agriculture, so that should be the first part being reforested, meaning less cattle feed, meaning less meat.
So we cover the surface of the earth with crop fields, plant a bunch of trees on the other and everything is going to be all right? Of course not, it's just not that simple.
Scientists simply cannot predict how the ecosystem would respond, the models are too simple for something so complex as the Earth.
We need to stop using so many resources, continuing to increase the rate of consumption while waiting for some miracle technical silver bullet solution is just suicidal as a species.
Coal is such a huge contributor to the problem that you can almost say that climate change is a coal problem. Not quite, but you're not wrong. I am deeply puzzled by anyone discussing climate change who doesn't bring up coal first, yet I see tons of discussion where coal is not even mentioned.
Maybe because the initial spike in CO2 came from lifestyle choices. Industry keeps up with consumer demands. And trying to advocate for lifestyle changes respects the free market.
I'm not saying it's the best or only way to address climate change but it does seem consistent with addressing how it started.
The problem is fundamentally caused by overconsumption and the solutions that don’t include reducing consumption will absolutely fail. If this were a school shooting you’re suggesting we be the hopes and prayers guy.
I would offer that a lot of proposals like Project Vesta sound great, but are massive-scale geo-engineering projects that could, themselves, have unintended consequences.
No small set of solutions will be enough. We're nowhere close to a "solution" and for the average individual who is not a policy-maker or wealthy investor, "lifestyle" changes and consumer choices is pretty much the only venue through we can impact.
It allows them to feel like they've helped while not actually targeting the areas which are producing the highest amounts of GHGs (transportation & electricity production). Areas that would financially impact the wealthiest among us.
Geo-engineering is like chemo. It comes with a bunch of other problems and it's far better to take steps to avoid being in a place where you need it. Usually proponents for it here do not talk about the downsides of it.
Demanding multiple extreme lifestyle changes from billions of people—most of whom don't like you and won't listen—seems like would make for the least effective and most damaging of all the available solutions.
I prefer solutions that involve changing the least number of stubborn and uneducated minds, and offer the most upside. Like industries that are run by professionals and are already accustomed to high regulatory requirements. Energy and construction industries seem like there's a lot of low-hanging fruit there, just for starters.
While I do agree with you for the most part, theres a few things I think are worth taking away.
First, there's no harm in the fact that we need to plant more trees. Would we ever achieve the amount needed as stated here? Hell no. But it at least shows we do need to be serious and replant trees.
Edit: For the most part there's no harm in planting trees as long as they're appropriate for the ecosystem, both type and density. One thing the article doesn't talk about, an Amazon forest can be denser per acre while a pacific northwest forest has to be thinner. Due to both pests and wildfire management. I also figure soil fertility too, but I don't have the data for that one.
I think the most valuable take away, the amount of trees needed is a good way to visualize the extent of the problem. Mentioning that we pump however many billion pounds of, essentially "smoke", is meaningless to most people. To be fair, it's hard to wrap your head around the weight of a gas for 80% of the population, let alone how much is bad.
But 80% of people can understand, we fucked so bad, we need to plant an extra 1 trillion plus trees to start fixing those problems. That's somewhat easier to understand. It's just more tangible for people to think about. Super accurate, no. But it's more about getting people's head around the problem to understand the extent of work needed.
"Wow, 1 trillion trees. That's a lot. Is there anything we can do that's easier, but can lower that by 1 billion trees?"
"Why yes, we can do..."
"What else can we do so we don't have to plant another 1 billion?"
Sometimes planting a tree is actually bad. We've introduced specific species into our environment for decorative or other purposes before and then ended up regretting it because it was a bad decision [1]. There's also the issue of when we mass-plant a specific tree species and then the trees all get devastated by disease (due to being a monoculture), creating a massive fire hazard [2].
So we need to plant more trees, but it goes beyond 'appropriate for the ecosystem', we have to consider very many factors to anticipate whether the trees we're planting will be a nuisance or even a hazard in 10 years and whether they will even survive to sink carbon. We need to make sure we plant a good mix of native species to ensure that they'll survive diseases and shifts in weather, but also deal with the fact that not every species grows at the same speed somehow. Forests are complex ecosystems and we basically have to build new ones from scratch to really have an impact here, and that's more complex than just planting some trees.
I used to be a big fan of Just Plant Some Trees but after seeing the impact of the two things I cite below I've developed some skepticism of the idea that we can just apply Tree Planting as a blunt-force instrument to compensate for all the damage we're inflicting on existing trees.
Also: These trees take decades to grow, at least, and will have to be protected from fires (which are only getting worse) and logging basically forever.
Just want to note that while 2/3 sounds like a lot it only refers to the CO2 released so far, not the future emissions, which keep increasing exponentially. There is no alternative to eliminating emissions. Having said that, sure, let's plant more trees.
edit: just to add some numbers for the context.
> Once mature, these new forests could store 205 billion tonnes of carbon: about two thirds of the 300 billion tonnes of carbon that has been released into the atmosphere as a result of human activity since the Industrial Revolution.
Given the current emissions rate of ~10Gt (assuming no increase), the amount captured by these new trees will be re-added in just 20 years, and will keep growing afterwords.
> AND reduce traveling AND stop eating so much meat, AND stop fishing so much, AND stop creating to much waste
OR eliminate coal as a source of energy.
Coal is the #1 source of manmade CO2 by far. Just switching from coal to natural gas reduces CO2 per kWh generated by 50%. Obviously putting any solar or wind alongside that natural gas cuts much more deeply.
By contrast the airline industry only accounts for a few percent of global CO2 emission. Why even bring up air travel at this point?
I feel like there's this perhaps subconscious desire to bring moralism into it by shaming people for consumption. The "problem" is that coal can be replaced with almost no impact to our lifestyle, and so getting rid of coal doesn't involve enough sacrifice. The narrative of redemption through sacrifice is deeply woven into not just Western culture but most human cultures really.
> Just switching from coal to natural gas reduces CO2 per kWh generated by 50%.
At the cost of increased methane emissions due to leakages from natural gas infrastructure that makes it far worse than coal since methane is a much more potent GHG.
I agree it's a complex problem that needs to be tackled on many fronts. But the great thing about trees is we like forests, they're economical to plant, and they buy us time. If we remove 2/3 of the carbon added to the atmosphere since the industrial revolution, it buys us 20 years at current emissions. In 20 years the demand for internal combustion vehicles will be nearly dead. Coal plants are already in serious decline, but in 20 years they'll probably need subsidies just to keep running. With the pace of advancements in renewable energy and electric vehicles, 20 years is enough to go from we don't know how we'll solve this problem to the problem is solving itself through free-market forces.
> We need to plant a bunch of trees AND reduce traveling AND stop eating so much meat, AND stop fishing so much, AND stop creating to much waste, AND keep the world population under control, etc.
Just a question: why should we?
Personally, I prefer global warming with the life quality of modern middle class rather than the wheather of 300 years ago with the life quality of ancient aristocracy.
If you want to go back to stone age, please feel free to go: I'm not retaining you.
On the other side, if we can discuss about how to improve quality of life for everybody, I'm in! And if we manage to solve global warming without impacting life quality, even better!
Because global warming means not just a slightly less comfortable summer season, but also rising ocean levels that displace low-lying coastal communities (to include not just island nations like Micronesia and The Maldives, but also large sections of major harbor cities like New York City, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Sydney); more violent and more frequent tropical storms and monsoons; drastic changes to crop viability in semi-arid agricultural regions such as those in California, North Africa, Yemen, and Afghanistan; increased wildfires in California and Australia; worsened air quality in and around major cities (especially megacities); acidification of our oceans; and heightened turmoil in and around arid regions with existing water and refugee crises.
I think there's a latent suggestion in your language that reducing consumption discards all of the technological social progress of the past three centuries, while climate change presents a negotiable inconvenience. The balance is quite the opposite. You can keep cellphones, the internet, food security, modern medicine, and clean, running water. If anything, many of these advances are secured, rather than threatened, by curbing human-driven climate change.
>If you want to go back to stone age, please feel free to go: I'm not retaining you.
Beyond misjudging the gravity of the problem at hand, I think this comment is also a little short-sighted in appreciating the nature of the problem and our collective responsibility for it. The choices we make as consumers, designers, and voters have impacts that affect the whole world, including populations with clear stake but no voice in those decisions. It's particularly callous to tell someone whose island will be washed away by rising sea levels that they're free to eschew any technology they want to curb ecological impact while our own emissions (by absolute value or per capita) far exceed their own contribution to atmospheric CO2 levels.
I think you're asking the rich to stop being so excessive. Anyone who is both intelligent and poor is not spending 500 dollars for meat in any given month. Myself, I think maybe I eat 2 cheeseburgers a year.
Individually, even most of the rich don't directly pollute so much as entire industries. On the HN front page there's an article stating that shipping companies have collectively spent $12 billion to cheat and instead of polluting the air, they pollute directly into the sea while technically adhering to standards.
I believe you are conflating some arguments. You don't have to spend a large amount of money to have an outsized effect on the climate. I'd wager that a Burger King Whopper for $4.19 contributes more to climate change than a 8oz ribeye from locally raised cattle at a high-end restaurant for $39.
In this case you should spend more money on less meat. Just saying 'spend less money' continues to ignore the enternatilies that make meat production such a driver of climate change.
I think what OP argues (and I agree with), is there’s no solution, or even partial mitigation, to climate crisis, wherein we keep the party going and due to some magic science in Alaska things are suddenly ok. This is a lie. If this lie is needed “to get a message across” so be it.
Exactly, we need to consume less, a lot less. Personally I've already started since a decade a minimalist lifestyle. I also plant trees when I go riding and hiking, even if it seems insignificant
Or stop producing as many people might be a better option.
I mean we could all live like caged hens and keep adding to our numbers for a while longer, but eventually there are going to be some hard limits to how many people the ecosystem can actually hold.
This. Climate Crisis is a result of behavior that regards environment as infinite while it is definitely not.
And Climate Crisis is just one of the symptoms. World's ecosystem is a multifaceted, wastly complex, richly interconnected and very reactive structure.
We as species WILL NOT get away with having power of a bulldozer and mind of a dragonfly[1].
A question: Considering human biology and mind, can human species ever collaborate and act together for a logical cause? I have almost lost all my confidence that we have that ability/function. I really would like to hear your perspective on this.
>We can't just plant a bunch of trees and keep living like before
Do you really think any country or society is "living like" before? Climate consciousness has come a long way. We are getting better in every aspect, though population growth will be an ongoing issue.
It will be impossible to progress if every time we try something or suggest something people shout "not good enough!"
The #1 thing that controls population growth is increasing the standard of living. See the conflict?
That said, population is already leveling off. The main cause of population growth now is not high birth rates, but rather increased lifespans and lower infant mortality rates. By the end of the century, population will have leveled off and may even start shrinking some.
Trees are Big O in the carbon sink direction. Switching to renewable bags or paper straws is just making your huge carbon footprint slightly less huge by sub-percentiles.
Plant 100,000 trees in a summer though and you’ve more or less offset your life’s consumption - cheeseburgers or no.
I think it comes down to the high cost of lifestyle changes. For example, if I am a consultant and needs to fly a lot to make a living, it would be very hard for me to change that.
I agree we need people to be more conscious of waste and to reduce excessive consumption, but at the same time, we need easy solutions for people to contribute.
I like the dual strategy of Project Wren (https://projectwren.com/) that encourages lifestyle changes and buying carbon offsets at the same time.
It’s probably not a “do all the things” solution, because (1) we won’t do those things; (2) trying to do those things will lead to undesirably high levels of government regulation of private behavior. The authoritarian infrastructure will be built, but it will fail because it will be diverted to ends other than addressing climate change.
You can already see this happening with the Green New Deal and Global Climate Strikes. The Green New Deal has turned into a jobs program. (Which is deeply ironic, because the Soviet Union was immensely energy inefficient and polluting, as a result of populist measures such as subsidized energy. Increasing middle class prosperity is inherently incompatible with reducing carbon output.) The Green New Deal, together with the climate strikes have become vehicles for socialist ideology. For example, despite experts broadly agreeing that we need things like carbon taxes, the Global Climate Strike platform categorically rejects market mechanisms to address climate change.
Carbon capture and cheap nuclear power can solve climate change, and we can do it without world government. (To many people, that second part is a downside, I think, which is why technological solutions to climate change get less emphasis than political solutions.)
It's not ironic at all that the "green new deal" would be a jobs program, given that the "new deal" was a jobs program.
But your argument is a bit of a straw man -- "do all things" refers to doing all things possible to deal with climate change, i.e. use new technologies that pollute less, engage in direct mitigation (like planting trees), and reducing emissions by changing consumption.
It doesn't necessarily mean implementing the green new deal as proposed, as one could possibly accomplish similar effects with a different set of measures.
But of course, your argument that carbon sequestration and nuclear energy will in effect magically solve this problem without the need for any changes in consumption or pricing effectively is arguing that we should, as a species, continue on our destructive path, because somebody else will come along and just fix the problem for us.
Do you have a source for Global Climate Strike rejecting a carbon price? The movement here in Germany seems to be generally in favor, since the experts are generally in favor and FFF for example explicitly asks politicians to finally listen to the experts.
Wrt cheap nuclear solving climate change: Nuclear is currently one of the most expensive forms of energy. How do you propose we make it cheap enough so that we can essentially waste the energy for unburning coal we could have left in the ground by a more aggressive buildout of renewables paired with improving energy efficiency?
But government already has a hand in influencing private behavior by regulating industries. Think of what would change if American farmers were no longer incentivized to produce corn, soy, and dairy. Or if gas prices reflected the full monetary and ecological cost of oil.
I agree with the "we won't do all the things" thesis, and that it's probably wise to acknowledge that and plan accordingly around that self-knowledge.
Almost everything else in the comment after that seems a bit off-kilter to me:
> The Green New Deal has turned into a jobs program
"turned into"? Are you familiar with the "New Deal" of historical note that it's deriving the very name from? It's always been a jobs program. That's part of the point.
> Soviet Union
As sibling commenters have already pointed out, I don't see how this comparison was particularly well-connected or topical.
> Increasing middle class prosperity is inherently incompatible with reducing carbon output.
No?
> The Green New Deal, together with the climate strikes have become vehicles for socialist ideology.
I don't disagree with that; what's your point, though? Are you trying to run with the association that "socialism=bad"?
I'm writing you from fairly-darn-Socialist (and fairly-darn-functional) Norway, so I'm not picking up.
> despite experts broadly agreeing that we need things like carbon taxes, the Global Climate Strike platform categorically rejects market mechanisms to address climate change.
Almost every single person I've talked to who has participated in or associated with the climate strikes has been an advocate for carbon taxes.
So, no. Those people and platforms do not categorically reject market mechanisms. In fact those that I've talked to seem to be essentially _on your side_.
> we can do it without world government
I'm sure that's true, but also, I'm not sure where there's been a suggestion of "world government" that you seem to be responding negatively to. Everything you've mentioned in your own comment is single-government internal proposals, or, groups of people advocating for general directions within their own local governments.
So in total: while I think you and I would agree in many many details about how to plan reactions to climate change, can I council you to polish your message to _focus on that_ and skip the world-socialist-government-conspiracy tinge? It's just not necessary. It seems to be making you believe you disagree with a bunch of people who... by and large agree with you, and are in fact interested in (and pursuing) market-oriented solution paths.
- "The authoritarian infrastructure will be built"
I'd argue it already has been built, by Google, NSA et al. Also, I fail to see why these "high levels of government regulation" would be bad, since we've tried the alternative and it obviously doesn't work..
- "The Green New Deal has turned into a jobs program."
I'm no american, but has this been put into law already?
- "the Soviet Union was immensely energy inefficient and polluting"
I do hear that from time to time but no one can provide any sources for this claim. Can you? Not planning on protecting the ol' USSR, but still seems insincere to just throw this around without attribution.
- "Increasing middle class prosperity is inherently incompatible with reducing carbon output."
That's a pretty flat statement. Why would this be so?
- "the Global Climate Strike platform categorically rejects market mechanisms to address climate change."
We tried this, it hasn't worked (so far). Why should we continue with this measure instead of other approaches?
- "Carbon capture and cheap nuclear power"
both of which do not exist. See my comment about LCOE and the link below for cheap nuclear power. With regards to carbon capture, we have some pilot plants but this technology (or rather mix of technologies) is nowhere near ready for the massive scale of deployment we'd need already. That's why the focus is on political solutions imo.
That's a good point. I think you are definitely correct.
However, I think it's also true that some of the other solutions are likely to happen "on their own" eventually. E.g. technological advancements in alternative energy and electric cars are likely to eventually allow them to replace alternatives (if the environment survives long enough).
A lot of the other parts of the solutions don't have good ways to accomplish them. For example, I don't see a good way to reduce travel or population growth.
Maybe it is more complex to deal with the causes of CO2 emissions. Some places in the world like Africa, East Asian have numerous power plants emitting tons of CO2 to the air and there are no simple substitutes to them because of lack of budget. Also if simply enforce those countries to ban factories would cause a rising of unemployment.
Reining in emissions and fixing our society are not separate issues. The scale of the change needed to substantially reduce or eliminate CO2 and methane emissions is huge.
Simple doesn't mean easy, unfortunately. There's more than a few sources of CO2 emissions, and some of the significant ones arent even (directly) manmade.
This has been debunked at plenty of places, but I guess it needs repeating.
Quote from the article: "Around 0.9 billion hectares (2.2 billion acres) of land worldwide would be suitable for reforestation, which could ultimately capture two thirds of human-made carbon emissions."
This is wrong. The reason is a bit technical. The issue here is that about half of the emissions going into the atmosphere get soaked up by natural sinks, e.g. the oceans. However if you take carbon dioxide out of the air the reverse happens: The oceans and other sinks re-release the carbon.
This needs to be taken into account, but hasn't happened here. So the effect is only about half the size of what is claimed.
To be clear: There's nothing wrong with planting trees as one solution to the climate crisis. However this study was presented in a way that overestimated the effect massively. (Also I have some doubts that planting trees is "easy" given the political situation in the countries that have the largest potential.)
Although as an aside, the oceans re-releasing carbon dioxide is also desirable because it should combat the effects of ocean acidification which is a significant life-threatening issue in and of itself.
Nevertheless, it also shouldn't be the case that what you remove from the atmosphere gets released from the ocean in equal quantities - it should be seen as trees sequestering CO2 from both the atmosphere and ocean (and potentially other sinks) as according to however the equilibrium of the system works out, right?
I agree with your point that it's not a cure-all though. It might be overstated in the abstract but is still worth pursuing. The enthusiasm, I understand, for planting trees is that it's broadly seen as returning the environment to something that is more equivalent to an earlier point in history and so is seen as less likely to have adverse affects as compared to forms of geo-engineering with less of a precedent in nature.
> This is wrong. The reason is a bit technical. The issue here is that about half of the emissions going into the atmosphere get soaked up by natural sinks, e.g. the oceans. However if you take carbon dioxide out of the air the reverse happens: The oceans and other sinks re-release the carbon.
This objection doesn't make sense. The article is talking about the total estimated amount of carbon dioxide generated since the industrial revolution. That's an absolute number. It doesn't matter where that CO2 currently lives, and it's not saying 2/3 of what is in the atmosphere.
On a practical standpoint, I don't think the article tackles the concept of forest management at all. Other than what's been going on the past few months, the Amazon doesn't see wildfires like the Pacific Northwest does. An Amazon forest can be denser per acre compared to a NW forest. Thinning forests is a common practice, across America at least, to manage burnable material that naturally occurs in a forest. Plus to deal with a lot of beetles and other pests that have been killing the forests. At the end, it's not enough anymore to just plant a tree and call it day in most forests. Management needs to be apart of the plan too. It would suck to plant a ton of trees, just to see it go up in smoke.
The Amazon is wet enough that it doesn't have natural massive fires. The recent and ongoing fires are set to clear the land for agriculture. They have to cut the trees down first, wait for them to dry out a bit, and then set them on fire.
if CO2 is removed from the oceans and other CO2 sinks, won't that still leave us in the position of having less free CO2 to release into the atmosphere in the aftermath? i'm trying to understand multiple angles of this issue because i'm interested in making a company to plant trees as a service.
Yeah, sure, but the point is that it would only get you a third of the way to the goal of removing all man-made CO2 from the atmosphere (and oceans) rather than two thirds as was claimed. And the atmosphere is sort-of especially important because that's where the warming happens, CO2 in the oceans does not directly contribute to the greenhouse effect. Though it does cause acidification, which isn't exactly helpful either.
I have always wondered what would happen if we could find a way to grow floating barges that would provide an environment for algae (and potentially other organisms) to grow in the oceanic deserts. There is a huge area that could work as a carbon sink there.
In my overly-populated European country, I think most people think that "nature" is going away because we're building more and more houses where fields were.
It's weird to me that people here seem to think of fields as nature, when it's actually huge zones where a single species of plant grows and where insects are killed with poison
I remember reading that in the Netherlands at least deforestation is taking place again. The reforestation effort had been doing quite well and then governmental policy changed.
EDIT: I will look for a source for this though, so do remain skeptical of what I just wrote for now.
EDIT2: this site claims a net loss in Dutch forest area of 3.8% since the year 2000. Clicking around on the map it seems like practically all European countries are losing forests faster than they are gaining them. At the moment I cannot find a source for the governmental policy claim though.
Change forest area into other use, e.g. residential, is hard AF. So forest-as-land-use is AFAIK not decreasing in Europe.
But re-forested areas are commercial forests, thus they're cut down. And the first re-forested forests reached their peak condition. So a lot of them are cut down. Usually they're given time to naturally re-seed from remaining trees (unless it was clear-cut, which are not advised in most cases nowadays), re-planting takes time and it takes time for that fresh cut to look like a forest again.
Trees take in much more CO2 while they're growing. So if we keep cutting down trees at their prime age, don't burn them and replant new trees in their place... That's pretty efficient. If that wood replaces some concrete in construction, which is terrible for CO2, double win!
We had a very heated debate about this in my country. Forest-land-use area is growing. But there're lots of clearings out in the forests. Cutting permits allow significantly less than theoretical yearly lumber growth. So sheer mass is growing too. But people see a clearing and think of that as deforestation.
Another issue when old and bio-diverse forests are cut down and then commercial mono-culture forest is re-planted in it's place. But from CO2 side - that's better than keeping the old forest in place. Not so good from eco diversity perspective though.
This is a common pattern of comments you'll see on almost any climate post:
Person 1 - locally we (majorly developed nation) are improving resource X!
Person 2 - ... but you're not accounting for exporting/externalizing demands for resource X that mask true usage by us.
Person 1 - ah but XYZ group shows that even if you account for this (which is really quite tricky to account for accurately) then everything is fine and we are doing better.
But the ultimate test of whether or not we're really improving anything always has to be a global view. Local resource improvement is meaningless and accounting for exporting of consumption/production etc is very tricky to account for unless you simply look at global trends.
And globally percent of forest area has been in steady decline[1]. I have no doubt some think tank has written a report showing that "even if we account for europe's exportation of plant biomass needs, things are still doing better" but all that really matters is always the global trend.
This is a great example of exporting your forest needs. About 1/3 of the UK's renewable energy is wood pellets shipped across the ocean from the US [1]. So yes you can have reforestation but for that to happen at the same time as your demand for wood pellets increases you have to burn a lot of bunker fuel to ship that wood across the ocean.
But of course in the end you get to claim that you are using more renewable energy and increasing local forest coverage!
I think the Scottish highlands are beautiful but wondered why those mountains are mostly bare whereas most mainland ones are wooded. Wasn't happy to read why.
Don’t have the data open to the public but I’m personally mapping the forrests from Southern Romania as they stood in 1867 (give a take a few years, based on an Austrian map) and comparing them to the present day forrested area. There are now 40% less forrests compared to 1867, and in the plain area the situation is even more dire, in those places we now have 80% to 90% less forrests.
If you look at the animated map on the Washington Post website it shows that especially in northern Romania deforestation has taken place in the second half of the 20th century, so the article does not contradict your data.
The problem is you can't create new "old" forest, and some of the old forest areas are under threat. In the case of Germany, some are even threatened by coal mining!
Ancient forest can expand but it has to do so gradually to maintain the characteristic species mix. And in order to expand it has to be protected in the first place.
Regarding climate change ancient forest is neutral, as it releases the same amount of carbon that it absorbs. Forestation on the other hand creates carbon storage, which is a very nice thing to have these days.
Globally, we are losing forests and have lost them for hundreds of years. Iceland, Brazil, Madagascar, Indonesia, many places have lost huge amounts of trees due to humans.
Europe as well, actually. It was virtually covered in forests then largely deforested to make way for agriculture. In the last 100 years or so rural exodus and agriculture industrialisation have meant that forests have started to expand again.
That actually highlights a global issue: We, in Europe, scold developing countries for doing what Europe has done (but it was centuries ago so people don't realise it). That is reasonable considering what we now know and modern technology but to avoid hypocrisy this should be accompanied by offers of help to achieve development and jobs without deforestation, and perhaps by no longer buying commodities that require deforestation.
It's difficult to deforestate Central Europe any further because almost complete deforestation already took place during the Middle Ages and the early modern period.
That reminds me of the discussions about overfishing. The amount of fish in the sea is a mere few percentages of what it was a century ago, but that already was way, way less than it was in the centuries before that. And we only went to fish in the sea after we had exhausted the rivers.
This is the shifting baseline effect and it really negatively affects conservation efforts.
Southern Germany and surrounding areas are much more forested than, for example, the UK, so this is not exactly true. Can we have more precise information?
>Yet, somehow people in Europe think that a huge deforestation is taking place.
That's because they have empirical knowledge on the ground -- for example in my country there is tons of deforestation taking place, and has been going on for decades.
Note that statistics can be misleading, especially when governments want to paint a greener picture: e.g. areas can be de-characterized (from "forrest" to available for construction and commercial use, etc), after which cutting trees there is not "deforestation" anymore...
With all these smart people reading Hacker News, why is the the top comment so negative. This is a legitimately doable thing.
The vast majority of us on here are some type of engineer. We can answer the question of "How do we efficiently plant 1bil hectare of trees within 5 years?"
Yes, we need to do other things too. But if we wait for some panacea plan to emerge it will be too late. Just do it.
Just imagine if we accomplished this within 5 years. How glad would we be in 30 years once they really started to mature? Let's be good to future us.
nature can plant trees instead. Trees, if left alone for a couple of years will naturally reproduce and plant themselves. The key bit is leaving the space alone. It is not something that really needs engineering on the whole.
There is a small amount of places where trees would not be able to colonise if left alone - and we need to use the science of Ecology to examine why. it's here where geotechnology can come into play, but for the vast vast majority of the billions needed, we just need to leave alone .
Now, saying that, there is a great benefit in getting children interested in nature and planting trees and so we shouldn't stop planting efforts for that sake. But there is a deeply troubling idea that we can engineer nature to save nature when it's nature that can save itself and us.
The recommendation is to reforest 103 million hectares of the US. That is about 400,000 square miles in a country of about 4,000,000 square miles, i.e. 10% of the surface area. It's not clear where there is that much land suitable for forest that is not being used for ag and other purposes. Of course, we could decrease the amount of land used for agriculture, since we are continually in surplus and export a lot of foodstuffs.
Some parts, such as New England, were farmed more intensively and have been allowed to go back to forest. In other areas, such as the midwest, poor or swampy land that was used for dairy farming pastures is no longer needed, since dairying is now concentrated in fewer huge herds. However, in these cases land had been allowed to go back to forests naturally, with scrubby transition shrubs and trees that are pretty poor forests. We could get both more carbon capture and more forest products by better forest management in the US. Invasive species such as kudzu, asian bittersweet, and porcelain berry make transitioning back to mature terminal stage forest difficult and expensive.
People need to start thinking of natural regeneration / rewilding as an option because "planting trees" per se does not create a self sustaining balanced forest ecosystem. Forestry plantations are often pretty much green deserts, like any other agricultural monoculture.
There's a pernicious influence from government here. It's unhelpfully easier to get funding for "plant 1000 saplings" than for "leave an area to transform into thorny scrub, pioneer tree woodland, and finally full woodland".
It would be nice if natural regeneration worked, but in this area an idle plot quickly becomes overrun with invasive species. Some of these are foreign trees, such as alianthus, and some are US trees not native to this area, such as black locust. Even these fast growing and short lived species become quickly entangled in non-native vines and dragged down in windstorms. The result is a tangled mess nothing like the theoretical progression from thorny scrub, pioneer tree woodland, and full woodland. Getting to something like a natural woodland may be possible naturally, but it takes many decades, and the resultant species will certainly not be the mixed oak and chestnut forest, since there are no more chestnuts. Nature only goes forward, never back.
One of my favorite "case studies" related to this is the Selah ranch in Texas.
The TL;DR: version is that because it was choked with trees and brush, the groundwater had been removed. The owners restored it to primarily native grassland, and in the process restored natural water holes, and streams.
Just as a political lesson, reforestation is fascinating.It seems to have casually gone from seeming unfeasible practically and politically to feasible... without much of a struggle.
Surely that's because its a suggest that we can "solve" an extistential crisis without changing the way we do business or live our lives in any meaningful way.
It's more realistic than thinking we're going to get a significant majority of the world's population to significantly reduce consumption while adding two more billion people and having the developed world catch up.
I disagree with the zero-sum assumption that often seem to permeate environmentalism, and climate politics in particular. Half the time it seems that effectiveness is judged by inconvenience, negative economic consequences and such. I sometimes think it hurts the cause more than outright anti-environmentalism.
If the only "real" solutions are things like reducing human energy use long term, you might as well stop caring and just hope for the best. It won't happen, and even if it does than the long-term^ consequences might be worse than climate change.
The actually sustainable solutions are those that are cheap, positive sum, and lead to humans thriving.
IDK if this is a solution (or meaningful part thereof) for climate change. It's not really an easy solution though. Land politics are tough, to put it mildly. They always have been.
Things like this article describes, the fact the world is getting greener as a result of human activity[1] not to mention the constant advance of technology is why I'm still optimistic for our future despite all the doomsday predictions.
Readit News
This is a thought fallacy that leads us nowhere, it's a complex problem with many causes and lots of moving parts.
We can't just plant a bunch of trees and keep living like before, growing to 10 billions and beyond.
We need to plant a bunch of trees AND reduce traveling AND stop eating so much meat, AND stop fishing so much, AND stop creating to much waste, AND keep the world population under control, etc. It's not OR, its AND.
Thinking "Oh well someone is just going to plant a bunch of trees and fix it, I'll just back to eating my cheeseburger" is not a productive message at this point in time, when so much is still to be done to convince the general public that lifestyle changes are urgently needed.
1. https://projectvesta.org/
The vast majority (~80%, [1]) of the greenhouse gas emissions do not come from "lifestyle" choices such as eating meat, but from transportation, industrial use and electrical production. These require changes at the policy level that individuals can't create by themselves but only by calling for action by legislators. Planting more trees on a national scale can absolutely be one of the many policy changes that we call for to help balance the scales, because we will never get those three sectors down to zero.
As for the specific question of meat, it would undoubtably help for everyone to eat less meat, but in fact if every single person in the US went vegetarian, it's estimated that it would only reduce the US's CO2 output by about 5%. [2]
1. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/climate/what-if-we-all-at...
Humans do not have a great track record of predicting the secondary effects of their actions on the earth.
Meanwhile our society is incredibly wasteful of energy, and has a ton of low hanging fruit via reduction and efficiencies. The less emissions we produce now, the less we have to clean up with solutions like the linked above.
I'll also repeat this again because it's a common accusation leveled on HN. Most people interested in addressing environmental issues are not doing it to "virtue signal" or impose arbitrary values but because they want a healthier environment and to make the world sustainable for future generations.
The alternative, lifestyle changes, is better understood and the effects of which are easily predicted, but is only effective if done in a unified manner at a scale that current human nature will not allow. We can’t even figure out how to cure hunger and poverty in a world of plenty, good luck getting everyone to make the dramatic changes to even get us to stabilize at mostly broken planet.
The real answer is that beyond a deus ex machina there is no answer and that the inevitable easily and indisputably modeled result of the current situation is dramatic near-term biosphere changes, ecosystems collapse and likely the end of most advanced human civilization within a couple centuries, conservatively.
It must be a weird time to be a climate scientists, with the best computer models that have ever existed essentially returning a result that ends the world within a half dozen generations.
2. They are proven to reduce your impact at a level that most consider manageable
3. The other poster said AND - eat less meat AND get involved in other mechanisms for change
I dont have any interest in virtue or signalling: i just want people to impact the planet less so we dont trigger any unwanted changes. Is that a valid enough reason to ask everyone to try their best or do we keep having to have philosophical arguments about how individual free choice (shaped often by the corporations themselves!) trumps any imperative to collectively sacrifice?
For example, we can plant as many trees as we want but if population grows even at the current rate we are gonna need another planet. So what’s wrong in saying we need to slow down our own expansion. Same for industrial scale agriculture.
What I always find puzzling in all these conversations is the attachment people have to their lifestyle which probably evolved to where it is only in the last five decades - at most. Meat was never this readily available in history. Neither was energy. These are incredibly recent in our evolutionary period and yet they wreak havoc like nothing else.
But if you actually have something that will reduce emissions? Well that's a threat to their plan to get more money and power.
On the other hand, all current IPCC scenarios require both lifestyle changes and a staggering amount of carbon capture, starting from 2030 peaking with up to 20 Gt/CO2/year in 2050 for the worst scenario (which we are very much on track for) [0]. (Current emissions are around 40 Gt/CO2/year. [1])
Nobody knows how, and especially not how without side effects. That does not mean we should not try - we need to - but that means we have to pull all the stops, now.
Look at those plots, this is a desperate situation, and the IPCC reports are actually optimistic. [2]/[3]
[0] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM3...
[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM1...
[2] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/FigSPM-10.jp...
[3] https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/graphics/
Some geoengineering solutions don't seem to be all that expensive (e.g. spraying sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere), and if things get really bad in some particularly hot places, somebody (India?) may decide to apply them unilaterally. Will we be happy about that?
Read about TWR (Traveling Wave Reactor) designed by these guys, financed by Bill Gates. It runs on depleted uranium, not enriched uranium. It's amazing how it works.
There's so many solutions being developed like this on so many fronts. But we're not doing any of them. I don't understand it. Government is not even being asked to finance this, but yet they won't approve it because of politics.
Overall our atmospheric models are not yet mature, which make carbon-trapping mechanisms from the atmostphere hard to gauge. Easier if we reduce or trap carbon emissions before it is spread into the atmosphere.
Please also consider we will eventually run out of fuel/oil/gas/coal; carbon dioxide savings is the long term strategy.
Project Vesta hasn't proved efficacy or ability to scale. It's reminiscent of the "solar roadways" hype from earlier this decade.
Most greenhouse gas emissions come from industry and transportation of goods.
It's less politically expedient to blame entrenched powers for their hand in climate change than it is to blame Joe Nobody for driving instead of walking to work.
So yes, I am a part of the problem. But we've gotten into this mess with technology; why can't we use technology to get out of it? Part of the problem is that, in taking part in these activities that increase our carbon footprint, we're not actually paying for the true impact of our actions. I'd be fine with paying more for my plane tickets if I knew that extra money was going toward carbon capture, or other technologies that are in development to reduce the impact of these -- by now very common -- activities.
I'm reminded of the checkbox memes; "You are attempting to apply an X solution to Y. Your idea will not work because:" -- one of my favorite checkboxes on those, was always "You are attempting to change the behavior of everyone, which does not work". I feel like this applies to most climate issues.
Implementing worldwide population controls is a non-starter. Implementing restrictions on air travel is a non-starter. Outlawing meat consumption is a non-starter. I love that companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are trying to come up with more sustainable meat substitutes. I think they have a ways to go, but I'd be happy to switch over to them at some point. That's a great example of using technology to reduce carbon footprint, while still allowing people to have the same (or nearly the same) experiences. Can't we do more of this?
At the end of the day, people are going to do what they're going to do, as long as they can (financially) afford it. Cultural/societal change on this level, in the time frame necessary, just isn't realistic.
We have no idea how that further manipulation would affect the environment, in a thousand unforeseen ways that would only be apparent decades down the line.
Half of the earth habitable area is used for animal agriculture, so that should be the first part being reforested, meaning less cattle feed, meaning less meat.
So we cover the surface of the earth with crop fields, plant a bunch of trees on the other and everything is going to be all right? Of course not, it's just not that simple.
Scientists simply cannot predict how the ecosystem would respond, the models are too simple for something so complex as the Earth.
We need to stop using so many resources, continuing to increase the rate of consumption while waiting for some miracle technical silver bullet solution is just suicidal as a species.
Coal is such a huge contributor to the problem that you can almost say that climate change is a coal problem. Not quite, but you're not wrong. I am deeply puzzled by anyone discussing climate change who doesn't bring up coal first, yet I see tons of discussion where coal is not even mentioned.
I'm not saying it's the best or only way to address climate change but it does seem consistent with addressing how it started.
It’s insane to want to suppress good ideas, i’m not sure you’d accomplishing what you intend with your criticism
EDIT: if you don’t like the title, criticize the title. Titles are written by clickbait artists, not the authors
They are criticizing this wording. This won't stop the climate crisis but sounds like a great first step.
I prefer solutions that involve changing the least number of stubborn and uneducated minds, and offer the most upside. Like industries that are run by professionals and are already accustomed to high regulatory requirements. Energy and construction industries seem like there's a lot of low-hanging fruit there, just for starters.
First, there's no harm in the fact that we need to plant more trees. Would we ever achieve the amount needed as stated here? Hell no. But it at least shows we do need to be serious and replant trees.
Edit: For the most part there's no harm in planting trees as long as they're appropriate for the ecosystem, both type and density. One thing the article doesn't talk about, an Amazon forest can be denser per acre while a pacific northwest forest has to be thinner. Due to both pests and wildfire management. I also figure soil fertility too, but I don't have the data for that one.
I think the most valuable take away, the amount of trees needed is a good way to visualize the extent of the problem. Mentioning that we pump however many billion pounds of, essentially "smoke", is meaningless to most people. To be fair, it's hard to wrap your head around the weight of a gas for 80% of the population, let alone how much is bad.
But 80% of people can understand, we fucked so bad, we need to plant an extra 1 trillion plus trees to start fixing those problems. That's somewhat easier to understand. It's just more tangible for people to think about. Super accurate, no. But it's more about getting people's head around the problem to understand the extent of work needed.
"Wow, 1 trillion trees. That's a lot. Is there anything we can do that's easier, but can lower that by 1 billion trees?"
"Why yes, we can do..."
"What else can we do so we don't have to plant another 1 billion?"
So we need to plant more trees, but it goes beyond 'appropriate for the ecosystem', we have to consider very many factors to anticipate whether the trees we're planting will be a nuisance or even a hazard in 10 years and whether they will even survive to sink carbon. We need to make sure we plant a good mix of native species to ensure that they'll survive diseases and shifts in weather, but also deal with the fact that not every species grows at the same speed somehow. Forests are complex ecosystems and we basically have to build new ones from scratch to really have an impact here, and that's more complex than just planting some trees.
I used to be a big fan of Just Plant Some Trees but after seeing the impact of the two things I cite below I've developed some skepticism of the idea that we can just apply Tree Planting as a blunt-force instrument to compensate for all the damage we're inflicting on existing trees.
1: https://www.kqed.org/science/4209/eucalyptus-california-icon...
2: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/flexibility-...
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Okay, but removing 2/3rds of the excess CO2 in the atmosphere strikes me as a damn good start.
edit: just to add some numbers for the context.
> Once mature, these new forests could store 205 billion tonnes of carbon: about two thirds of the 300 billion tonnes of carbon that has been released into the atmosphere as a result of human activity since the Industrial Revolution.
Given the current emissions rate of ~10Gt (assuming no increase), the amount captured by these new trees will be re-added in just 20 years, and will keep growing afterwords.
OR eliminate coal as a source of energy.
Coal is the #1 source of manmade CO2 by far. Just switching from coal to natural gas reduces CO2 per kWh generated by 50%. Obviously putting any solar or wind alongside that natural gas cuts much more deeply.
By contrast the airline industry only accounts for a few percent of global CO2 emission. Why even bring up air travel at this point?
I feel like there's this perhaps subconscious desire to bring moralism into it by shaming people for consumption. The "problem" is that coal can be replaced with almost no impact to our lifestyle, and so getting rid of coal doesn't involve enough sacrifice. The narrative of redemption through sacrifice is deeply woven into not just Western culture but most human cultures really.
At the cost of increased methane emissions due to leakages from natural gas infrastructure that makes it far worse than coal since methane is a much more potent GHG.
Sources:
https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/natural-gas-industry-has-methan...
https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/coal-and-other-fossil-fu...
Just a question: why should we?
Personally, I prefer global warming with the life quality of modern middle class rather than the wheather of 300 years ago with the life quality of ancient aristocracy.
If you want to go back to stone age, please feel free to go: I'm not retaining you.
On the other side, if we can discuss about how to improve quality of life for everybody, I'm in! And if we manage to solve global warming without impacting life quality, even better!
I think there's a latent suggestion in your language that reducing consumption discards all of the technological social progress of the past three centuries, while climate change presents a negotiable inconvenience. The balance is quite the opposite. You can keep cellphones, the internet, food security, modern medicine, and clean, running water. If anything, many of these advances are secured, rather than threatened, by curbing human-driven climate change.
>If you want to go back to stone age, please feel free to go: I'm not retaining you.
Beyond misjudging the gravity of the problem at hand, I think this comment is also a little short-sighted in appreciating the nature of the problem and our collective responsibility for it. The choices we make as consumers, designers, and voters have impacts that affect the whole world, including populations with clear stake but no voice in those decisions. It's particularly callous to tell someone whose island will be washed away by rising sea levels that they're free to eschew any technology they want to curb ecological impact while our own emissions (by absolute value or per capita) far exceed their own contribution to atmospheric CO2 levels.
In this case you should spend more money on less meat. Just saying 'spend less money' continues to ignore the enternatilies that make meat production such a driver of climate change.
I mean we could all live like caged hens and keep adding to our numbers for a while longer, but eventually there are going to be some hard limits to how many people the ecosystem can actually hold.
[1] - https://news.mongabay.com/2011/01/how-genghis-khan-cooled-th...
And Climate Crisis is just one of the symptoms. World's ecosystem is a multifaceted, wastly complex, richly interconnected and very reactive structure.
We as species WILL NOT get away with having power of a bulldozer and mind of a dragonfly[1].
A question: Considering human biology and mind, can human species ever collaborate and act together for a logical cause? I have almost lost all my confidence that we have that ability/function. I really would like to hear your perspective on this.
[1]: https://youtu.be/Y0vRupFPw90
We should at least address the elephant in the room.
For centuries the west (including me) has consumed the planet resources while colonizing the rest of the world.
Now that poor countries started having access to the same kind of benefits we have, we tell them that they should stop doing it.
It's not gonna happen, so we.better start thinking about what we will do when the oceans levels will rise.
Hopefully for me living in the Mediterranean sea will make the catastrophe bearable.
Do you really think any country or society is "living like" before? Climate consciousness has come a long way. We are getting better in every aspect, though population growth will be an ongoing issue.
It will be impossible to progress if every time we try something or suggest something people shout "not good enough!"
That said, population is already leveling off. The main cause of population growth now is not high birth rates, but rather increased lifespans and lower infant mortality rates. By the end of the century, population will have leveled off and may even start shrinking some.
Plant 100,000 trees in a summer though and you’ve more or less offset your life’s consumption - cheeseburgers or no.
I agree we need people to be more conscious of waste and to reduce excessive consumption, but at the same time, we need easy solutions for people to contribute.
I like the dual strategy of Project Wren (https://projectwren.com/) that encourages lifestyle changes and buying carbon offsets at the same time.
You can already see this happening with the Green New Deal and Global Climate Strikes. The Green New Deal has turned into a jobs program. (Which is deeply ironic, because the Soviet Union was immensely energy inefficient and polluting, as a result of populist measures such as subsidized energy. Increasing middle class prosperity is inherently incompatible with reducing carbon output.) The Green New Deal, together with the climate strikes have become vehicles for socialist ideology. For example, despite experts broadly agreeing that we need things like carbon taxes, the Global Climate Strike platform categorically rejects market mechanisms to address climate change.
Carbon capture and cheap nuclear power can solve climate change, and we can do it without world government. (To many people, that second part is a downside, I think, which is why technological solutions to climate change get less emphasis than political solutions.)
But your argument is a bit of a straw man -- "do all things" refers to doing all things possible to deal with climate change, i.e. use new technologies that pollute less, engage in direct mitigation (like planting trees), and reducing emissions by changing consumption.
It doesn't necessarily mean implementing the green new deal as proposed, as one could possibly accomplish similar effects with a different set of measures.
But of course, your argument that carbon sequestration and nuclear energy will in effect magically solve this problem without the need for any changes in consumption or pricing effectively is arguing that we should, as a species, continue on our destructive path, because somebody else will come along and just fix the problem for us.
Wrt cheap nuclear solving climate change: Nuclear is currently one of the most expensive forms of energy. How do you propose we make it cheap enough so that we can essentially waste the energy for unburning coal we could have left in the ground by a more aggressive buildout of renewables paired with improving energy efficiency?
Can you share your sources of information?
Almost everything else in the comment after that seems a bit off-kilter to me:
> The Green New Deal has turned into a jobs program
"turned into"? Are you familiar with the "New Deal" of historical note that it's deriving the very name from? It's always been a jobs program. That's part of the point.
> Soviet Union
As sibling commenters have already pointed out, I don't see how this comparison was particularly well-connected or topical.
> Increasing middle class prosperity is inherently incompatible with reducing carbon output.
No?
> The Green New Deal, together with the climate strikes have become vehicles for socialist ideology.
I don't disagree with that; what's your point, though? Are you trying to run with the association that "socialism=bad"?
I'm writing you from fairly-darn-Socialist (and fairly-darn-functional) Norway, so I'm not picking up.
> despite experts broadly agreeing that we need things like carbon taxes, the Global Climate Strike platform categorically rejects market mechanisms to address climate change.
Almost every single person I've talked to who has participated in or associated with the climate strikes has been an advocate for carbon taxes.
So, no. Those people and platforms do not categorically reject market mechanisms. In fact those that I've talked to seem to be essentially _on your side_.
> we can do it without world government
I'm sure that's true, but also, I'm not sure where there's been a suggestion of "world government" that you seem to be responding negatively to. Everything you've mentioned in your own comment is single-government internal proposals, or, groups of people advocating for general directions within their own local governments.
So in total: while I think you and I would agree in many many details about how to plan reactions to climate change, can I council you to polish your message to _focus on that_ and skip the world-socialist-government-conspiracy tinge? It's just not necessary. It seems to be making you believe you disagree with a bunch of people who... by and large agree with you, and are in fact interested in (and pursuing) market-oriented solution paths.
- "The authoritarian infrastructure will be built"
I'd argue it already has been built, by Google, NSA et al. Also, I fail to see why these "high levels of government regulation" would be bad, since we've tried the alternative and it obviously doesn't work..
- "The Green New Deal has turned into a jobs program."
I'm no american, but has this been put into law already?
- "the Soviet Union was immensely energy inefficient and polluting"
I do hear that from time to time but no one can provide any sources for this claim. Can you? Not planning on protecting the ol' USSR, but still seems insincere to just throw this around without attribution.
- "Increasing middle class prosperity is inherently incompatible with reducing carbon output."
That's a pretty flat statement. Why would this be so?
- "the Global Climate Strike platform categorically rejects market mechanisms to address climate change."
We tried this, it hasn't worked (so far). Why should we continue with this measure instead of other approaches?
- "Carbon capture and cheap nuclear power"
both of which do not exist. See my comment about LCOE and the link below for cheap nuclear power. With regards to carbon capture, we have some pilot plants but this technology (or rather mix of technologies) is nowhere near ready for the massive scale of deployment we'd need already. That's why the focus is on political solutions imo.
I don't think that's implied here. Clearly there's a lot to be done, this is just a good place to start.
The title is literally saying exactly that, it's not implied, it's explicitly said:
Scientists Identify How Many Trees to Plant and Where to Stop Climate Crisis
Planting those trees is NOT going to stop the climate crisis, a large number of other things need to be done too.
However, I think it's also true that some of the other solutions are likely to happen "on their own" eventually. E.g. technological advancements in alternative energy and electric cars are likely to eventually allow them to replace alternatives (if the environment survives long enough).
A lot of the other parts of the solutions don't have good ways to accomplish them. For example, I don't see a good way to reduce travel or population growth.
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I for one, want to get past this so we can move on to fixing our society.
Quote from the article: "Around 0.9 billion hectares (2.2 billion acres) of land worldwide would be suitable for reforestation, which could ultimately capture two thirds of human-made carbon emissions."
This is wrong. The reason is a bit technical. The issue here is that about half of the emissions going into the atmosphere get soaked up by natural sinks, e.g. the oceans. However if you take carbon dioxide out of the air the reverse happens: The oceans and other sinks re-release the carbon.
This needs to be taken into account, but hasn't happened here. So the effect is only about half the size of what is claimed.
Sources by some climate scientists explaining this: https://twitter.com/pepcanadell/status/1147066574299377664https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1147190442145898496
To be clear: There's nothing wrong with planting trees as one solution to the climate crisis. However this study was presented in a way that overestimated the effect massively. (Also I have some doubts that planting trees is "easy" given the political situation in the countries that have the largest potential.)
Nevertheless, it also shouldn't be the case that what you remove from the atmosphere gets released from the ocean in equal quantities - it should be seen as trees sequestering CO2 from both the atmosphere and ocean (and potentially other sinks) as according to however the equilibrium of the system works out, right?
I agree with your point that it's not a cure-all though. It might be overstated in the abstract but is still worth pursuing. The enthusiasm, I understand, for planting trees is that it's broadly seen as returning the environment to something that is more equivalent to an earlier point in history and so is seen as less likely to have adverse affects as compared to forms of geo-engineering with less of a precedent in nature.
This objection doesn't make sense. The article is talking about the total estimated amount of carbon dioxide generated since the industrial revolution. That's an absolute number. It doesn't matter where that CO2 currently lives, and it's not saying 2/3 of what is in the atmosphere.
But then you'd lose a lot of farmland, and have to destroy a lot of cities and homes.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/12/04...
Yet, somehow people in Europe think that a huge deforestation is taking place.
It's weird to me that people here seem to think of fields as nature, when it's actually huge zones where a single species of plant grows and where insects are killed with poison
EDIT: I will look for a source for this though, so do remain skeptical of what I just wrote for now.
EDIT2: this site claims a net loss in Dutch forest area of 3.8% since the year 2000. Clicking around on the map it seems like practically all European countries are losing forests faster than they are gaining them. At the moment I cannot find a source for the governmental policy claim though.
[0] https://www.globalforestwatch.org/map/country/NLD?mainMap=ey...
Change forest area into other use, e.g. residential, is hard AF. So forest-as-land-use is AFAIK not decreasing in Europe.
But re-forested areas are commercial forests, thus they're cut down. And the first re-forested forests reached their peak condition. So a lot of them are cut down. Usually they're given time to naturally re-seed from remaining trees (unless it was clear-cut, which are not advised in most cases nowadays), re-planting takes time and it takes time for that fresh cut to look like a forest again.
Trees take in much more CO2 while they're growing. So if we keep cutting down trees at their prime age, don't burn them and replant new trees in their place... That's pretty efficient. If that wood replaces some concrete in construction, which is terrible for CO2, double win!
We had a very heated debate about this in my country. Forest-land-use area is growing. But there're lots of clearings out in the forests. Cutting permits allow significantly less than theoretical yearly lumber growth. So sheer mass is growing too. But people see a clearing and think of that as deforestation.
Another issue when old and bio-diverse forests are cut down and then commercial mono-culture forest is re-planted in it's place. But from CO2 side - that's better than keeping the old forest in place. Not so good from eco diversity perspective though.
Person 1 - locally we (majorly developed nation) are improving resource X!
Person 2 - ... but you're not accounting for exporting/externalizing demands for resource X that mask true usage by us.
Person 1 - ah but XYZ group shows that even if you account for this (which is really quite tricky to account for accurately) then everything is fine and we are doing better.
But the ultimate test of whether or not we're really improving anything always has to be a global view. Local resource improvement is meaningless and accounting for exporting of consumption/production etc is very tricky to account for unless you simply look at global trends.
And globally percent of forest area has been in steady decline[1]. I have no doubt some think tank has written a report showing that "even if we account for europe's exportation of plant biomass needs, things are still doing better" but all that really matters is always the global trend.
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.FRST.ZS?
https://rewildingeurope.com/rew-project/restoring-the-caledo...
(The video at the bottom is a bit gushing but it's a decent view of what the reforestation projects want to achieve).
But of course in the end you get to claim that you are using more renewable energy and increasing local forest coverage!
[1] http://www.biomassmagazine.com/articles/16053/uk-bioenergy-c...
Ancient forest can expand but it has to do so gradually to maintain the characteristic species mix. And in order to expand it has to be protected in the first place.
That actually highlights a global issue: We, in Europe, scold developing countries for doing what Europe has done (but it was centuries ago so people don't realise it). That is reasonable considering what we now know and modern technology but to avoid hypocrisy this should be accompanied by offers of help to achieve development and jobs without deforestation, and perhaps by no longer buying commodities that require deforestation.
This is the shifting baseline effect and it really negatively affects conservation efforts.
That's because they have empirical knowledge on the ground -- for example in my country there is tons of deforestation taking place, and has been going on for decades.
Note that statistics can be misleading, especially when governments want to paint a greener picture: e.g. areas can be de-characterized (from "forrest" to available for construction and commercial use, etc), after which cutting trees there is not "deforestation" anymore...
The plantations are dead wildlife-wise, and they alter soil chemistry such that native broad leaf trees will not be able to re-colonise.
The vast majority of us on here are some type of engineer. We can answer the question of "How do we efficiently plant 1bil hectare of trees within 5 years?"
Yes, we need to do other things too. But if we wait for some panacea plan to emerge it will be too late. Just do it.
Just imagine if we accomplished this within 5 years. How glad would we be in 30 years once they really started to mature? Let's be good to future us.
nature can plant trees instead. Trees, if left alone for a couple of years will naturally reproduce and plant themselves. The key bit is leaving the space alone. It is not something that really needs engineering on the whole.
There is a small amount of places where trees would not be able to colonise if left alone - and we need to use the science of Ecology to examine why. it's here where geotechnology can come into play, but for the vast vast majority of the billions needed, we just need to leave alone .
Now, saying that, there is a great benefit in getting children interested in nature and planting trees and so we shouldn't stop planting efforts for that sake. But there is a deeply troubling idea that we can engineer nature to save nature when it's nature that can save itself and us.
Some parts, such as New England, were farmed more intensively and have been allowed to go back to forest. In other areas, such as the midwest, poor or swampy land that was used for dairy farming pastures is no longer needed, since dairying is now concentrated in fewer huge herds. However, in these cases land had been allowed to go back to forests naturally, with scrubby transition shrubs and trees that are pretty poor forests. We could get both more carbon capture and more forest products by better forest management in the US. Invasive species such as kudzu, asian bittersweet, and porcelain berry make transitioning back to mature terminal stage forest difficult and expensive.
There's a pernicious influence from government here. It's unhelpfully easier to get funding for "plant 1000 saplings" than for "leave an area to transform into thorny scrub, pioneer tree woodland, and finally full woodland".
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/26/wildwo...
The TL;DR: version is that because it was choked with trees and brush, the groundwater had been removed. The owners restored it to primarily native grassland, and in the process restored natural water holes, and streams.
National Geographic did a really good 8-minute video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSPkcpGmflE
More info on the ranch: https://bambergerranch.org
Trees are great in some environments, but not appropriate for all environments.
Impossible until it isn't.
Feels a bit too good to be true.
If the only "real" solutions are things like reducing human energy use long term, you might as well stop caring and just hope for the best. It won't happen, and even if it does than the long-term^ consequences might be worse than climate change.
The actually sustainable solutions are those that are cheap, positive sum, and lead to humans thriving.
IDK if this is a solution (or meaningful part thereof) for climate change. It's not really an easy solution though. Land politics are tough, to put it mildly. They always have been.
^Operative term.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/human-activity-in-china-an...