So having read the article summary, then the research paper, then reading the article summary again... it seems that the summary isn't at all an accurate summary of the research paper, but rather a narrow focus on the suboptimal cases where tree growing isn't super effective at sequestering carbon. It sort of completely ignores the cases where they observed enhanced carbon sequestration, increases in soil organic carbon, enhanced soil nitrogen availability, etc.
The emphatic message of the research paper is basically like, "tree growing to sequester carbon is very complicated, there's a lot we don't know, and there are a ton of different outcomes depending on how/where the tree growing is carried out."
One part of the paper I found most interesting was the section on nitrogen fixing microorganisms; they made it seem like the nitrogen fixation occurs via microbes pulling nitrogen from the soil and making it available to the plants. However my understanding is that those nitrogen fixing microbes pull N from the air, not the soil. Even good ol' wikipedia says "The bacteria are filamentous and convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia via the enzyme nitrogenase, a process known as nitrogen fixation." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankia) ... Undoubtedly there are microbes that can mine nitrogen from the soil, but why focus on those when the real bang-for-your-buck nitrogen fixation occurs when pulling nitrogen from the atmosphere.
"...tree growing to sequester carbon is very complicated, there's a lot we don't know, and there are a ton of different outcomes depending on how/where the tree growing is carried out.."
My guess is they say that because that's a much as they can say with full evidence backing. But suspect that most ecologists actually want to say "planting tree is a dumb solution for carbon sequestering or anything, please stop". That's what my ecologists say, certainly.
I mean, consider:
A) Trees are very good at spreading themselves. A tree adapted to it's environment will spread everywhere.
B) You can't get more carbon into an environment than ecosystem naturally sequesters - what it sequesters in long term, what's at the end of forest succession [1]. I'm in the California Sierras now and a lot of areas have a higher density of trees than the long term average and this along with global warming has contributed to the massive summer fires we've had. If anything, what this area's ecology needs is a thinning of the stick-like trees that have grown over the last 100 since all the existing trees were cut down during the Gold Rush. That can happen through fire or through human intervention but since human intervention is costly, fire is what it will be - fires made worse by fire suppression over many years. California's ecology is "fire based", etc.
Regarding nitrogen fixing, my understanding is that 'green manure' & cover crops take from the air, leave in the soil - but microorganisms sounds like it's more in the context of composting, where whatever waste material is 'broken down'. So not 'soil' in the sense of 'it was already there anyway', but rather.. 'in the ground but needing to be made smaller and more available'.
Cover crops have a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen fixing bacteria that they maintain in their roots. When the crop is harvested (and the roots die), the nitrogen that was fixed by the bacteria in the roots remains in the soil.
Free living, nitrogen fixing bacteria are free living and have a protein that allows them to fix nitrogen to allow faster growth than the bacteria that need to get their nitrogen through other processes. They are often anaerobic (or functionally anaerobic) and so flourish in areas that are oxygen poor (like soil and decomposing organic matter) and by fixing the nitrogen present they enable other organisms to live there (their nitrogen fixing allows fungus to become established in the decomposing organic matter - the bacteria themselves aren't doing the decomposition). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paenibacillus_polymyxa is one such species of nitrogen fixing bacteria that forms a biofilm on plant roots, fixes nitrogen, and produces a substance that makes the plant roots more resistant to other pathogens.
> “Industrial hemp absorbs between 8 to 15 tonnes of CO2 per hectare (3 to 6 tonnes per acre) of cultivation.”
> Comparatively, forests capture 2 to 6 tonnes of carbon per hectare (0.8 to 2.4 tonnes per acre), depending on the region, number of years of growth, type of trees and other factors, Shah said.
> Shah, who studies engineered wood, bamboo, natural fiber composites and hemp [at Cambridge, UK], said hemp “offers an incredible scope to grow a better future” while producing fewer emissions than conventional crops and more usable fibers per hectare than forestry.
> And limestone isn’t the only product microalgae can create: microalgae’s lipids, proteins, sugars and carbohydrates can be used to produce biofuels, food and cosmetics, meaning these microalgae could also be a source of other, more expensive co-products—helping to offset the costs of limestone production.
The efficient thing to do is render them into charcoal, yes.
Biochar is a great soil amendment, and doesn't oxidize over decades or even centuries, depending. Putting it back in the mines is an option, if we ever need to stop rebuilding topsoil, which is itself getting urgent.
Ever wonder why ancient ruins are buried under feet of dirt? Plants will grow the ground towards the sky given enough time. We could perform a high carbon sequestration crop rotation to pile up dirt in place rapidly.
> > “Industrial hemp absorbs between 8 to 15 tonnes of CO2 per hectare (3 to 6 tonnes per acre) of cultivation.”
> Comparatively, forests capture 2 to 6 tonnes of carbon per hectare (0.8 to 2.4 tonnes per acre), depending on the region, number of years of growth, type of trees and other factors, Shah said.
Per hectare PER YEAR.
Trees can store much much more carbon per hectare.
Do you know of any papers investigating how kelp or other seaweeds compare? I've heard some biologists informally claim that they would be even more effective because they can grow incredibly fast.
I thought trees were somewhat ideal because the carbon sequestered in them can be used as long-lived lumber. If the kelp sequesters carbon but then it gets released immediately when it decomposes or someone eats it, then it doesn't really solve the problem.
We need to be putting carbon back into the ground where we got it, or at least converting into forms where it lives a long time on the surface (decades or centuries).
Biochar [1] is a potential approach to long term carbon sequestration using waste biomass that has the positive side effect of enriching agriculture soils and producing biofuels, and it does not require special caverns like CCS.
There are potential unknown negative side effects of reducing environmental plant residues from current levels, however, so the choice of feedstock biomass shouldn't be taken lightly. Perhaps it should be made from human waste streams or fast growing grasses from areas that have high regeneration potential.
Then again, agriculture itself has fundamentally modified ecosystems for centuries, so there's not much that is timeless or sacred about the current state of industrial agricultural land. If it's a question of whether the leftover crop matter rots and CO2 is released, or is captured long term in biochar, then its compelling to consider it.
My native plant friend has a rant I've heard twice and I gather he's given countless times.
The logistics of a wetland restoration are that you get a lump of money to get a group to go out and stick plants in the ground, but the problem is that in an intact habitat plants compliment each other. Some won't grow next to tall plants, others will only grow next to tall plants. So a restoration should ideally be a series of planting events over three or four years, but that's either not 'sexy' enough for the financial and public policy people, or doesn't have the sense of closure they're chasing.
Mass tree plantings aren't fundamentally different, and doing mass anything means disturbing the soil. The current wisdom is that there's a point of no return with soil compaction, where if you cross it, there are only two solutions: One is to raise the surface area of the soil to increase the distance, the other is is to wait for the next ice age to scrape it all up and precipitate it back out. Those compaction layers also affect the flow of groundwater, so building upward only solves part of your problem. And it's heavy work, so you're again tromping the ecosystem you're trying to save.
The moral of the story is that if you disturb an area and end up with 90% dead trees, you may have done more harm than good.
I've been doing this to my lawn (central Texas): putting in a turf varietal of the native Texas Buffalo grass. This year, we had a 5ish month drought with a couple months of 105° daytime temps. My Buffalo went dormant; all of my neighbors' Bermuda died: the soil temp went too high for it. Soil temp death is something I've been warning people about for years.
It started raining, again, a couple weeks ago: my lawn is a lush, bright green, native surface (with Butterflies, again!); the rest of the street is gray mush.
Sequestring CO2 is a huge scale problem, and all solutions have significant flaws. Forests require vasts amounts of land, and storage is only assured as long as nobody decides to chop down the forest for other more pressing purposes (looking at you, Brazil). Storing CO2 in oceans (either in the form of "ocean fertilization" or by directly dissolving CO2 in seawater) could have huge and unknown consequences for marine ecosystems. Other solutions such as biochar and enhanced weathering of minerals have limited scalability.
As I see it, Geological CO2 storage (CCS) may be the only large-scale practical way going forward, despite all the bad rap it gets due to its historical association with the fossile fuel industry. After all, the excess C in the system came from the ground, and the ground may be the only place able to re-absorb it without significant environmental consequences.
> storage is only assured as long as nobody decides to chop down the forest for other more pressing purposes
Yes and no; if we're talking about logging for lumber then it's really a question of efficiency. Logging in optimal ways helps you minimize carbon release and maximize wood production long-term. If most of the wood is used in construction the carbon remains captured so long as the building stands or the timber is re-used or eventually buried, i.e. scrap wood from a tear-down or remodel isn't burned or left near enough to the surface to rot.
Setting aside land for logging this way has the benefit of using economic activity to our advantage. There are obviously limits but there is no one magic solution to climate change.
"storage is only assured as long as nobody decides to chop down the forest"
In 2020 "the Lionshead Fire [...] have almost completely engulfed the largest forest dedicated to sequestering carbon dioxide in the state [of Oregon]". Turns out that Nature may also decide to destroy a forest. Biomass comes and goes. As you stated, geostorage is the only solution that makes sense from a first principles perspective.
Wildfire is a natural part of many forest ecosystems, so it is definitely worth factoring that into plans for CO2 capture. Perhaps we can lean more heavily on high carbon capturing forests for construction and furniture again.
>despite all the bad rap it gets due to its historical association with the fossile fuel industry.
It's not really historical as in far in the past.
The relatively recent bill pushed by Trump that gives massive tax credits for CO2 sequestration were a veiled subsidy(or whatever you wish to call it) towards extracting more oil with enhanced oil recovery.
Even if proposed for vicarious motives, the technology as such may still be the right way to go.
From an environmental perspective, CO2 sequestration for EOR (enhanced oil recovery) makes little sense, other than reducing the carbon footprint of production a bit, demonstrating the storage principle and further developing key technology.
What makes more sense is to use geological storage for CO2 captured from industrial processes other than power generation - production of cement, steel and chemicals, in other words processes that would release large amounts of CO2 even if switching 100% to renewable energy.
Also, we need some place to store all that CO2 that purportedly would be captured using DAC (direct air capture) in the future.
When people say this they typically mean the land is no longer usable for another purpose. I don't think this is the case with 'forests,' let alone adding more trees to empty spaces in currently populated areas.
> may be the only large-scale practical way going forward
Why must it be "large-scale?" "We could plant trees, in addition to implementing many other common sense measures and improvements collectively." "Yes, but is it web-scale?"
The only reason to do this is to create a large for profit industry driven solely by monopoly granting regulatory bodies as opposed to many individual markets driven by reasonable and non-discriminatory laws and enforcement.
The earth is currently losing 3kg/s hydrogen and 50g/s of helium because that's what is in the upper atmosphere where a molecule can gain sufficient velocity to escape the orbit.
The issue with CO2 is that it is a heavier gas and so takes more energy to escape and is also more likely to fall. Left on its own over a sufficiently long time period, you'll end up with an atmosphere that is mostly rarefied carbon dioxide (see Mars).
Ejecting CO2 from ground level to the upper atmosphere and beyond in the quantities that are talked about when dealing with carbon sequestration (tons - not kilograms or grams) would be very energy intensive and using current technologies (we don't have surplus non-carbon based energy) would mean that we are adding to the total amount of carbon instead of reducing it.
Short answer is no.
CO2 is sitting at about 400ppm( parts per million(. So take a million things, say golf balls, and paint 400 of them red. The rest white. Put them in a container, then search for the red balls. The goal is to get at least ~150 to 200 before you have to look at the next batch. There's not really a quick way to do that.
Green house gas is such a hard problem because it's a dispersed problem. This is where we need to stop removing plant life from the earth, and start seriously considering a little bit of CRISPR to tweak plants to grow fast and absorb as much co2 as possible.
It'd also be great if we started iron seeding the southern ocean to kick that ecosystem into gear as we really need evertying to start sequestering carbon.
Trees are enduring. Certain trees take forever to decay.
It's "slow sequestration" but it lasts a long time. Hardwood is very valuable, and growing more valuable, and trees are pretty.
Everything else might sequester the carbon faster, but a tree is "forever."
And you wouldn't just plant trees on that piece of land. You could interplant other sequestration for probably 15 years before it was no longer viable, or raise livestock, whatever.
I found the arguments in the article rather weak. One was that trees die. True enough. But if you plant 100 trees and 10 die within ten years, that's still quite a bit of CO2 converted into O2. It may not scale so well, sure. But as far as I can tell, neither do wind & solar. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make the best use of them.
Yes you need to build ecosystems not just plant trees. Monoculture tree stands are often mostly empty of other life.
You need to plant a variety of native species keeping track of keystone species and year round food production so that your forest supports other life.
Absolutely. Our ways of thinking about the environment are trapped in the past. Where we focus on one variable and miss the importance and resilience that comes from a holistic approach. We need to be encouraging the right ecosystems for the right environment. For example, we need to be encouraging native grassland ecosystems in the great plains, not forests. Native grasses can have root systems 8 feet deep to deal with droughts and erosion, a forest just doesn't make sense there
I think this way of thinking is trapped in the past.
The reality of atmospheric carbon is that we have to get rid of it or face mass extinction. Trying to build some nostalgic idea of a untouched ecosystem in tune with 'nature' is just a feelgood ideology.
We're actually faced with an engineering project - the first planet that our species will terraform.
There is a grove of red pine near where I grew up that was planted row on row about 15 feet apart. These trees are 70+ years old but most of them are only 7-8 inches in diameter. The floor of this grove is just red with pine needles, nothing else can grow and any animals are just passing through.
Whenever I hear about planting trees for "carbon sequestration", I immediately remember walking through that forest and thinking how quiet and dead it felt.
The great simplification of the forest into a "one-commodity machine" was precisely the step that allowed German forestry science to become a rigorous technical and commercial discipline that could be codified and taught. A condition of its rigor was that it severely bracketed, or assumed to be constant, all variables except those bearing directly on the yield of the selected species and on the cost of growing and extracting them. As we shall see with urban planning, revolutionary theory, collectivization, and rural resettlement, a whole world lying "outside the brackets" returned to haunt this technical vision.
In the German case, the negative biological and ultimately commercial consequences of the stripped-down forest became painfully obvious only after the second rotation of conifers had been planted. "It took about one century for them [the negative consequences] to show up clearly. Many of the pure stands grew excellently in the first generation but already showed an amazing retrogression in the second generation. The reason for this is a very complex one and only a simplified explanation can be given.... Then the whole nutrient cycle got out of order and eventually was nearly stopped.... Anyway, the drop of one or two site classes [used for grading the quality of timber] during two or three generations of pure spruce is a well known and frequently observed fact. This represents a production loss of 20 to 30 percent."
A new term, Waldsterben (forest death), entered the German vocabulary to describe the worst cases. An exceptionally complex process involving soil building, nutrient uptake, and symbiotic relations among fungi, insects, mammals, and flora--which were, and still are, not entirely understood--was apparently disrupted, with serious consequences. Most of these consequences can be traced to the radical simplicity of the scientific forest.
A "keystone species" that is important for a lot of ecosystems but on the surface seems contradictory to the goal of carbon sequestration is wild fires. A stand of coniferous trees can block out light year round, limiting all other species of plants from growing underneath, but a fire will make the holes in the canopy that they need to spring up. Likewise, grasslands, which sequester a lot of carbon in their roots/soil, depend on fire to keep out trees and letting prairie plants thrive.
Ecosystems grow, maintain themselves, and can be better at sequestering carbon.
Random example: blue jays plant oak trees. They like acorns, pick them off trees and bury them for later, and forget some. If you have an ecosystem that supports blue jays your forest will expand without fundraisers and government programs.
Ecosystems fix carbon in more active biomass than just tree trunks. If you get soil building ecosystems and ecosystems that put more carbon in living creatures, you have less carbon in the atmosphere. The extra CO2 in the atmosphere is like fertilizer, and you can get life to utilize it more and grab more of it out of the atmosphere by supporting it in small ways so it can go on to support itself.
Readit News
The emphatic message of the research paper is basically like, "tree growing to sequester carbon is very complicated, there's a lot we don't know, and there are a ton of different outcomes depending on how/where the tree growing is carried out."
One part of the paper I found most interesting was the section on nitrogen fixing microorganisms; they made it seem like the nitrogen fixation occurs via microbes pulling nitrogen from the soil and making it available to the plants. However my understanding is that those nitrogen fixing microbes pull N from the air, not the soil. Even good ol' wikipedia says "The bacteria are filamentous and convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia via the enzyme nitrogenase, a process known as nitrogen fixation." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankia) ... Undoubtedly there are microbes that can mine nitrogen from the soil, but why focus on those when the real bang-for-your-buck nitrogen fixation occurs when pulling nitrogen from the atmosphere.
Anyhow, great research paper, crappy summary.
My guess is they say that because that's a much as they can say with full evidence backing. But suspect that most ecologists actually want to say "planting tree is a dumb solution for carbon sequestering or anything, please stop". That's what my ecologists say, certainly.
I mean, consider:
A) Trees are very good at spreading themselves. A tree adapted to it's environment will spread everywhere.
B) You can't get more carbon into an environment than ecosystem naturally sequesters - what it sequesters in long term, what's at the end of forest succession [1]. I'm in the California Sierras now and a lot of areas have a higher density of trees than the long term average and this along with global warming has contributed to the massive summer fires we've had. If anything, what this area's ecology needs is a thinning of the stick-like trees that have grown over the last 100 since all the existing trees were cut down during the Gold Rush. That can happen through fire or through human intervention but since human intervention is costly, fire is what it will be - fires made worse by fire suppression over many years. California's ecology is "fire based", etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_succession
Free living, nitrogen fixing bacteria are free living and have a protein that allows them to fix nitrogen to allow faster growth than the bacteria that need to get their nitrogen through other processes. They are often anaerobic (or functionally anaerobic) and so flourish in areas that are oxygen poor (like soil and decomposing organic matter) and by fixing the nitrogen present they enable other organisms to live there (their nitrogen fixing allows fungus to become established in the decomposing organic matter - the bacteria themselves aren't doing the decomposition). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paenibacillus_polymyxa is one such species of nitrogen fixing bacteria that forms a biofilm on plant roots, fixes nitrogen, and produces a substance that makes the plant roots more resistant to other pathogens.
> “Industrial hemp absorbs between 8 to 15 tonnes of CO2 per hectare (3 to 6 tonnes per acre) of cultivation.”
> Comparatively, forests capture 2 to 6 tonnes of carbon per hectare (0.8 to 2.4 tonnes per acre), depending on the region, number of years of growth, type of trees and other factors, Shah said.
> Shah, who studies engineered wood, bamboo, natural fiber composites and hemp [at Cambridge, UK], said hemp “offers an incredible scope to grow a better future” while producing fewer emissions than conventional crops and more usable fibers per hectare than forestry.
"Cities of the future may be built with algae-grown limestone" (2022) https://www.colorado.edu/today/2022/06/23/cities-future-may-... :
> And limestone isn’t the only product microalgae can create: microalgae’s lipids, proteins, sugars and carbohydrates can be used to produce biofuels, food and cosmetics, meaning these microalgae could also be a source of other, more expensive co-products—helping to offset the costs of limestone production.
Carbon sequestration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration
What you need is tonnes of carbon per hectare per year.
We don't have enough space to let these plants be there, we need to convert them into coal and throw it back into the mines.
Biochar is a great soil amendment, and doesn't oxidize over decades or even centuries, depending. Putting it back in the mines is an option, if we ever need to stop rebuilding topsoil, which is itself getting urgent.
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> Comparatively, forests capture 2 to 6 tonnes of carbon per hectare (0.8 to 2.4 tonnes per acre), depending on the region, number of years of growth, type of trees and other factors, Shah said.
Per hectare PER YEAR. Trees can store much much more carbon per hectare.
We need to be putting carbon back into the ground where we got it, or at least converting into forms where it lives a long time on the surface (decades or centuries).
There are potential unknown negative side effects of reducing environmental plant residues from current levels, however, so the choice of feedstock biomass shouldn't be taken lightly. Perhaps it should be made from human waste streams or fast growing grasses from areas that have high regeneration potential.
Then again, agriculture itself has fundamentally modified ecosystems for centuries, so there's not much that is timeless or sacred about the current state of industrial agricultural land. If it's a question of whether the leftover crop matter rots and CO2 is released, or is captured long term in biochar, then its compelling to consider it.
https://www.patch.io/blog/biochar
The logistics of a wetland restoration are that you get a lump of money to get a group to go out and stick plants in the ground, but the problem is that in an intact habitat plants compliment each other. Some won't grow next to tall plants, others will only grow next to tall plants. So a restoration should ideally be a series of planting events over three or four years, but that's either not 'sexy' enough for the financial and public policy people, or doesn't have the sense of closure they're chasing.
Mass tree plantings aren't fundamentally different, and doing mass anything means disturbing the soil. The current wisdom is that there's a point of no return with soil compaction, where if you cross it, there are only two solutions: One is to raise the surface area of the soil to increase the distance, the other is is to wait for the next ice age to scrape it all up and precipitate it back out. Those compaction layers also affect the flow of groundwater, so building upward only solves part of your problem. And it's heavy work, so you're again tromping the ecosystem you're trying to save.
The moral of the story is that if you disturb an area and end up with 90% dead trees, you may have done more harm than good.
It started raining, again, a couple weeks ago: my lawn is a lush, bright green, native surface (with Butterflies, again!); the rest of the street is gray mush.
As I see it, Geological CO2 storage (CCS) may be the only large-scale practical way going forward, despite all the bad rap it gets due to its historical association with the fossile fuel industry. After all, the excess C in the system came from the ground, and the ground may be the only place able to re-absorb it without significant environmental consequences.
Yes and no; if we're talking about logging for lumber then it's really a question of efficiency. Logging in optimal ways helps you minimize carbon release and maximize wood production long-term. If most of the wood is used in construction the carbon remains captured so long as the building stands or the timber is re-used or eventually buried, i.e. scrap wood from a tear-down or remodel isn't burned or left near enough to the surface to rot.
Setting aside land for logging this way has the benefit of using economic activity to our advantage. There are obviously limits but there is no one magic solution to climate change.
In 2020 "the Lionshead Fire [...] have almost completely engulfed the largest forest dedicated to sequestering carbon dioxide in the state [of Oregon]". Turns out that Nature may also decide to destroy a forest. Biomass comes and goes. As you stated, geostorage is the only solution that makes sense from a first principles perspective.
https://grist.org/climate/this-oregon-forest-was-supposed-to...
It's not really historical as in far in the past. The relatively recent bill pushed by Trump that gives massive tax credits for CO2 sequestration were a veiled subsidy(or whatever you wish to call it) towards extracting more oil with enhanced oil recovery.
From an environmental perspective, CO2 sequestration for EOR (enhanced oil recovery) makes little sense, other than reducing the carbon footprint of production a bit, demonstrating the storage principle and further developing key technology.
What makes more sense is to use geological storage for CO2 captured from industrial processes other than power generation - production of cement, steel and chemicals, in other words processes that would release large amounts of CO2 even if switching 100% to renewable energy.
Also, we need some place to store all that CO2 that purportedly would be captured using DAC (direct air capture) in the future.
When people say this they typically mean the land is no longer usable for another purpose. I don't think this is the case with 'forests,' let alone adding more trees to empty spaces in currently populated areas.
> may be the only large-scale practical way going forward
Why must it be "large-scale?" "We could plant trees, in addition to implementing many other common sense measures and improvements collectively." "Yes, but is it web-scale?"
The only reason to do this is to create a large for profit industry driven solely by monopoly granting regulatory bodies as opposed to many individual markets driven by reasonable and non-discriminatory laws and enforcement.
The earth is currently losing 3kg/s hydrogen and 50g/s of helium because that's what is in the upper atmosphere where a molecule can gain sufficient velocity to escape the orbit.
The issue with CO2 is that it is a heavier gas and so takes more energy to escape and is also more likely to fall. Left on its own over a sufficiently long time period, you'll end up with an atmosphere that is mostly rarefied carbon dioxide (see Mars).
Ejecting CO2 from ground level to the upper atmosphere and beyond in the quantities that are talked about when dealing with carbon sequestration (tons - not kilograms or grams) would be very energy intensive and using current technologies (we don't have surplus non-carbon based energy) would mean that we are adding to the total amount of carbon instead of reducing it.
Green house gas is such a hard problem because it's a dispersed problem. This is where we need to stop removing plant life from the earth, and start seriously considering a little bit of CRISPR to tweak plants to grow fast and absorb as much co2 as possible. It'd also be great if we started iron seeding the southern ocean to kick that ecosystem into gear as we really need evertying to start sequestering carbon.
Feasible is a different issue.
It is hugely expensive (give CO2 escape velocity) and wasteful (CO2 is a valuable substance, containing 2 important elements).
It might be in the wrong place (atmosphere) but we definitely want it on the earth, not in outer space.
It's "slow sequestration" but it lasts a long time. Hardwood is very valuable, and growing more valuable, and trees are pretty.
Everything else might sequester the carbon faster, but a tree is "forever."
And you wouldn't just plant trees on that piece of land. You could interplant other sequestration for probably 15 years before it was no longer viable, or raise livestock, whatever.
You need to plant a variety of native species keeping track of keystone species and year round food production so that your forest supports other life.
The reality of atmospheric carbon is that we have to get rid of it or face mass extinction. Trying to build some nostalgic idea of a untouched ecosystem in tune with 'nature' is just a feelgood ideology.
We're actually faced with an engineering project - the first planet that our species will terraform.
Whenever I hear about planting trees for "carbon sequestration", I immediately remember walking through that forest and thinking how quiet and dead it felt.
The great simplification of the forest into a "one-commodity machine" was precisely the step that allowed German forestry science to become a rigorous technical and commercial discipline that could be codified and taught. A condition of its rigor was that it severely bracketed, or assumed to be constant, all variables except those bearing directly on the yield of the selected species and on the cost of growing and extracting them. As we shall see with urban planning, revolutionary theory, collectivization, and rural resettlement, a whole world lying "outside the brackets" returned to haunt this technical vision.
In the German case, the negative biological and ultimately commercial consequences of the stripped-down forest became painfully obvious only after the second rotation of conifers had been planted. "It took about one century for them [the negative consequences] to show up clearly. Many of the pure stands grew excellently in the first generation but already showed an amazing retrogression in the second generation. The reason for this is a very complex one and only a simplified explanation can be given.... Then the whole nutrient cycle got out of order and eventually was nearly stopped.... Anyway, the drop of one or two site classes [used for grading the quality of timber] during two or three generations of pure spruce is a well known and frequently observed fact. This represents a production loss of 20 to 30 percent."
A new term, Waldsterben (forest death), entered the German vocabulary to describe the worst cases. An exceptionally complex process involving soil building, nutrient uptake, and symbiotic relations among fungi, insects, mammals, and flora--which were, and still are, not entirely understood--was apparently disrupted, with serious consequences. Most of these consequences can be traced to the radical simplicity of the scientific forest.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/sc...
Azn link for HN Books: https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/d...
Random example: blue jays plant oak trees. They like acorns, pick them off trees and bury them for later, and forget some. If you have an ecosystem that supports blue jays your forest will expand without fundraisers and government programs.
Ecosystems fix carbon in more active biomass than just tree trunks. If you get soil building ecosystems and ecosystems that put more carbon in living creatures, you have less carbon in the atmosphere. The extra CO2 in the atmosphere is like fertilizer, and you can get life to utilize it more and grab more of it out of the atmosphere by supporting it in small ways so it can go on to support itself.
I disagree. We also want to avoid ecological cascade effects in our ecosystems.
Geoff Lawton and Sepp Holzer are good people to look into.