"The other reason to love this story is that it is about getting paid not to do things. That is always complicated. If you are paid to do things, it is relatively easy to measure how much you did and how much you should get paid. If I want you to cut down trees for my sawmill, we might agree on a price of $5 per tree. You will cut down the trees and deliver them to me, and I will count them. If you deliver 100 trees then I’ll pay you $500.
"But if I want you not to cut down trees for my carbon capture program, it is harder to measure how many trees you didn’t cut down. Just sitting here right now, typing this column on my computer, I have cut down zero trees,[1] which means in theory that there are absolutely billions of trees that I have not cut down. Where is my check? A landowner might have planned to cut down only a few trees this year, but she will have incentives to say “I was planning to cut down all my trees,” in order to get paid for not cutting down all of them. She might have trees that are impossibly un-economic to cut down, but it’s easy enough for her not to cut them down.
"Similarly, if I agree to buy 100 trees from you, and you sell me the trees, you can’t sell them to anyone else: I have the trees. If I agree to pay you not to cut down 100 trees, though, what’s to stop you from getting paid by someone else not to cut down the same trees? The trees stay there; you can sell the concept of them staying there as many times as you like."
>“His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbours sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counselled one and all, and everyone said “Amen.”
Oh boy, I'm huge into trees and boy could I talk about this. Not cutting down trees is way more lucrative than cutting down trees. You can only cut a tree down once, but you can not cut it down as many times as you like. And then, once you're done not cutting it down, you can cut it down and sell it to a sawmill.
yeah, this will only become part of a forest management plan. i bet that everybody will do it eventually, and the market will have too many credits for sale. and the polluters will continue to pollute, and use their carbon credits as a marketing gimmick.
True obviously but the poor man working for a logging company in Brazil needs to feed his kids today. He's not concerned about what happens in 20 years.
Wouldn't a better solution be to encourage more things built of wood? Cut the trees down and use them, while replacing with more.
E.g. Encourage more wooden houses and your not only capturing carbon but storing it separately so more can be captured in that same place.
While there are probably many better solutions, you would think whatever they are we need something that can continue to capture carbon ongoing. A forest, as great as they are for a plethora of reasons, is fairly finite in terms of carbon capture.
I've had this on my mind for a bit, but carbon capture seems to be oversold from my understanding. The way I see it, additional trees would reduce atmospheric carbon at that moment in time, but as they burn or decay it releases CO2 back to the atmosphere and the problem continues. If the issue is that we've pumped so many tons of carbon out of the Earth, the solution is to pump so many tons of carbon back in. Remove it from the cycle so that the net amount of surface carbon is reduced.
Personally, my solution is to start chucking trees down a mineshaft and backfill the shaft when it's full. It's crude but it gets the idea across.
Edit: happened to be listening to a podcast writing this and right as I finish they start talking about olivine, which is a mineral that can absorb it's weight in CO2 and prices around $7 USD/ton. Maybe a better option for carbon removal
Reforestation is an extremely time-consuming affair with many, many possible ecological and economic downfalls and/or environmental harms. As a sidebar to your suggestion of using more wood, perhaps a partial step in that direction is greater recycling of unfinished wood products into chips and dust for use in engineered wood outputs. Similarly, a change in the chemistry of wood finishing products (stains, coatings, paints, adhesives) to 100% removable or neutralized state would permit discarded finished wood products to be recycled rather than dumped. So, to directly reply to your question, cutting down trees and replacing them with more is not a quick or necessarily successful strategy.
I don't think we need that much construction built, for one thing.
I have an even simpler idea: Cut the trees down and store the wood permanently.
Left in the wild, the wood will eventually break down, and the carbon return to the atmosphere. But there must be some low tech way to preserve the wood for a century at least.
Logging and converting the trees into lumber for building isn't free from a carbon perspective. A modern logging operation typically has several large diesel-powered heavy machines to cut down and move the trees. Then the logs are transported by diesel-powered semi trucks to a mill. The mill has many machines to move logs, cut them, and remove some moisture (kilns). Once they are cut, they are loaded onto more diesel powered trucks and delivered somewhere to sell.
Back at the site of the cut, piles of slash (all of the branches) are left on the ground to rot, or sometimes piled up and burned.
How long will the buildings made of wood last? Eventually they are bulldozed and hauled away to a landfill.
I work in an adjacent space, and have been encouraged by an investor to push into the reduced emissions and avoided emissions sector. I’m yet to decide, but a few factors are currently dissuading me:
1. The assumptions behind forestry and soil offsets on closer inspection can seem a bit stretched.
2. An offset creates revenue for the person creating the offsets - which money is then spent on things which have their own carbon intensity - eg fuel or a vehicle or whatever. So there’s ultimately no offset.
3. Being able to offset your carbon emissions has unpredictable consequences. I remember seeing some study which showed people who bought a Macdonald’s salad were likely to reward themselves with a burger. I can see how I’d offset a flight and then piously reward myself with a steak later.
4. Companies buying offsets open themselves to reputational risk associated with the quality of the offsets. Is it worth the risk?
There seem to be a bunch of other reasons why offsets are questionable but those are my four reasons for not going into this space.
I looked relatively deeply in to this area when starting an asset exchange ~2011. My conclusion at that time was that existing carbon trading / offsets tokens were basically non-fungible due to disparate definitions from different regulators. Nominal assets ranged from honor-system self-declarations to heavily audited. The resulting asset types were found to be effectively illiquid, despite a rush to open exchange platforms and media talk of trading schemes, owing to lack of buy-side demand. Individually the systems were mostly only useful for gaming local regulators. I doubt their primary purpose today has changed from multinationals greenwashing their dirty operations with suitably distracting levels of misdirection.
I once worked as a data analyst in the EM&V industry (Evaluation, Measurement, and Verification). I worked for a small group of consultants and our primary customer would be energy utilities across the United States. You see, an energy company, all things equal, would prefer to sell more energy rather than less. More energy sold == more profit, for the most part - coops and other, smaller scale operations aside.
Now, society has decided that incentivizing growth in energy consumption isn't a winning strategy in the long run. Or, at least, politicians have signed into law various incentive programs to change the business calculus of energy companies, wherein an energy company can get reimbursed for energy efficiency campaigns that it runs and, if total energy consumption is less than a certain rate year over year, the energy company can claim a prize to offset the profit forgone by promoting energy efficiency.
However, it is not so straightforward to account for how much energy _isn't_ being used on account of a specific intervention. Enter here the entire EM&V industry! We would run studies to account for this missing energy, and it was a very thorough business - comparing lists of equipment replaced under industrial efficiency programs, measuring Watt-hours offset, surveying households to figure out how many of them actually installed those complementary LED lightbulbs. Every year we would run through the same process with the same energy companies and then they'd find out how much energy they saved.
At times it felt surreal to be a part of this giant industry competing for a chance to count how much of something wasn't used, but it looks like that industry is only going to grow as carbon caps and offsets become a bigger deal.
I don't think it's a bad thing, just a profoundly weird one. In 50 years I wonder how many people will derive their income from counting things that don't exist :)
I suppose to align incentives you should only get paid if you grow a tree cut it down and then bury the carbon [trunk] somehow. Anything less isn't permanently removing carbon from the atmosphere
For example just growing a tree is no net carbon reduction - the tree dies naturally the carbon is released at some point.
I see this point brought out often. Some counter points:
a) Trees can live for hundreds of years. We're in the midst of transforming how we produce energy and improving energy efficiency all around... A good CO2 'battery' to smooth out the problem can still be very helpful. Think of it as a low-pass filter to help reduce a shock.
b) Forests have a massive number of positive effects beside co2 sequestration, including local cooling and aiding the water cycle. A world with more forests is a healthier world. (See also: riding a bike instead of driving. It saves CO2, and has numerous health benefits.)
Yeah, that sounds more reasonable. Pay people for the quantity of carbon they sequestered at the point it's turned into biochar and buried (or whatever technology is used), and maybe have financial instruments set up so that investors can buy the rights to future carbon from the people growing the trees, so the growers don't have to wait fifty years to get paid. If there's a forest fire, the investors lose their investment, and that's just part of the built-in risk.
On the micro-scale, I wonder if towns and cities could start incentivizing people to dispose of more yard waste. For instance, you get a rebate on your garbage bill based on how many hundreds of pounds of lawn clippings and branches you stuff in your yard waste bins each year (assuming that yard waste is processed in a way that sequesters the carbon, and people don't try to game the system by filling their bins with dirt or trash). You could also have something like a free service for people in rural areas to request a dumpster that they can fill with organic material and have hauled away as an alternative to just burning it.
> "There are companies out there that are endeavoring to use satellites and computers, that are artificial intelligence and machine learning to replace the boots on the ground foresters that have to go out and do these very precise measurements of trees by using satellite imagery to size up the trees and tell you how many trees there are, how big they are, how much they've grown over time. And the thinking is that by doing that and removing a lot of the upfront costs, you can start doing smaller and smaller tracts of woods."
It seems like having a national or a global database of trees would be a useful and interesting public data set to have. For instance, you could have the location, approximate age, approximate mass and height, and probable species for all the known trees in your region of interest. I wonder what the technical limitations on collecting this data are? I mean, the imagery and metadata Google Maps uses probably could be used to find most of the full-grown trees, as long as they aren't clustered too tight to each other to distinguish. Maybe you'd need radar scans or close-up imagery for dense forests. Most young trees would probably be missed unless you had some very precise way to detect them. (Drones flying through forests, maybe? Or miniaturized Google-streetview-type cameras affixed to wild deer?)
This also rubs me the wrong way and feels like something that can be gamed too easily.
It also feels like something rich people can throw some money at a problem to make it go away for themselves. Some years I remember an article about Paul Allen’s super yacht and the enormous amounts of fuel it was consuming. But they quickly added that he had offset this by planting a few trees somewhere… In my mind it would better we didn’t have 100m yachts ship around a few people for leisure.
It seems like a much better solution to think in terms of continuous material flows, rather than trying to stop all flows of a material humans consider waste.
It does make sense until renewable power, cleaner manufacturing tech and electric vehicles are able to replace the polluters. Would have been easier if more nuclear plants were ready to go.
It would've made sense if it was a true offset, i.e. carbon capture in various forms. But "offsetting" carbon-positive activity with carbon-neutral is just bizarre. Where is my money for sitting on a couch instead of taking a plane to Australia?
don't think of it as offsetting a polluter, think of it as charging a polluter.
requiring the purchase of offsets equal to the amount of pollution is essentially a tax on pollution. assuming it's fairly priced, it should create a market for non-polluting alternatives to the pollution-causers and lead to the eventual decline of pollution-causing processes as they're replaced with alternatives that don't require offsetting.
Maybe a better solution here would be laws and regulations to prevent the cutting down of trees. Seems like this obsession to make everything into a market doesn't always make sense.
There was an interesting article a while back about how pine tree farmers have moved away from cutting cutting timber and are instead selling pinestraw for landscaping because it's more lucrative.
Less extreme would be offering family planning in the form of condoms and birth control globally. You don't have to incentivize people to change their behavior, but help them achieve what they already want.
The optics of paying people in a culture not your own to not reproduce are problematic, yes? Besides, we know how to get people to have fewer children. Raise their standard of living.
[+] [-] neonate|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kgwgk|4 years ago|reply
"The other reason to love this story is that it is about getting paid not to do things. That is always complicated. If you are paid to do things, it is relatively easy to measure how much you did and how much you should get paid. If I want you to cut down trees for my sawmill, we might agree on a price of $5 per tree. You will cut down the trees and deliver them to me, and I will count them. If you deliver 100 trees then I’ll pay you $500.
"But if I want you not to cut down trees for my carbon capture program, it is harder to measure how many trees you didn’t cut down. Just sitting here right now, typing this column on my computer, I have cut down zero trees,[1] which means in theory that there are absolutely billions of trees that I have not cut down. Where is my check? A landowner might have planned to cut down only a few trees this year, but she will have incentives to say “I was planning to cut down all my trees,” in order to get paid for not cutting down all of them. She might have trees that are impossibly un-economic to cut down, but it’s easy enough for her not to cut them down.
"Similarly, if I agree to buy 100 trees from you, and you sell me the trees, you can’t sell them to anyone else: I have the trees. If I agree to pay you not to cut down 100 trees, though, what’s to stop you from getting paid by someone else not to cut down the same trees? The trees stay there; you can sell the concept of them staying there as many times as you like."
[+] [-] xkcd-sucks|4 years ago|reply
-- Joseph Heller, Catch-22
[+] [-] cortesoft|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pintxo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 55555|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cven714|4 years ago|reply
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/771699-his-specialty-was-al...
[+] [-] datavirtue|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greenie_beans|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gizmondo|4 years ago|reply
The only logical solution is to force you to buy some carbon offsets from coal miners. In the form of obligation not to mine some coal.
[+] [-] MomoXenosaga|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ineedasername|4 years ago|reply
I'm guessing the throughput on that is incredibly fast.
[+] [-] Igelau|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gustomaximus|4 years ago|reply
E.g. Encourage more wooden houses and your not only capturing carbon but storing it separately so more can be captured in that same place.
While there are probably many better solutions, you would think whatever they are we need something that can continue to capture carbon ongoing. A forest, as great as they are for a plethora of reasons, is fairly finite in terms of carbon capture.
[+] [-] Cycl0ps|4 years ago|reply
Personally, my solution is to start chucking trees down a mineshaft and backfill the shaft when it's full. It's crude but it gets the idea across.
Edit: happened to be listening to a podcast writing this and right as I finish they start talking about olivine, which is a mineral that can absorb it's weight in CO2 and prices around $7 USD/ton. Maybe a better option for carbon removal
[+] [-] wodow|4 years ago|reply
"Timber Towers" London proposal: https://www.natmat.group.cam.ac.uk/news/timber-towers-could-... (2019)
(encountered via the easy-listening of BBC Radio 4's 39 Ways to Save the Planet: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000qy43 )
[+] [-] cf100clunk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|4 years ago|reply
I have an even simpler idea: Cut the trees down and store the wood permanently.
Left in the wild, the wood will eventually break down, and the carbon return to the atmosphere. But there must be some low tech way to preserve the wood for a century at least.
That's easily long enough!
[+] [-] javman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Biologist123|4 years ago|reply
1. The assumptions behind forestry and soil offsets on closer inspection can seem a bit stretched.
2. An offset creates revenue for the person creating the offsets - which money is then spent on things which have their own carbon intensity - eg fuel or a vehicle or whatever. So there’s ultimately no offset.
3. Being able to offset your carbon emissions has unpredictable consequences. I remember seeing some study which showed people who bought a Macdonald’s salad were likely to reward themselves with a burger. I can see how I’d offset a flight and then piously reward myself with a steak later.
4. Companies buying offsets open themselves to reputational risk associated with the quality of the offsets. Is it worth the risk?
There seem to be a bunch of other reasons why offsets are questionable but those are my four reasons for not going into this space.
[Edit: I added reason 4].
[+] [-] contingencies|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robto|4 years ago|reply
Now, society has decided that incentivizing growth in energy consumption isn't a winning strategy in the long run. Or, at least, politicians have signed into law various incentive programs to change the business calculus of energy companies, wherein an energy company can get reimbursed for energy efficiency campaigns that it runs and, if total energy consumption is less than a certain rate year over year, the energy company can claim a prize to offset the profit forgone by promoting energy efficiency.
However, it is not so straightforward to account for how much energy _isn't_ being used on account of a specific intervention. Enter here the entire EM&V industry! We would run studies to account for this missing energy, and it was a very thorough business - comparing lists of equipment replaced under industrial efficiency programs, measuring Watt-hours offset, surveying households to figure out how many of them actually installed those complementary LED lightbulbs. Every year we would run through the same process with the same energy companies and then they'd find out how much energy they saved.
At times it felt surreal to be a part of this giant industry competing for a chance to count how much of something wasn't used, but it looks like that industry is only going to grow as carbon caps and offsets become a bigger deal.
I don't think it's a bad thing, just a profoundly weird one. In 50 years I wonder how many people will derive their income from counting things that don't exist :)
[+] [-] slang800|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sytse|4 years ago|reply
TLDR; there is a percentage set aside for fires but it seems way too little.
[+] [-] 0xdeadbeefbabe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zug_zug|4 years ago|reply
For example just growing a tree is no net carbon reduction - the tree dies naturally the carbon is released at some point.
[+] [-] sdenton4|4 years ago|reply
a) Trees can live for hundreds of years. We're in the midst of transforming how we produce energy and improving energy efficiency all around... A good CO2 'battery' to smooth out the problem can still be very helpful. Think of it as a low-pass filter to help reduce a shock.
b) Forests have a massive number of positive effects beside co2 sequestration, including local cooling and aiding the water cycle. A world with more forests is a healthier world. (See also: riding a bike instead of driving. It saves CO2, and has numerous health benefits.)
[+] [-] elihu|4 years ago|reply
On the micro-scale, I wonder if towns and cities could start incentivizing people to dispose of more yard waste. For instance, you get a rebate on your garbage bill based on how many hundreds of pounds of lawn clippings and branches you stuff in your yard waste bins each year (assuming that yard waste is processed in a way that sequesters the carbon, and people don't try to game the system by filling their bins with dirt or trash). You could also have something like a free service for people in rural areas to request a dumpster that they can fill with organic material and have hauled away as an alternative to just burning it.
[+] [-] elihu|4 years ago|reply
It seems like having a national or a global database of trees would be a useful and interesting public data set to have. For instance, you could have the location, approximate age, approximate mass and height, and probable species for all the known trees in your region of interest. I wonder what the technical limitations on collecting this data are? I mean, the imagery and metadata Google Maps uses probably could be used to find most of the full-grown trees, as long as they aren't clustered too tight to each other to distinguish. Maybe you'd need radar scans or close-up imagery for dense forests. Most young trees would probably be missed unless you had some very precise way to detect them. (Drones flying through forests, maybe? Or miniaturized Google-streetview-type cameras affixed to wild deer?)
[+] [-] greenie_beans|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spaetzleesser|4 years ago|reply
It also feels like something rich people can throw some money at a problem to make it go away for themselves. Some years I remember an article about Paul Allen’s super yacht and the enormous amounts of fuel it was consuming. But they quickly added that he had offset this by planting a few trees somewhere… In my mind it would better we didn’t have 100m yachts ship around a few people for leisure.
[+] [-] SuoDuanDao|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goatlover|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gizmondo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notatoad|4 years ago|reply
requiring the purchase of offsets equal to the amount of pollution is essentially a tax on pollution. assuming it's fairly priced, it should create a market for non-polluting alternatives to the pollution-causers and lead to the eventual decline of pollution-causing processes as they're replaced with alternatives that don't require offsetting.
[+] [-] askvictor|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CommieBobDole|4 years ago|reply
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/03/31/pine-need...
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mgarfias|4 years ago|reply
I wonder how much I could get for my 5 acres of big ass trees?
[+] [-] tailius|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] NonContro|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
If you don't want to be banned on HN, stop veering in that direction in particular, and stop posting flamebait generally.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] s1artibartfast|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tezzer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|4 years ago|reply
Impact is far from obvious; the immediate result you'd expect would be that someone else has the children instead.