[promocha]

Mindless money that's being poured into carbon capture projects, would help grow and maintain forests for at least 10yrs. A recent example like Heirloom that just started its facility and would only capture 1000 tons per year. It took them 4yrs and $50M+ to build one facility. Even if they somehow were to build 1000 facilities annually, they would only capture 10M tons of carbon. Also think about the carbon they would release by building those facilities. We need to remove 2 billion tons of carbon per year at current levels of pollution. Carbon capture projects are just another type of climate grifting like carbon offsets etc.

[cowboyscott]

I read that story as well, and while the company does promise increases in efficiency, the whole thing seems like a very expensive way to do very little.

Based on light googling, a mature tree can capture about 50lbs of carbon a year [1]. Assuming a few hundred trees per acre [2] you could get, let's say, 5 tons per year in the steady/mature state. Small numbers, but it adds up. Leander, TX is a suburb of Austin that sprung up in the last 50 years. It's a useful measure for me as 1) I have some intuitive comprehension of the size (37.5 sq miles) and 2) it was an area slowly developed over the last 50 years. If it were reforested (you wouldn't want to do this because, you know, people live there), we might get 100kton of capture a year (guesstimating). Repeat that 170,000 times and we can get back to the net emissions of the year 2000 - a 17gigaton reduction per year.

Of course, that would require planting an area double the size of the United States.

Anyway, that's napkin math and I hope I'm off.

1: https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2015/03/17/power-one-tree-ve... 2: https://bugwoodcloud.org/resource/files/27435.pdf

[virtue3]

Interesting.

I looked up the world consumption of lumber in 2018 (pre-pandemic stuff). ~ 2.2billion cubic meters, a cubic meter of wood is ROUGHLY(really depends on species) 0.55 tons.

So If we doubled lumber production (which would help housing/construction and a lot of other sectors) wed at least offset the carbon created by roughly half.

Still wont come close to solving our CO2 emission issues but interesting because we could "get something" from the lumber vs just storing CO2.

Assuming 100% carbon capture into wood weight which is not realistic but I think it's a good thought exercise.

[abakker]

I'm not saying you are doing this, but don't confuse Lumber production and forest growth. Increasing lumber production decreases forest growth.

we need to increase forest capacity for lumber production first.

[shzhdbi09gv8ioi]

I don't think you understand how trees work as carbon sinks. You're destroying that potential by cutting them down.

[colechristensen]

For multiple reasons we need actual foresters to build ecosystems, not just plant a bunch of trees. They also need to be built to maintain themselves, not be reliant on continued investment. Bonus points for building ecosystems that support a small amount of logging.

[promocha]

Fully agree with this. Continued investment with forest ecosystem maintainers in place is best solution.

[lwn]

Maybe "the world" needs to pay to countries with large forests (like Brazil) to maintain them, instead of paying them for cutting them down (lumber, agro, resources)

[hinkley]

Regulatory capture. Too much of the population of “foresters” is bought and paid for by the tree farming industry.

Asking foxes to grow more chickens definitely gets you more chickens but you don’t get the benefits, they do.

[verisimi]

They spent money here to put up boxes with special moss in around here.....

And when you think that they put carbon into greenhouses to make the plants grow more.. I reckon extra carbon just means extra growth in plant life. Ie the plants are a natural balancing mechanism.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

People are carbon. Could we remove them?

[11235813213455]

People are neutral, unless they spend money (which is more or less a unit of pollution & carbon-emission)

[verisimi]

I think that's the plan.