[ISL]

If you'd like to fund trees, one could start buying land and start protecting trees.

Spending that money on intensive lobbying and forest advocacy in rapidly-deforesting countries could have an impact, too.

The trick, of course, is that neither of these techniques compound for the individual nor a startup. They are pure charity for the planet.

[samstave]

Actually, my idea would be the following:

1. Automate tree/crop planting

2. Reform regulations stipulating that planting of trees/crops/plants should be required on any and all uninhabited lands, as a matter of "imminent domain" regardless of the land owner. Perhaps even as a tax incentive to land owners.

3. The development of a maintenance and management policy and system around all that is planted

4. In conjunction with the RFS for flooding deserts, develop a multi-stage water transfer to desert desalinization ponds, then to be used in irrigation of the tree planting efforts.

We already have autonomous farming combines with excellent ability to harvest crops and plant seed. They should be put to use at scale in panting trees.

Further, we could make an effort to employ the vast amounts of humans with little opportunity to be productive to build, plant and deploy a massive effort such as this.

We dont need to try to do everything with robots, when we have millions and millions of humans.

If we are so progressive and smart, maybe learning how to manage a labor force in the millions to accomplish a great work such as terraforming a desert is someting we should attempt again.

[aoner]

RE: 1. Automate tree/crop planting:

https://www.biocarbonengineering.com/ These guys use drones to shoot tree seeds in the ground.

Also regarding terraforming a dessert, I think one of the biggest problems with is the number of water needed in the area, but I do think that this will be a really interesting part of the solution. Maybe the increase of land prices due to the decrease of arable land might make such ventures more profitable. There's a great ted talk about reversing desertification: https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_worl...

[thinkling]

Around here, tree farms replant by hiring people who plant hundreds to thousands trees per day per person and are paid for piece-work, a fraction of a dollar (~$0.20?) per treelet planted.

Given that you need to do this once every 25-40 years (maturity cycle of the tree), is doing it with drones really that big a win?

[aoner]

I'm also not sure how much of a big win the drones are. Proper forest management is probably way more important. So protecting against illegal logging and making sure that whenever trees are almost dying to take them out so that they don't rot and replant a new one.

[PeterisP]

Do you feel that #2 is a plausible goal that can be realistically achieved within a decade? I'm not really seeing any political will to do something like this, and without buy-in and cooperation from those who actually can make such regulations (and, effectively, authorize massive expenditures to make this happen) the other points don't really matter.

[dereke]

You are right that there is no political will right now. We need to make it happen.

Historically non violent direct action has been successful in changing politics (see womens suffrage, civil rights movement). This is the primary goal of the Extinction Rebellion http://extinctionrebellion.org

[52-6F-62]

Also is this a suggestion that a company that did just this would be accepted and funded?

That's an interesting option, but I wonder how a company might sustain itself doing this.

Lease land to eco-friendly activities like zipline adventures or something?

Also sounds like a good reason for expansion of National Parks services.

[francisofascii]

So does anyone know why this isn't happening more? Surely there are plenty of super wealthy tech titans, Hollywood stars, etc. that care about climate change. They could buy up rural land that is suitable for forestry and start planting trees, or prevent deforestation. Even small time donors could make an impact. Land in the US is cheap, right? What am I missing?

[PeterisP]

Land isn't that cheap compared to the (not that large) effect, especially if we want that effect to be meaningful in the short term.

Buying land and planting trees there will cost something like $2000 per acre and retain something like one ton of CO2 per acre per year (an order of magnitude estimate - depending on details both the cost and CO2 effect can be very different).

Industrial carbon capture at power plants can do that for something like 70$ per ton. That's much cheaper than forestry, but that's still not good enough. ycombinator is obviously looking for technologies that scale better than these existing approaches, something that might achieve large scale carbon removal at maybe $10/ton or less, at which stage the option "just pay a lot of money to reverse the effect of our emissions" might be plausibly considered affordable to our society.

[strainer]

>Industrial carbon capture at power plants can do that for something like 70$ per ton.

And then you have a lot of captured carbon dioxide on your hands - next big cost is the storage/conversion.

IPCC summary on cost of forest sequestration :

> Estimates of the private costs of sequestration range from about US$0.10-US$100/tC, which are modest compared with many of the energy alternatives (see Table 3.9 and Figure 4.9). Additionally, it should be noted that most forest projects have positive non-market benefits, thus increasing their social worth

http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg3/index.php?idp=171#fig...

[ed_balls]

Why do you want to buy the land? Raise the money for seedling, get volunteers/robots to plant them. Pay people to maintain trees on land (which should require 0 effort). You can come up with some clever designs to make it a tourist attraction and make some extra cash. Plenty of room for improvements.

Let say you can have 100 000 trees per square km. If 40 trees gives you 1 ton of carbon per year then spending $25 000 gives you $10/ton.

[PeterisP]

Well, because to the first approximation pretty much all land is used - any land thats suitable to be a forest but is not already a forest is only that way because it's used for grazing or farming, otherwise it would overgrow naturally (though not as efficiently as with planting). If you want to increase the amount of woodland, you have to decrease the amount of pastures or farmland, so you have to either buy that land from the previous owner (because they won't be able to graze or plant there anymore) or take it from them by force.

[ed_balls]

I pretty sure that are that 10 mln km^2 around the word that is not use (Canada, Alaska, Syberia and patches of land around the world)

[PeterisP]

As I said, I'm talking about "any land thats suitable to be a forest but is not already a forest". These large uninhabited areas in Canada, Alaska and Siberia don't have such land - if any spot there is suitable for trees, then trees already have filled that area for hundreds of years (I mean, these areas already have massive forests), and in the areas where trees aren't growing naturally, it's for a reason, planting won't make a difference.

If you want to convert not-woodland into woodland, then that limits you to farmland or pastures - because there's no such thing as "unused natural potential woodland", any potential woodland that's not used and left alone becomes actual woodland; any potential woodland that's not woodland only became that way when we cut down the trees and cleared the land because we wanted to use it otherwise.

[andersha]

It is happening.

The founders of Patagonia and The North Face brands did start conservacion patagonia together. [1]

It is one amazing project. [2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservaci%C3%B3n_Patag%C3%B3n... 2. http://www.conservacionpatagonica.org/aboutus_oh.htm

[schiffern]

>The trick, of course, is that neither of these techniques compound for the individual nor a startup. They are pure charity for the planet.

"Doesn't concentrate wealth exponentially; BZZT rejected!"

At some point, we apparently forgot that wealth/power inequality itself massively contributes to environmental problems.

* If you have no political power, you can't defend yourself and your land from pollution.

* If a large portion of the society has no political power, a large portion of the society cannot defend themselves and their land from pollution.

* In a society with extreme wealth, the price mechanism can't "kick in" to protect increasingly-scarce renewable resources (ie saving a species from extinction). Donella Meadows gives a much better explanation than I can, using fisheries as an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMmChiLZZHg&t=18m48s

[schiffern]

Better timecode link (the relevant comments are here in Part 2, but the whole thing is worth watching): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuIoego-xVc&t=10m30s

[abledon]

we need a black mirror-esque social credit score system where based on the individuals revenue, and what corporation they work for they have a 'tree quota' they need to fulfill. this could be hours volunteered at a global tree planting foundation, $$ donated to public works companies who plant the trees. I suppose if someone only made a small amount of $ and hid the rest behind their corporation , corporations would also have to be responsible in the system and donate $ to plant trees. website would be something like tree.global ... we need some way to tie all the world (or atleast continents) together under one government, a .global domain name or something.

EDIT: after reading other comments on how trees arent the greatest solution, replace trees with the best option and tie it to a continent wide / global wide black mirror credit score system.

[Pfhreak]

I'm seriously considering doing this myself. I've got some money set aside, and a smallish group (~20) people who are interested in contributing time, smaller amounts, etc. I'm no tech billionaire, but there's definitely areas where I could buy a few dozen acres of land.

I've been researching what's involved in reforesting, and it looks like a ton of work and a non-trivial cost. And maybe not the most efficient dollar / CO2 ratio, but also something that has the nice side effect of having a living forest around. (And also the side effect of providing exercise, access to the outdoors, etc.)

[buzzy_hacker]

Right. And that charity is https://www.coolearth.org/. They don't buy land but they protect trees.