[topher515]

My understanding is that reforestation, while being wonderful and helpful, simply doesn’t address the scale of the problem.

All forests today contain ~200 gigatons of carbon. Humans release ~25 gigatons of carbon per year. So DOUBLING the size of forests on Earth would just absorb 8 years of greenhouse gas emissions.

This made no intuitive sense to me until I began to think of the fossil fuels we’ve got underground as representing millions of years of forests “compressed” into oil / gas.

[tunesmith]

There's this pattern of:

- We should do "X"

- But doing "X" won't solve "Y"

- But "X" will help

- But "X" won't solve

- But "X" is necessary

- But "X" isn't sufficient

And I think the unstated conclusions are whether we should actually do "X" or not. I think the answer is usually Yes, we should do X (in this case, plant as many damn trees as we can), but I also think that's me arguing from an individual perspective and not a group psychology perspective.

Like, when people argue "but focusing on trees could distract us from addressing the entire problem", I used to just be dismissive of that, but I'm starting to feel like those objections should be taken more seriously - particularly having gone through this COVID debate where people focused so much on "flattening the curve" - which was necessary, not sufficient - that too many people signed on to gradual reopening just as the (high-amplitude) curve started flattening. If we had socialized a different benchmark, maybe it would have been more effective in the long run.

(But still, even if only in parentheses, plant trees.)

[quotemstr]

This whole argument is a great example of why we use prices and markets to decide on resource allocation instead of some other system. It's easy for people to cherry-pick evidence that their pet solution is the most efficient and to browbeat others into accepting that pet solution for non-economic reasons.

But when you have to attach a price to something, you have to essentially put up or shut up. Either your project is as efficient as you claim or you lose money. And if your project suffers from economies or dis-economies of scale? Prices can incorporate this information too. Prices keep us honest.

That's why a cap-and-trade system is the best approach for limiting and reducing carbon in the atmosphere. Put a price on the externality and the market will find a way to drive it down as far as it'll go.

[ikiris]

Most often by avoiding paying for the externality.

[notabee]

I think that we should cast the widest net for possible solutions, but there does come a point where they need to be winnowed down to which solutions will have the greatest effect (without bad side effects) with the least time and material resources. It'll still have to be multiple solutions on multiple fronts, though. Planting trees should be an easy win where the ecology currently supports growing them without too much maintenance work, but some areas would require massive effort to revitalize. Nuance like that is important, and so I encourage everyone to take things a step further mentally each time you engage with these topics. Do some napkin math, read some studies, etc. The more people that do that, the more we can create working knowledge and solutions instead of just taking pot shots at various proposals.

[carvink]

Some of that work about possible solutions has been done by Paul Hawken. His Project Drawdown book is at least an organized and reasoned list of 100 possibilities. I attended a talk about one of them - marine permaculture arrays. This is a body of working knowledge developed over the past thirteen years, with new inventions being developed and deployed for growing kelp in the open ocean. What's proven is the ability of wave, solar, wind powered pumps to upwell cold water hundred of meters beneath the ocean surface, and irrigate kelp, doubling the growth rate. This is important because 93% of global warming goes into the surface layers of the ocean, cutting of circulation of nutrients needed by life.

What's proven is that seaweeds and kelps can sequester more carbon per square meter per year than the tropical rainforest. The idea is put submerged, autonomous satellite-assisted kelp platforms in the open ocean at scale, to farm for food/feed/fertilizer/fish or just sink the kelp into the depths to sequester the carbon for hundreds of years. (per UN research)

There is now a kelp coin, which might someday play a role in emerging carbon sequestration markets. At the moment, it is a fundraiser, crowd- funding style to help raise capital to get these to hectare scale. https://www.climatefoundation.org/kelp-coin.html This kelp coin is new, just a couple of weeks out.

It might take a decade or more to get to a gigaton of carbon sequestration. But it is also about food security and ecosystem regeneration. If you like short videos for information, try https://www.climatefoundation.org/2040-make-a-change.html

[waheoo]

No. There are nearly 8 billion people on this planet. Figure it out.

This is a complex problem. Almost all solutions are worth trying. Most of them are going to be required. There does not need to be a winnowing of solutions. We just need to fucking start rolling them out.

I'm so over the argument that something won't be good enough.

No fucking shit.

Nothing is going to be good enough, nothing is going to be potent enough to solve how monumentally we screwed the environment up.

[mycall]

> There are nearly 8 billion people on this planet.

It is not a complex problem, this is the root cause.

[beenBoutIT]

If that number was rolled back to 4 billion (ethically, somehow) wouldn't that be sufficient to reverse climate change?

[Johnjonjoan]

I don't think it's a given we can reverse or even stop climate change. There are many positive feedback loops going on right now.

AFAIK neither the Paris accords or any climate management proposals entertain the idea of stopping climate change.

Edit: positive feedback loops are things like the melting ice caps. Less sunlight is reflected back to space by the white ice which means more is absorbed by the dark sea. This causes the earth to warm and more of the ice caps to melt....

In climate science there is something called the tipping point. This is when mechanisms like positive feedback will make drastic climate change inevitable (with current technology).

When the tipping point will happen is up for debate. IMO the idea that we have already passed the tipping point is also up for debate.

[lopmotr]

People frequently try to say the right things to convince the "stupid sheep" people but nobody bothers to think of how to convince themselves. Activists typically believe what they believe for bad reasons so they aren't able to make a good argument for why they're right.

How about estimate the future cost of climate change and the cost of various measures to prevent/reduce it. Do they result in a net gain or loss? There's no point doing something will help less than it hurts.

It's hard to predict future costs but we should at least try instead of (incorrectly) pretending it's the end of the world and no expense is too great to stop it. People probably have a sense that some measures (like reforestation) might not be worth the cost but others consider any cost is worth paying if it does anything.

[tunesmith]

Any investment can be argued to be not worth it before the return is received. If you constrain the timeframe to exclude the timeframe of the expected return, then of course it won't be worth it. Point taken if you're talking about a sufficiently long timeframe, though.

Second, there's the behavior of the thing you're trying to fix. If you're accelerating towards a wall, you don't analyze the cost of switching to your current velocity. You're still going to get smashed apart by the wall. With Covid, people wondered if a lockdown is worth the economic cost compared to not locking down, without stopping to consider if no-lockdown's economic cost exceeds the cost of the lockdown, which is the bleedingly obvious reality. Comparing the cost of mitigating climate change over not mitigating climate change sometimes ignores we aren't in a static reality - the status quo is that we are accelerating in a direction that leads to higher and higher costs.

Finally, the return on an investment can change over time. For many people, planting one tree is obviously worth the cost of planting one tree. I've got space in my backyard, and I have seeds. It's a few square feet and it sequesters about a ton of CO2 over 40 years. I mean, that's a hell of a return on an investment, compared to not planting the tree. Now, that return will go down over time, as it becomes harder and more expensive for society to plant trees, several billion trees from now. But right now it's easy money. A US Citizen can currently offset their own carbon footprint by paying tree-planting services somewhere between $120 and $200 per year. That's cheap. It'll get more expensive over time until the point it's not "worth it" by some argument, and that can also mean that "the effort of offsetting the worlds carbon footprint through world reforestation isn't worth it", but that doesn't mean it's not worth it at first.

[kshacker]

Ok I read the entire thread and I don't know where to plug my comment so let me do it here.

I recently drove through a road after a couple of years. On one side is Safeway and other shops - standard California shopping area - bigger than a strip mall smaller than a mall - not sure what to call it, and housing on the other side of the road.

Maybe it is bad memory but maybe it is real since I sort of exclaimed when passing through the area. The area used to be a concrete jungle but now they added so many trees that if you were not looking you may not realize you are passing a shopping area (of course I exaggerate but just a little). Not sure if they added 10 trees, 100 or maybe 200-300 (smallish ones not full size ones). I wonder if those things help and to what extent?

[Kinrany]

Cities are very small and expensive compared to the rest of the planet.

[ghransa]

It's a different lense we need, this would be the argument: we should do x,x if we do it won't have enough effects by itself, it's better than nothing to have that desired effect, it's a step in the right direction to achieve the desired results, what we need to have is other people to also have the desired effect to do the same thing independently. The question is what is the effect and how much of a piece of the whole would it mitigate. Can the people who do decide to make a change in that one goal can they compare notes to improve on that outcome.

Tldr: do what you can based on where you are at your life and hope improves in the right direction, this applies to all things.

[godelski]

That's pretty much the problem, but I should also add that this doesn't mean we shouldn't do reforestation. It just means there isn't a single solution to a complex global problem (honestly, is anyone surprised? Why the fuck are people suggesting single solution answers to complex nuanced problems?).

We should be making larger forests, fill them with birds and animals (this is actually a difficult part if you look at huge man made forests like the one in China). But we should also use man made sequestration. We should also redevelop coral reefs around the world. Etc. A lot of people seem to be forgetting the heart of the problem. There is too much greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It doesn't matter how we remove them, just that we do (assuming the removal process doesn't do more harm, of course). Doesn't matter if it is natural (i.e. forests & reefs) or artificial (CCS), it needs to be removed from the atmosphere (and ocean). There's no "one size fits all" solution.

[neutronman]

Bill Gates has reached the same conclusion. He’s funded carbon extraction tech that takes up a football field in size but does the job of millions of trees.

https://prepforthat.com/bill-gates-funds-project-that-extrac...

[godelski]

The added benefit of these is that you can directly capture carbon at its source. This is good since we know that emissions aren't homogeneous dispersed.

[m463]

When I read The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley, I found it really interesting to read the history of fossil fuels.

Basically whale oil and trees were replaced by coal mining - which saved whales and trees! And if I recall the coal mining saved 5x the landmass area in trees cut down (not that that helped the british isles). And then oil saved lots of coal mine deaths and strip mining.

We just gotta keep going forward. I think it's unfortunate that modern safe nuclear hasn't gotten a place. I like that solar is getting a chance at development (helped via greedy power companies.. PG&E@48c/kwh).

and yes, plant trees.

[loungeleezard]

Humans release closer to 35 metric gigatons of carbon per year. The increased thawing of the permafrost is releasing massive amounts of CO2, methane which is 80 times more impactful than CO2, and nitrous oxide which is 300 times more impactful than CO2. The oceans are warming and they are releasing increasing amounts of CO2.

Humans haven't been able to even slow the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, and now with the melting glaciers, thawing permafrost and warming oceans, which are all locked into positive feedback loops, it won't be long until the earth it's self will sustain the global warming pattern with no help from humans.

Between the oceans, the glaciers and the permafrost they sequester almost 2.5 times the CO2 that is currently in the atmosphere.

All we need is a technology that will capture and sequester greenhouse gases on a global scale to the tune of about 60 gigatons per year, this way we'll capture all the human released greenhouse gases, plus the emissions from the melting glaciers, thawing permafrost and warming oceans, and capture enough more so that we can eventually reverse the atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations back to the early 1700's. Oh, one last thing we need to invent this technology in about the next 10 years.

[jackfoxy]

> Humans release ~25 gigatons of carbon per year

~30% of which is from ongoing deforestation, unless the quoted ~25 gigatons is from fossil fuels only?

[mrosett]

My understanding is that we’ve been net reforesting worldwide for the last few decades.

[renewiltord]

There are 200 gigatons of forest in the world. We net 8 gigatons each year. So in 25 years we will have no forest if all this is true. That conclusion is absurd.

[eanzenberg]

These models are about as good as the covid ones!

[renewiltord]

Yeah, just through sheer arithmetic not all the parent comments can be right.

[simonebrunozzi]

You're missing an important detail: forests don't capture CO2 just once (in the form of organic matter, e.g. wood); they also capture it continuously... Slowly turning CO2 into coal/oil over millions of years, which is not included in the count for CO2 in forests.

It's instead like a slow by-product of it; as if we had "fossil forests" underneath live ones, which several gigatons of additional sequestered carbon.

Doubling the size of forests on Earth would provide benefits that go beyond the simple, one-time CO2 capture you refer to.

[almog]

I am not familiar with the numbers, but do they represent carbon trapped in the forest's plants or in the forest as a whole (that includes the soil as well). The latter has an accumulative nature in regard to the soil trapped carbon being a derivative.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that calculating how much carbon a forest can store, should take the throughput into account, not just the current total capacity.

[dredmorbius]

You'll likely appreciate Jeffrey Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine", which quantifies fossil fuel synthesis and utilisation:

https://dge.carnegiescience.edu/DGE/Dukes/Dukes_ClimChange1.... (pdf)

[bromuro]

There are for sure many other benefits of increasing the forested land, eg from protecting the soil to host a whole living ecosystem (from which humans can benefit from)

Not only reforestation helps with cleaning the air, but it tries to rolls back a (irreparable) damage we made to the environment during the last centuries.