[alexose]

Here in Northern California there are huge swaths of firs that are dead or diseased as a result of drought. When they burn (which they will, at high intensity), they'll release their carbon back into the air. Seems to me that there's an opportunity for someone to sequester a lot of carbon by burying these trees (https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0...) or by turning them into biochar/bio-oil.

[hedora]

In the SF area, the redwoods are dying off from heat/drought. The pines and oaks are being hit with disease. On balance, the oaks seem to be replacing the redwood forests, but everything is thinning out.

The mountain forests in Southern California (near Yosemite, etc) have been burnt out hellscapes for years.

Of course, this is all rounding error vs. the loss of 90% of the kelp forest, which many people didn't notice, since it's underwater. The kelp biomass the has been lost in the last few years is equal to 100% of the redwood forests.

As I like to shout from the rooftops, gasoline could be made carbon negative with a ~ $1/gallon direct air carbon capture tax. (And similar for the other fossil fuels.). I recently saw $7.99 / gallon, so that's a bit over a 10% tax in some areas.

Yes, poor people need gasoline too. We should tax new ICE vehicles at some astronomical rate and plow the money into steeper EV subsidies.

Alternatively, we could tax ICE new vehicles so (assuming they run for 250K miles) the purchaser pays 100% of the carbon recapture cost up front.

We could also allow for community net metering so poor high density areas could establish nonprofit solar/wind farms that lower their electricity bills.

As far as I can tell, all these plans are deficit neutral and would also boost the economy.

[alexose]

I'm with you! I'm a big proponent of DAC. I believe it'll be the key that unlocks a circular carbon economy. But, we're still a long ways from scaling it to a level where we can offset the carbon from burning fuel.

We should be pursuing every possible avenue, especially those that might have side benefits. Sequestering dead trees could help with fuels reduction and potentially improve soil health.

(If anyone reading this wants to help scale DAC, consider joining me in OpenAir collective discord! https://openair.cc/)

[mlyle]

> Yes, poor people need gasoline too.

Just tax carbon. Use proceeds to subsidize situations where the hardship is too high (e.g. energy used by poor people).

Start small and phase in over time.

[hondo77]

> ...in Southern California (near Yosemite, etc)...

In what universe is Yosemite in Southern California?

[qorrect]

> We could also allow for community net metering so poor high density areas could establish nonprofit solar/wind farms that lower their electricity bills.

Is this something that one could do now ? I don't know where you'd begin on something like that but I'm loving this idea.

[colpabar]

>As far as I can tell, all these plans are deficit neutral and would also boost the economy.

The state of california should enact these plans so we can all see how it goes. If it works other states will follow suit. If it doesn't, more people will leave california.

>As I like to shout from the rooftops, gasoline could be made carbon negative with a ~ $1/gallon direct air carbon capture tax. (And similar for the other fossil fuels.). I recently saw $7.99 / gallon, so that's a bit over a 10% tax in some areas.

I know that gas prices are high because of putin's price hike (tm), but wasn't calfornia gas already much more expensive than other states because of state taxes? How is this one going to be different?

[ceeplusplus]

> steeper EV subsidies

It will be at least a decade before used EVs with >200mi range trickle down to the $10-15k used market. Saying we should tax gas when poor people can't even afford it as is is a gross misunderstanding of the financial situation of poor people today. You can't even buy a >200mi EV for less than 40k today.

> establish nonprofit solar/wind farms

Who's going to pay for them? And who's paying for the storage?

> also boost the economy

Boosting the price of fuel would have hugely inflationary effects while everyone is still stuck on ICEs. We saw this in the 70s, we're seeing it now.

[dfee]

This response makes about half sense. There are flaws - geographic and mathematic. Could this be a GPT3 response?

[quarterdime]

To add to others' comments about timber harvest: Logging operations in burned areas can greatly accelerate erosion. Dead trees have ecological value as habitat and food (woodpeckers are a textbook example). Dead trees have ecological value in the long term as they ultimately become soil (both the volume and contour). Check out Tom Wessels (example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcLQz-oR6sw)

I have not studied or worked with bio-oils, but on biochar: As a soil amendment, many soil types are incompatible with addition of biochar. Biochar tends to retain water, which is a problem if you add it to already poorly draining soils. Biochar also shifts soil pH. In some cases this is good, in other cases it is bad. I think it is the minority of soils that are actually improved by adding biochar. I am not aware of any studies that show that biochar is a suitable carbon storage scheme. The last time I reviewed the research, the behavior of carbon in soils is as yet poorly understood and appears to be quite complex. It may be a decade or more before we understand what biochar does when added to different soil types, and we might learn that the majority of it ends up as CO2 within a couple years.

Finally you mention burying trees: it may be that this accelerates the release of Carbon. Depending on climate, standing timber often lasts longer. Dead wood on the ground (or buried) is often wetter, which favors decomposition.

I am not trying to sound negative here. You bring up a lot of points that are being actively researched and worked on. But there are not any clear easy solutions. We need to work on this problem. I wish we (as a society) were putting a lot more into this effort.

[alexose]

No negativity taken. These are complex systems. Any solutions involving forestry should be heavily scrutinized.

[rr808]

Nice idea but surely all the chainsaws, loaders, trucks, diggers would burn so much diesel it isn't worth it?

[s1artibartfast]

Unlikely. Compare the size/mass of the gas tank on a truck to the load of trees it is carrying. This approach gives a very rough estimate of the carbon used vs sequestered.

[alexose]

That's a good point. Though, it might be possible to tack the sequestration step onto existing thinning and/or fuel reduction projects.

[Ancalagon]

You should be able to electrify all of those components at this point, no? Sorry maybe that is a dumb question, I just dont know.

[qorrect]

Well not really the loaders and trucks yet. I don't think there are any commercial semis, but https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2022/05/13/big-rigs... seems to suggest that they are coming.

[ErikVandeWater]

Aren't there also invasive beetles that kill the trees?

[alexose]

The invasive beetles are the bullet, but climate change is the gun.

[countvonbalzac]

And humanity pulled the trigger

[BurningFrog]

Burying trees seems like a huge effort.

Is there a fundamental reason you can't treat the wood to make it non flammable and non digestible, and just stack them in big piles somewhere?

[Ancalagon]

Like spraying them down in PFAS, insecticide, and wrapping them in plastic? Not sure that will go over well long term.

Edit: Hope yall realize this was sarcasm and none of these options would sequester the carbon long term.

[qorrect]

> Like spraying them down in PFAS, insecticide, and wrapping them in plastic?

Then sink them in the ocean.

[BurningFrog]

Wood gets consumed in most parts of the ocean, but in at least the Baltic and Black Sea, it gets preserved for thousands of years, without any treatment.

Aside from weighing it down enough to stop floating, of course.

[BurningFrog]

Yeah, except the wrapping part is probably not needed.

[mistrial9]

surveying the actual forests is ongoing, with certain old-fat-bureaucracies trying to control the budgets, with over-caffeinated do-gooders on their backs. However some good news is that an individual researcher got a Nature publication credit for a drone+machine learning method to detect dead trees, a few years ago.

The majority of pine-beetle related deaths are in the southern range of the Sierras, south of Yosemite, but it occurs well into the North, as mentioned. Even conservatives, cant-be-bothered people have noticed the huge stands of dead trees, because you see them when driving to Yosemite for vacation. Meanwhile greens have been flipping out amongst themselves for years.

The forest carbon studies executed on Azure cloud mentioned here, have agenda and suffer from ordinary capitalist-picked experts problems, but generally we should all support more quantitative, fact-based decision making.

The dunce cap here definitely goes to the US Forest Service, and cronies, who have for 100 years, exercised their extensive muscle to prove without a doubt that they are in fact, red-neck badge-wearing troglodytes from a Robin Hood movie, for the most part; dramatic exceptions within the ranks noted.

[antonymy]

What's the scoop on the US Forest Service? Obstruction, grift, or waste?

[jeffbee]

The purpose of the USFS is to provide forest products to Americans. People project other missions onto the USFS and then point out their failures to achieve the imaginary mission.