Behold! The Tree.
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Technology
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Algae isn't it ?
Alge produces much oxygen but the carbon isn't stored long.
Ah true. Is it fungi
I heard Cordyceps might be a good solution
Thought I recognized the name. Last of us reference?
I think anything that reduces the elites would be effective.
And just generally forcing people to do better.
Less costs for those that reuse and a scale for people reducing their landfill rubbish.
Incentives for public transportation and other forms of transportation.
Incentives for planting more and reducing concrete use and destruction of native plants.
Grey water application and solar on all new roofs.
A complete stop to plastic use for everything would also be helpful. People myself included find it almost impossible to not purchase plastic.
Bread. Comes in plastic bag. Cheese cucumber all meat products. Crackers in a plastic tray. It's cheap for supermarkets to use plastic and we pay for cleanup. Move costs to them and they will change to cheaper.
Cardboard can be broken down and hood for composting.
That may be possible, but for long term storage of Carbon, Wood is great, just use it as building material or make charcoal from it wich you can store endlessly without the carbon being released again into the wild. Other options would be grain, you could Make alcohol from it, wich stores a lot of Carbon, but that would be a storage problem.
Efficacy of photosynthesis in mitigation of CO2 is slowing.
https://phys.org/news/2023-08-global-photosynthesis-due-carbon-dioxide.amp
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Until the tree dies and all that carbon is released back into the atmosphere.
- Trees last hundreds of years
- Trees die at differing times
- Trees are replaced by new trees as they die
- Trees support additional plant biomass
Trees are not the solution. The forest is the solution.
No, as said you cab use the wood for building stuff or reduce it to charcoal and store it for a long time, so taking it out permanently.
It's a technological antisolution.
Just noticed your username--did you write that post? If so, nice work
I did. Thanks so much!
People should keep in mind that even if we stop adding more carbon into the atmosphere today it still wouldn't stop climate change because all the carbon we've put there already isn't going anywhere. To truly stop and reverse climate change requires carbon capture in one way or another. It's something we have to do.
We're sooooo far from even thinking about reversing climate change that this argument, though valid, sounds very misplaced. If can't even get my friends, who are otherwise smart and decent people, to consider not eating meat.
Try slow changes for them first. Impossible burgers are actually very tasty! And if seasoned well, taste pretty close to the real thing. Maybe convince them to do a day off meat per month at first, with these burgers to replace it.
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... Which is more reason to invest in carbon capture.
Carbon capture is a fucking scam, always has been.
This just funnels more money into big oil.
- Let big oil pollute the everloving fuck of the planet.
- Tax the peasants to fund carbon capture theatre.
- Tear gas the protestors so they die quietly in their own homes.
- Profit???
Direct carbon capture is a scam. Alternatives like biochar, enhanced basalt weathering, and reforesting are definitely not.
The article says it's direct air capture. So everything I said about this being a scam is true.
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I recall the biggest direct air capture facility ever made in like, Norway?, only being able to capture about a few seconds worth of our yearly carbon output lol
Why don't we just simply throw every big oil exec into life in prison. That'd solve so many issues. Fuck em, they're straight evil.
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They rather should've planted a bunch of trees
I agree that planting trees is generally good, but doing so can't sequester the amount of carbon released by humans since the start of the industrial revolution. We need other avenues to do that. If we returned forests back to how they were 100,000 years ago (untouched by modern humans) the new trees that would grow wouldn't be able to soak up the CO2 released. Returning the forests to that state with the current world population isn't feasible either as we need some of that land for agriculture.
I get your sentiment, but we're beyond a 'plant trees' solution.
We've been doing that too. The US has more trees now then it did a hundred years ago.
Still less than before settlers came...
Amen, only angle I can see someone disagreeing with is trees becoming a potential bank of carbon to be fed back into the atmosphere via fuel for wildfires.
I so wish there were better ways to control forest fires.
But even if they do die, if you always make sure to have enough trees alive, it'll be a net zero.
Also, I'm wondering that no company has started investigating to bury trees into abandoned coal mines yet. Like, take one, give back one for using a few hundred thousand years later.
How would a company make money by dumping trees in holes?
It should be a government effort to do something like this. At least planting trees, no need to cut them for decades anyway. We would need an insane amount of tress for that to work too, basically as many as we burned as oil since the industrial era...
There's this concept of CO2 trading in europe. Basically a very dirty compania buys certificates from cleaner ones (or CO2 negative companies, like that hypothetical tree burying company). These allow dirtycorp. to pollute the air, while giving clean Inc. the ability and the monetary resources to pull CO2 from the air.
~~Or moss. Moss is better~~
That's not what that article says. At all.
As mentioned in the article, moss is pretty good at pulling particulates out of the air and "cleaning" it in that sense.
But trying to get CO2 out of the air isn't the same. Trees are very effective at this because they have a lot of mass and density and are largely carbon themselves. When we talk about "carbon sequestering", we're generally talking things like trees because that carbon from the air has to go somewhere and having a huge dense chunk of carbon is basically the most efficient natural method.
Moss is good at removing other particles, but trees are generally still better at carbon sequestering and CO2 removal.
Semi related: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/187327/how-plants-carbon-affects-their-response/
TL;DR - if you want to suck up a lot of CO2, you basically want a massive plant. Moss isn't one of them.
My bad, sorry and thanks for correcting me
This is honestly probably more of a transition jobs program for oil workers and something designed to get a few extra votes in Congress. One of the projects is in my state (Louisiana) and the politicians all stressed how it’s creating jobs in the oil producing Southwest part of the state. And the other project is in East Texas. The companies even pinky swore that at least 10% of their workforce would be former oil workers.
I'm fine with that. If it gets jobs, gets more political support, and gets carbon out of the air... I'm all for it.
From an industry standpoint everything the article says at the end as a critique is correct. We should be playing moneyball, those fans that draw in the particles would be an additional toll on the power grid.
Instead spend the money on removing the emission sources and modernizing our grid/reducing fuel emissions. After weve exhausted low hanging fruit there we'll have to throw money at offset tech.
I suppose we'll have to get the tech made eventually but there's just so much to be reworked on our grids as is.
We're past the reducing emissions stage.
We need to BOTH cut emissions, and find a way to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere to get to a healthy planet. Not all the CO2 traps are going to be the right way to do it, but we need to research and figure out how to sustainably pull CO2 out, stop methane emissions, switch to a carbon free grid, and.... everything else.
We are not beyond the emissions reduction stage and will not be until the grid is 100% renewable or other emissions free energy powered.
Switching to clean energy is emissions reduction. Imo should be our #1 priority because we're not reducing power demand without massive societal change.
Instead spend the money on removing the emission sources and modernizing our grid/reducing fuel emissions.
These things are not exclusive they are complimentary.; things like CarbonCapture's Project Bison show how this can work.
They will buy power from Solar / Wind farms which causes energy suppliers to build more of them. They use the power to run their DAC and Carbon Sequestration Wells. Their plants are modular so as more power becomes available and the tech matures they add more modules. They're supposed to start operating later this year and when it does it will be removing three times more CO2 from the atmosphere than the worlds next largest plant.
That kind of project results in CO2 capture and accelerates the shift away from fossil fuels.
We are past the point of either / or, we need and solutions if we are going to fix this problem in the required time frame.
I agree, however as much as I wish our governments would do both - they won't. At least not This is why I said we should be playing money ball. I don't disagree with anything you said.
I think the additionallity to the grid as these renewables come online is great...but if they only cover the energy to run them then they're not expanding the grid for everyone else. This emissions continue. I agree it incentvizes renewable builds but only if it powers more of the grid vs just being dedicated to the wells.
We're headed towards a world where corps are incentvizes to buy up all the clean energy on the market and leave consumers with the fossile fuels right now. We just don't have enough clean or renewable energy to power everything and demand is only increasing.
Awesome. But we need more effort to clean up our oceans and reduce the waste and plastic pumped into them by mega corporations.
I can't get the article to open. Is this going to worthwhile carbon capturing or is it going to be like that South American sequestration plant which just opened that will take 168,000 years to remove just the carbon we generated in 2022?
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