Yeah... shit... that makes things even better because it take like 100 years for those oaks to grow. I'll be long dead before we'd need to cut them down and find a place to bury them!
Wouldn't it make more sense to do that with bamboo or some other plant that grows insanely fast? Trees take a long ass time to sequester carbon whereas bamboo or a grassland grows much faster
Its a grift see, I don't actually want to pay to cut down trees, find a place to dig a huge and deep hole, haul the trees to the huge deep hole, and stick the wood in the huge deep hole. We wanna have slow growing trees so that when the time comes to "do the thing" as :biden: would say, none of us are around to have to pay for it. See? :wink:
If this were a thing to be attempted there would be a few factors to consider.
Speed of growth to either maturity or to when the marginal rate of carbon capture over time starts to plateau.
Next would be, how soon after harvesting does the carbon start to make its way back into the surface carbon cycle. Probably a miniscule amount but given we're talking about millions of acres devoted to this type of massive project, that shit would add up. By this I mean, as soon as the plant is cut down and stacked up waiting for transport to "the hole" how much carbon is being shed.
Another would be volume of transported material vs density of material. Bamboo is pretty light, and its hollow so there's some number crunching that's probably needed to figure out if bamboo would be an "either/or" or "and". Meaning, do we mono crop our carbon sink or plant a few different varieties of carbon sinks with different characteristics to take advantage of as many ... things?... as possible.
Another would be dealing with non-native vs invasive species, and bamboo is a crazy fucking plant. I've heard stories of people planting small plots for prettiness and it going out of control and taking over their yard in a way that required excavation equipment to dig out the dirt and replace it with dirt that didn't have any bamboo rhizome bits. Though, if we're talking the end of the world, CGAF.
there's still some decomposition happening in the ocean and wood is pretty bouyant so it probably wouldn't get deep enough to get to the bottom where there isn't much microbial activity; substantially more of it would still be released into the atmosphere than it would be down a deep hole.
could be a really dynamic start to a cargo cult. your spiritual worth or luck determined by the most cherished thing you can bring yourself to sacrifice to hole.
Okay, well, no. First, the carbon released from the rotten wood would both contribute to ocean acidification as well as making its way back to the surface and then back into the carbon cycle.
The idea is to actually return an equal amount of carbon to the earth that fossil fuel extraction has removed in a way that keeps it there for centuries. Hopefully removing it from the surface level carbon cycle.
That it would contribute to ocean acidification makes sense. I thought water slowed decomposition, but I was misremembering that logs in swamps, so mud, would decompose a lot slower.
Technically, if we were to bind the logs together with weights to have negative boyancy and dump them into something like the Mariana trench the lack of heat, sunlight, and a fair bit of microbial action should drastically slow decomposition. Especially if they are treated/coated with something. Its why we can still find old wooden plank ships at the bottom of the ocean.
But I'd imagine that the amount of trees we'd need to dump into the ocean to try to lock away the extra carbon in the atmosphere might (and I say might because I'm not in any way qualified to speak with authority about this) be such an terrifyingly huge amount that the lower rate of decay wouldn't matter due to the sheer volume that we would need to be storing in the ocean. (Not even accounting for accidents or failures of our systems that wound up with the trees breaking free and floating back up to the surface.
True, but the point is that any carbon on the surface of the planet is going to wind up in the atmosphere as a GHG at some point in the near future. So all of the extra carbon from fossil fuels needs to be captured and returned to a position where it cannot get back into the atmosphere without creating more GHG's than it would be removing. Burning a millions of acres of wood every year, will likely produce a fair amount of GHGs. The machinery to grind millions of acres of burned trees into tiny bits will produce GHG's and disturbing the soil releases carbon back into the atmosphere.
Now, I'm just spit balling here, I'm not a scientist or researcher or involved in any thing important so my criticism is mostly based on me following a train of thought of my "digs in the dirt looking for potatoes for a living" self. It could be possible that the math works out that doing all of that would produce less GHG's that would be sequestered and the net effect would be a positive. It could also be possible that the net positive would be large enough to be worthwhile.
I saw something like this getting peddled by trchbros on "Hacker News", lol. They were jerking each other off agreeing with an article about how easy it is to solve California's wildfires that was written by a venture capital marketing guy, I shit you not.
So, this will take a bit of crowd work but stick with me...
So... We plant a huge amount of trees.... then we cut them down and bury them... Like REEAAALLL deep.
Then we do it again.
We'll call it, "Deep Foresting Carbon Sequestration." It'll be big, you won't even believe it.
Plant tree
Tree drops 20 acorns
Plant 20 trees
20 × (20 + 1) = 420 acorns (ayyy)
Plant 420 trees
That's how you scale :big-cool:
Yeah... shit... that makes things even better because it take like 100 years for those oaks to grow. I'll be long dead before we'd need to cut them down and find a place to bury them!
Perfect scam!
deleted by creator
tree(Σ♂)
Wouldn't it make more sense to do that with bamboo or some other plant that grows insanely fast? Trees take a long ass time to sequester carbon whereas bamboo or a grassland grows much faster
whispers
Its a grift see, I don't actually want to pay to cut down trees, find a place to dig a huge and deep hole, haul the trees to the huge deep hole, and stick the wood in the huge deep hole. We wanna have slow growing trees so that when the time comes to "do the thing" as :biden: would say, none of us are around to have to pay for it. See? :wink:
*serious face * :monke-ruserious:
If this were a thing to be attempted there would be a few factors to consider.
Speed of growth to either maturity or to when the marginal rate of carbon capture over time starts to plateau.
Next would be, how soon after harvesting does the carbon start to make its way back into the surface carbon cycle. Probably a miniscule amount but given we're talking about millions of acres devoted to this type of massive project, that shit would add up. By this I mean, as soon as the plant is cut down and stacked up waiting for transport to "the hole" how much carbon is being shed.
Another would be volume of transported material vs density of material. Bamboo is pretty light, and its hollow so there's some number crunching that's probably needed to figure out if bamboo would be an "either/or" or "and". Meaning, do we mono crop our carbon sink or plant a few different varieties of carbon sinks with different characteristics to take advantage of as many ... things?... as possible.
Another would be dealing with non-native vs invasive species, and bamboo is a crazy fucking plant. I've heard stories of people planting small plots for prettiness and it going out of control and taking over their yard in a way that required excavation equipment to dig out the dirt and replace it with dirt that didn't have any bamboo rhizome bits. Though, if we're talking the end of the world, CGAF.
Isn't this a real thing some futurist are proposing
Oh it has to be, I'm not even going to look it up and just believe that its true.
Wouldn't dropping them in the ocean or a deep lake accomplish the same thing?
there's still some decomposition happening in the ocean and wood is pretty bouyant so it probably wouldn't get deep enough to get to the bottom where there isn't much microbial activity; substantially more of it would still be released into the atmosphere than it would be down a deep hole.
That makes sense, thanks.
I worry that if a deep hole is dug, people would be tempted to start throwing all sorts of stuff down there.
could be a really dynamic start to a cargo cult. your spiritual worth or luck determined by the most cherished thing you can bring yourself to sacrifice to hole.
Damn, my "joke" hath biteth me in the arse.
serious face :monke-ruserious:
Okay, well, no. First, the carbon released from the rotten wood would both contribute to ocean acidification as well as making its way back to the surface and then back into the carbon cycle.
The idea is to actually return an equal amount of carbon to the earth that fossil fuel extraction has removed in a way that keeps it there for centuries. Hopefully removing it from the surface level carbon cycle.
That it would contribute to ocean acidification makes sense. I thought water slowed decomposition, but I was misremembering that logs in swamps, so mud, would decompose a lot slower.
Thanks!
Technically, if we were to bind the logs together with weights to have negative boyancy and dump them into something like the Mariana trench the lack of heat, sunlight, and a fair bit of microbial action should drastically slow decomposition. Especially if they are treated/coated with something. Its why we can still find old wooden plank ships at the bottom of the ocean.
But I'd imagine that the amount of trees we'd need to dump into the ocean to try to lock away the extra carbon in the atmosphere might (and I say might because I'm not in any way qualified to speak with authority about this) be such an terrifyingly huge amount that the lower rate of decay wouldn't matter due to the sheer volume that we would need to be storing in the ocean. (Not even accounting for accidents or failures of our systems that wound up with the trees breaking free and floating back up to the surface.
If you burn the wood into charcoal and mix it with dirt and compost, it acts as a carbon sink and topsoil amendment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
True, but the point is that any carbon on the surface of the planet is going to wind up in the atmosphere as a GHG at some point in the near future. So all of the extra carbon from fossil fuels needs to be captured and returned to a position where it cannot get back into the atmosphere without creating more GHG's than it would be removing. Burning a millions of acres of wood every year, will likely produce a fair amount of GHGs. The machinery to grind millions of acres of burned trees into tiny bits will produce GHG's and disturbing the soil releases carbon back into the atmosphere.
Now, I'm just spit balling here, I'm not a scientist or researcher or involved in any thing important so my criticism is mostly based on me following a train of thought of my "digs in the dirt looking for potatoes for a living" self. It could be possible that the math works out that doing all of that would produce less GHG's that would be sequestered and the net effect would be a positive. It could also be possible that the net positive would be large enough to be worthwhile.
I saw something like this getting peddled by trchbros on "Hacker News", lol. They were jerking each other off agreeing with an article about how easy it is to solve California's wildfires that was written by a venture capital marketing guy, I shit you not.