> Because a solution that can only possibly delay the climate change by a decade or two with extreme change to global ecosystems by immense program of forestation is no solution at all.
> Indeed, these 1.2T live trees will sequester the carbon. I do not question that.
It seems we agree that as long as these 1.2T trees are living (and any ones that die are replaced), the carbon will be sequestered. As long as humanity can keep on doing that, the delay will be... indefinite. Are we in agreement on that point?
With the leaky pipe analogy, it seems you are worried we'll run out of room to put dead trees. Indeed, burying them is a great idea, and that can be combined with Hügelkultur technique to produce better growing conditions for other plants, including... more trees.
As far as some of the other concerns you raise: the Trees.org organization can have a tree planted for $0.10 (by people who are happy to plant it and take care of it). By that measure, it seems this method is the least expensive (if we judge effort by the amount it costs) and least extreme of all. Will Trees.org be able to scale to 1.2T trees? It's hard to say. They've planted 155M trees so far, so they need to scale by a factor of ~10000x. It will certainly be hard, but it seems to be possible: we have room for them in places where trees previously grew (see the link to the study where the 1.2T number comes from). Recently, India planted 50M trees in one day; a startup has a goal to plant 500B trees by 2050 (if they have two equally-capable competitors, the 1.2T quota can be met before then).
What ecosystems will be destroyed by planting trees? Currently deforested areas? That seems hard to believe.
I view any carbon sequestration efforts to be a partial stop-gap effort until the world becomes mostly electrified and using renewable/nuclear energy. I am for all kinds of carbon sequestration efforts, but as a consumer, I would like them to be relatively inexpensive, and not have an unknown side effect. Planting trees meet both these requirements.
> It seems we agree that as long as these 1.2T trees are living (and any ones that die are replaced), the carbon will be sequestered. As long as humanity can keep on doing that, the delay will be... indefinite. Are we in agreement on that point?
Yes, as long as there’s a cup under leaking pipe, the amount of leak equivalent to the volume of the cup is sequestered. When the cup is full and starts overflowing (I.e. your trees start to die) you have to figure out where to contain the overflow. If you do nothing, it will simply spill on the floor (I.e. dying trees will decompose), which puts you back on the square one.
> With the leaky pipe analogy, it seems you are worried we'll run out of room to put dead trees. Indeed, burying them is a great idea, and that can be combined with Hügelkultur technique to produce better growing conditions for other plants, including... more trees.
Somewhat, but not quite. The real concerns is that burying trees while you keep extracting fossils is absolutely bonkers idea.
Burying trees would make sense (though not necessarily be most cost effective way to do so) in the future world where we no longer extract fossils. Then, growing trees and burying them would (extremely slowly, and at a huge ecological cost) bring us back to previous CO2 level before industrial revolution. If you keep extracting coal from the ground, however, burying trees is insanely stupid and wasteful thing to do, because it would be offsetting the fossil emissions by literally putting the fossils back into the ground. Why go through all the motions with planting trillions of trees, if you could simply not extract the fossils in the first place?
> I view any carbon sequestration efforts to be a partial stop-gap effort until the world becomes mostly electrified and using renewable/nuclear energy.
Look, if you don’t bury trees, all you do is introduce slight delay in the system. If you want to use the trees as a stop gap, then it makes much more sense to use the trees as a biomass, that is, burn them instead. That way, you’ll actually in fact be carbon-neutral.
> Indeed, these 1.2T live trees will sequester the carbon. I do not question that.
It seems we agree that as long as these 1.2T trees are living (and any ones that die are replaced), the carbon will be sequestered. As long as humanity can keep on doing that, the delay will be... indefinite. Are we in agreement on that point?
With the leaky pipe analogy, it seems you are worried we'll run out of room to put dead trees. Indeed, burying them is a great idea, and that can be combined with Hügelkultur technique to produce better growing conditions for other plants, including... more trees.
As far as some of the other concerns you raise: the Trees.org organization can have a tree planted for $0.10 (by people who are happy to plant it and take care of it). By that measure, it seems this method is the least expensive (if we judge effort by the amount it costs) and least extreme of all. Will Trees.org be able to scale to 1.2T trees? It's hard to say. They've planted 155M trees so far, so they need to scale by a factor of ~10000x. It will certainly be hard, but it seems to be possible: we have room for them in places where trees previously grew (see the link to the study where the 1.2T number comes from). Recently, India planted 50M trees in one day; a startup has a goal to plant 500B trees by 2050 (if they have two equally-capable competitors, the 1.2T quota can be met before then).
What ecosystems will be destroyed by planting trees? Currently deforested areas? That seems hard to believe.
I view any carbon sequestration efforts to be a partial stop-gap effort until the world becomes mostly electrified and using renewable/nuclear energy. I am for all kinds of carbon sequestration efforts, but as a consumer, I would like them to be relatively inexpensive, and not have an unknown side effect. Planting trees meet both these requirements.