On the smaller scale, hugelkultur is a fine way to grow a garden in drier climates. You bury wood in trenches, cover it with dirt to form a berm, plant all over the berm, and the wood acts as a...
On the smaller scale, hugelkultur is a fine way to grow a garden in drier climates. You bury wood in trenches, cover it with dirt to form a berm, plant all over the berm, and the wood acts as a sponge over the winter/spring and holds the water into summer meaning less watering.
I don’t think this works for carbon sequestration. The fungi, bacteria, and other microbes would break down the carbon and release it to the atmosphere. At least that is my current understanding....
I don’t think this works for carbon sequestration. The fungi, bacteria, and other microbes would break down the carbon and release it to the atmosphere. At least that is my current understanding. I think this is why many soil sequestration schemes are not really viable for long term carbon storage.
I wonder how hard it would be to sequester carbon by burying waste paper instead of recycling it? Tree farms will keep growing trees, so a large part of the job is taken care of. And unlike with...
I wonder how hard it would be to sequester carbon by burying waste paper instead of recycling it?
Tree farms will keep growing trees, so a large part of the job is taken care of. And unlike with actual recycling, the waste stream doesn't need to be particularly pure.
Ive always wondered this lol Like, plastic is mostly long carbon chains, so we’re sequestering carbon by producing it since nothing breaks it down. Of course that doesn’t make any sense, we know...
Ive always wondered this lol
Like, plastic is mostly long carbon chains, so we’re sequestering carbon by producing it since nothing breaks it down.
Of course that doesn’t make any sense, we know that plastic, and our waste in general, is bad for the environment. Its just that viewing the entire climate as carbon centric is such a narrow visual of how it really works.
We're not really sequestering carbon by producing it, since producing it requires energy, which right now mostly requires us to to burn fossil fuels. The carbon being used to produce it was all...
We're not really sequestering carbon by producing it, since producing it requires energy, which right now mostly requires us to to burn fossil fuels. The carbon being used to produce it was all also already sequestered. We pumped it out of the ground where it would have happily sat for millions of years, not affecting the atmosphere at all until we decided it should turn into a grocery bag.
I think the issue here is scale. A quick googling suggests that annual global plastic production is roughly 0.4 billion tons, and paper production is also roughly 0.4 billion tons, while total...
I think the issue here is scale. A quick googling suggests that annual global plastic production is roughly 0.4 billion tons, and paper production is also roughly 0.4 billion tons, while total annual carbon emissions are around 40 billion tons.
So all the carbon from plastic and paper combined is only equivalent to about 2% of the problem.
This is just for comparison of scale. Not going into the issues with translating these products to atmospheric emissions, logistics of sequestering, etc.
Part of that 40B is in the production of those products in the first place... so we would be able to cut down a bit on it by just skipping the whole 'turn trees into paper' step and go straight to...
Part of that 40B is in the production of those products in the first place... so we would be able to cut down a bit on it by just skipping the whole 'turn trees into paper' step and go straight to burying the trees.
But yes, no matter what we do we're not skipping the 2 orders of magnitude difference we'd need to cover to start moving the needle in the right direction.
Reduce, reuse, recycle. And most people don't realize that's in order of priority too: Reduce how much you use. If you can't, reuse something if you have to use it once. If you can't reuse it, recycle it.
Sure, but that sounds to me like an entirely different discussion. If we would just stop doing the thing that causes the problem, then we'd stop having the problem. While reducing pollution is...
Sure, but that sounds to me like an entirely different discussion. If we would just stop doing the thing that causes the problem, then we'd stop having the problem. While reducing pollution is probably the best thing to do, unfortunately there are some competing priorities. These items are presumably created for some benefit, not just to pollute.
Although it could be an interesting discussion whether it's a net positive/negative to bury paper waste instead of recycling it, to relate it to the question in the headline of this article, we probably can't bury enough to slow climate change. It seems like the carbon sequestration of plastic production is similarly insignificant. Based on the article, it does seem like it's also an interesting conversation whether we should be more aggressive with burying waste wood, since it has some potential to be impactful.
It seems like the key is having a better way to sequester it so the carbon doesn't decompose and get out? Looks like paper and cardboard will decompose within months. Worse, apparently in a...
It seems like the key is having a better way to sequester it so the carbon doesn't decompose and get out? Looks like paper and cardboard will decompose within months. Worse, apparently in a landfill it will release methane, though perhaps it's not so bad if the landfill gas is burnt.
To sequester carbon you'd want to somehow prevent that.
Actually, the anoxic environment of the landfill can be very good at preserving newsprint. I think recycling is great, like everyone else, but it is quite an energy hog. Whereas making virgin pulp...
Actually, the anoxic environment of the landfill can be very good at preserving newsprint. I think recycling is great, like everyone else, but it is quite an energy hog. Whereas making virgin pulp burns half the tree (a biofuel) for the energy to turn the other half into paper with little in the way of additional energy needed, paper recycling needs a lot of energy to reprocess and dry pulp into paper.
Meanwhile, we could either burn the paper to recover the remainder of its energy and return the carbon that it held into the atmosphere or bury it, as you suggest.
It takes a fair amount of energy in fairly old plants to create pulp for paper (see the Kraft process for details), where the majority of that energy + emissions are spent in boilers and...
It takes a fair amount of energy in fairly old plants to create pulp for paper (see the Kraft process for details), where the majority of that energy + emissions are spent in boilers and regenerators for the various chemical processes needed to purify wood into paper. Very little of that is necessary when using recycled feedstock, so a comparison of recycling vs. vaulting would need to consider whether the offset carbon emissions from the former are greater than the direct gains from the latter.
I'd lean towards no, if only because shipping paper around for this purpose is likely a lot more trouble than growing trees and burying them nearby. But I haven't done the math.
I can't access the article or the archive version at present, but, as I understand it, the problem with bio-sequestration is throughput. There are around 1.5 teratonnes of anthropogenic CO₂ to...
I can't access the article or the archive version at present, but, as I understand it, the problem with bio-sequestration is throughput. There are around 1.5 teratonnes of anthropogenic CO₂ to remediate, and my understanding of bio-remediation is that it has a top speed of around 5 gigatonnes per year. So, yes, you can use biological methods to decarbonize the atmosphere, but it's going to take 300 years to get there. That might work fine, but if the carbon is causing havoc in the meantime, that's a long time to wait for the remediation to take place.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't; every little bit helps and it is the least expensive form of sequestration. But expecting it to perform the bulk of the decarbonization is asking for a lot of patience. Machines took the carbon out fast. You'll need machines if you want to put the carbon back fast.
Well 5 Gt/yr may be outdated. A 2022 paper in Nature is placing that number at 13 Gt/yr, which is better to be sure. This would mean that the decarbonization would be taking place of a 50 - 100...
Well 5 Gt/yr may be outdated. A 2022 paper in Nature is placing that number at 13 Gt/yr, which is better to be sure. This would mean that the decarbonization would be taking place of a 50 - 100 year horizon in a zero-emissions scenario.
Although I am interested in this topic, I'm not in a position to criticize how optimistic their projections are. Presumably, newer projections are better than older ones. Even so, I think claims that decarbonization can be accomplished if people just planted more trees vastly understate the magnitude of the problem.
Edit: I think the discrepancy between my previous estimate and the one in the paper shows up here (emphasis mine):
We estimate that ~1/5 more carbon, totaling 13.74 PgC yr⁻¹ could be added to the current NPP (net primary production) from global terrestrial vegetation if the identified OLMPs (optimal land-management practices) get implemented, or a net effect of reducing 3.5–4.0 PgCyr⁻¹ from the atmosphere.
So their top line number (13.74) is only primary production, discounting the carbon that will return to the atmosphere after production. This will decarbonize the atmosphere at ~4 GtCyr⁻¹.
These numbers are extremely depressing. We do this for about 75 years and we get barely above half a degree F? And that’s assuming their complete lifecycle emissions calculation isn’t being...
These numbers are extremely depressing.
And according to the research team’s models, this would remove a grand total of at least 770 billion tons from the atmosphere by 2100, turning the global thermostat down by at least 0.35 degree C (0.63 degree F).
We do this for about 75 years and we get barely above half a degree F? And that’s assuming their complete lifecycle emissions calculation isn’t being unreasonably rosy and it doesn’t cost way more than expected to dig and rebury our ditches full of wood?
There’s really no good sequestration solution huh?
I think sequestration is doomed to fail, because the mere dream of sequestration will drive multiple-fold more carbon emission than could ever be sequestered, since policymakers and billionaires...
I think sequestration is doomed to fail, because the mere dream of sequestration will drive multiple-fold more carbon emission than could ever be sequestered, since policymakers and billionaires will use the pretense that "the future will handle it" to avoid taking the problem seriously. It's probably a much better use of resources to invest in things like preventing desertification or habitat preservation.
Edit: doing some napkin math (assuming the avg car driver relases 4.2 metric tons of CO2 in a year and that the typical tree stores 22kg of CO2), one would need to grow and sequester roughly 209 trees to offset one year of carbon emission from a single car. I'm not a climate scientist, but, as it appears to me, sequestration is a boon dongle virtually no matter how much the technology or process improves.
Sequestration needs to happen regardless of how effective emission reduction efforts are just to reverse the damage. We can wait on geology to do it naturally but that’s basically accepting a much...
Sequestration needs to happen regardless of how effective emission reduction efforts are just to reverse the damage. We can wait on geology to do it naturally but that’s basically accepting a much less liveable climate for basically the rest of human history.
That depends on how pessimistic you are about human history :) Here’s a link quoting the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: So it does sound like, once carbon emissions are cut back enough, things...
That depends on how pessimistic you are about human history :)
Here’s a link quoting the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report:
About 50% of a CO2 increase will be removed from the atmosphere within 30 years, and a further 30% will be removed within a few centuries. The remaining 20% may stay in the atmosphere for many thousands of years.
So it does sound like, once carbon emissions are cut back enough, things would start improving substantially within decades?
IMO it depends on your definition of good! We're pumping up oil dramatically faster than it can be formed in the Earth's crust (some Reddit armchair scientists guestimate that we're chugging oil...
There’s really no good sequestration solution huh?
IMO it depends on your definition of good! We're pumping up oil dramatically faster than it can be formed in the Earth's crust (some Reddit armchair scientists guestimate that we're chugging oil several million times faster than nature can replenish it), and ultimately, it's formed by the same process that we're trying to exploit here: photosynthesis. The fact that we could potentially outpace the Earth's ability to sequester carbon the old fashioned way is rather good to me, imo, and it means that -- assuming modern human civilization doesn't collapse in the next couple hundred years -- there's a chance that our great-great-great-great-great-great grand children can live on a planet without a collapsing biosphere! Genuinely, it feels good to me that we can a see a way out of this, even if it'll take a dramatic amount of effort over several generations. All the more reason to start now :3
If your definition of good is that it solves all of our problems with a wave of a magical wand, I mean, fair enough. Carbon sequestration requires at least as much energy as is released through hydrocarbon combustion, so imo it was thermodynamically doomed to failure: if it were ever economically feasible, we'd be converting trees into oil and undercutting saudi arabian oil production. They tried to do that with algae a couple decades ago and failed miserably, even!
I don’t think it’ll take the collapse of humanity. It just seems like committing any level of resources to take action on climate at all has been a Herculean task and it seems to yo-yo back and...
I don’t think it’ll take the collapse of humanity. It just seems like committing any level of resources to take action on climate at all has been a Herculean task and it seems to yo-yo back and forth in support so we get 2 steps forward and 1 step back. Knowing that, it’s sensible to think people will just take their eyes off the ball before the job is done. Once our sense of “normal” is a generation in the rear view mirror I worry people will just forget, in the same way the passing of the WWII generation speedily saw the renewal of fascist and neofascist politics.
Fair enough! I would disagree, if only because I have no idea what day to day life will be like in the many dozens of years (if not centuries) that it'll take to try to restore our biosphere. My...
Fair enough! I would disagree, if only because I have no idea what day to day life will be like in the many dozens of years (if not centuries) that it'll take to try to restore our biosphere. My statement was moreso that modern human civilization is necessary for this to happen, not excluding that there are many other necessary components as well (e.g. as you note, political will).
On the smaller scale, hugelkultur is a fine way to grow a garden in drier climates. You bury wood in trenches, cover it with dirt to form a berm, plant all over the berm, and the wood acts as a sponge over the winter/spring and holds the water into summer meaning less watering.
I don’t think this works for carbon sequestration. The fungi, bacteria, and other microbes would break down the carbon and release it to the atmosphere. At least that is my current understanding. I think this is why many soil sequestration schemes are not really viable for long term carbon storage.
I wonder how hard it would be to sequester carbon by burying waste paper instead of recycling it?
Tree farms will keep growing trees, so a large part of the job is taken care of. And unlike with actual recycling, the waste stream doesn't need to be particularly pure.
Ive always wondered this lol
Like, plastic is mostly long carbon chains, so we’re sequestering carbon by producing it since nothing breaks it down.
Of course that doesn’t make any sense, we know that plastic, and our waste in general, is bad for the environment. Its just that viewing the entire climate as carbon centric is such a narrow visual of how it really works.
How about sequestering carbon in our own bodies? Save the environment by getting really fat.
Say no more, fam. I'm on it.
Are you suggesting that my affection for cheeseburgers could be a vehicle for positive change in the world?
Someday there be a statue in your honor.
Ban cremation and insist on burying bodies.
We're not really sequestering carbon by producing it, since producing it requires energy, which right now mostly requires us to to burn fossil fuels. The carbon being used to produce it was all also already sequestered. We pumped it out of the ground where it would have happily sat for millions of years, not affecting the atmosphere at all until we decided it should turn into a grocery bag.
I think the issue here is scale. A quick googling suggests that annual global plastic production is roughly 0.4 billion tons, and paper production is also roughly 0.4 billion tons, while total annual carbon emissions are around 40 billion tons.
So all the carbon from plastic and paper combined is only equivalent to about 2% of the problem.
This is just for comparison of scale. Not going into the issues with translating these products to atmospheric emissions, logistics of sequestering, etc.
Part of that 40B is in the production of those products in the first place... so we would be able to cut down a bit on it by just skipping the whole 'turn trees into paper' step and go straight to burying the trees.
But yes, no matter what we do we're not skipping the 2 orders of magnitude difference we'd need to cover to start moving the needle in the right direction.
Reduce, reuse, recycle. And most people don't realize that's in order of priority too: Reduce how much you use. If you can't, reuse something if you have to use it once. If you can't reuse it, recycle it.
Sure, but that sounds to me like an entirely different discussion. If we would just stop doing the thing that causes the problem, then we'd stop having the problem. While reducing pollution is probably the best thing to do, unfortunately there are some competing priorities. These items are presumably created for some benefit, not just to pollute.
Although it could be an interesting discussion whether it's a net positive/negative to bury paper waste instead of recycling it, to relate it to the question in the headline of this article, we probably can't bury enough to slow climate change. It seems like the carbon sequestration of plastic production is similarly insignificant. Based on the article, it does seem like it's also an interesting conversation whether we should be more aggressive with burying waste wood, since it has some potential to be impactful.
It seems like the key is having a better way to sequester it so the carbon doesn't decompose and get out? Looks like paper and cardboard will decompose within months. Worse, apparently in a landfill it will release methane, though perhaps it's not so bad if the landfill gas is burnt.
To sequester carbon you'd want to somehow prevent that.
Actually, the anoxic environment of the landfill can be very good at preserving newsprint. I think recycling is great, like everyone else, but it is quite an energy hog. Whereas making virgin pulp burns half the tree (a biofuel) for the energy to turn the other half into paper with little in the way of additional energy needed, paper recycling needs a lot of energy to reprocess and dry pulp into paper.
Meanwhile, we could either burn the paper to recover the remainder of its energy and return the carbon that it held into the atmosphere or bury it, as you suggest.
It takes a fair amount of energy in fairly old plants to create pulp for paper (see the Kraft process for details), where the majority of that energy + emissions are spent in boilers and regenerators for the various chemical processes needed to purify wood into paper. Very little of that is necessary when using recycled feedstock, so a comparison of recycling vs. vaulting would need to consider whether the offset carbon emissions from the former are greater than the direct gains from the latter.
I'd lean towards no, if only because shipping paper around for this purpose is likely a lot more trouble than growing trees and burying them nearby. But I haven't done the math.
I can't access the article or the archive version at present, but, as I understand it, the problem with bio-sequestration is throughput. There are around 1.5 teratonnes of anthropogenic CO₂ to remediate, and my understanding of bio-remediation is that it has a top speed of around 5 gigatonnes per year. So, yes, you can use biological methods to decarbonize the atmosphere, but it's going to take 300 years to get there. That might work fine, but if the carbon is causing havoc in the meantime, that's a long time to wait for the remediation to take place.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't; every little bit helps and it is the least expensive form of sequestration. But expecting it to perform the bulk of the decarbonization is asking for a lot of patience. Machines took the carbon out fast. You'll need machines if you want to put the carbon back fast.
Interesting. Do you remember where you got that number?
Well 5 Gt/yr may be outdated. A 2022 paper in Nature is placing that number at 13 Gt/yr, which is better to be sure. This would mean that the decarbonization would be taking place of a 50 - 100 year horizon in a zero-emissions scenario.
Although I am interested in this topic, I'm not in a position to criticize how optimistic their projections are. Presumably, newer projections are better than older ones. Even so, I think claims that decarbonization can be accomplished if people just planted more trees vastly understate the magnitude of the problem.
Edit: I think the discrepancy between my previous estimate and the one in the paper shows up here (emphasis mine):
So their top line number (13.74) is only primary production, discounting the carbon that will return to the atmosphere after production. This will decarbonize the atmosphere at ~4 GtCyr⁻¹.
These numbers are extremely depressing.
We do this for about 75 years and we get barely above half a degree F? And that’s assuming their complete lifecycle emissions calculation isn’t being unreasonably rosy and it doesn’t cost way more than expected to dig and rebury our ditches full of wood?
There’s really no good sequestration solution huh?
I think sequestration is doomed to fail, because the mere dream of sequestration will drive multiple-fold more carbon emission than could ever be sequestered, since policymakers and billionaires will use the pretense that "the future will handle it" to avoid taking the problem seriously. It's probably a much better use of resources to invest in things like preventing desertification or habitat preservation.
Edit: doing some napkin math (assuming the avg car driver relases 4.2 metric tons of CO2 in a year and that the typical tree stores 22kg of CO2), one would need to grow and sequester roughly 209 trees to offset one year of carbon emission from a single car. I'm not a climate scientist, but, as it appears to me, sequestration is a boon dongle virtually no matter how much the technology or process improves.
Sequestration needs to happen regardless of how effective emission reduction efforts are just to reverse the damage. We can wait on geology to do it naturally but that’s basically accepting a much less liveable climate for basically the rest of human history.
That depends on how pessimistic you are about human history :)
Here’s a link quoting the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report:
So it does sound like, once carbon emissions are cut back enough, things would start improving substantially within decades?
Whether we’ll live to see it is another question.
IMO it depends on your definition of good! We're pumping up oil dramatically faster than it can be formed in the Earth's crust (some Reddit armchair scientists guestimate that we're chugging oil several million times faster than nature can replenish it), and ultimately, it's formed by the same process that we're trying to exploit here: photosynthesis. The fact that we could potentially outpace the Earth's ability to sequester carbon the old fashioned way is rather good to me, imo, and it means that -- assuming modern human civilization doesn't collapse in the next couple hundred years -- there's a chance that our great-great-great-great-great-great grand children can live on a planet without a collapsing biosphere! Genuinely, it feels good to me that we can a see a way out of this, even if it'll take a dramatic amount of effort over several generations. All the more reason to start now :3
If your definition of good is that it solves all of our problems with a wave of a magical wand, I mean, fair enough. Carbon sequestration requires at least as much energy as is released through hydrocarbon combustion, so imo it was thermodynamically doomed to failure: if it were ever economically feasible, we'd be converting trees into oil and undercutting saudi arabian oil production. They tried to do that with algae a couple decades ago and failed miserably, even!
I don’t think it’ll take the collapse of humanity. It just seems like committing any level of resources to take action on climate at all has been a Herculean task and it seems to yo-yo back and forth in support so we get 2 steps forward and 1 step back. Knowing that, it’s sensible to think people will just take their eyes off the ball before the job is done. Once our sense of “normal” is a generation in the rear view mirror I worry people will just forget, in the same way the passing of the WWII generation speedily saw the renewal of fascist and neofascist politics.
Fair enough! I would disagree, if only because I have no idea what day to day life will be like in the many dozens of years (if not centuries) that it'll take to try to restore our biosphere. My statement was moreso that modern human civilization is necessary for this to happen, not excluding that there are many other necessary components as well (e.g. as you note, political will).
Mirror: https://archive.is/vSree
I'm very proud of everyone else for not having done so already.
That said, seriously, are we not doing phrasing anymore?
(I'm very sorry.)