How is the answer to “carbon removal” not just “turn deserts into plant areas” or “encourage algae blooms” or something? It seems implausible to me that any chemical carbon extraction process has superior externalities to just planting more trees or something.
I do not have a complete well-sourced answer, but the common argument against your suggestion is that such a carbon sink would work for only a couple of decades until it reaches a steady state, and these couple of decades do not seem to be enough to make a dent.
Also, it is difficult to plant trees in a desert. Also, algae blooms are dangerous for other life forms.
However, there are some startups working with super-fast-growing (ugly) trees that are then used as construction material, which would be a longer-term-functioning sink. Not very clear whether that scales.
The trees grow. We cut them down. We make houses out of them, which are wrapped to prevent deterioration. The sunk carbon becomes our buildings.
Other uses of the wood are also usually carbon sinks. Paper either gets recycled (the carbon is preserved) or it gets buried in a sealed landfill where is takes decades or longer to break down.
It'd be cool to calculate how much carbon Weyerhaeuser sucks out of the atmosphere each year.
Dried up wooden building material is pretty stable and a fairly common (even commercialized) suggestion for a carbon sink. If you let it rot/burn, then no, it is not a carbon sink.
Sure, but the way we build buildings, there's no way that's actually the case. Transport alone to the sawmill, then the lumber yard, then the job site might actually release more carbon than the tree is storing.
A 25 year old maple will sequester 400 pounds of co2 in it's lifetime. An average commuter car will emit that in 2 weeks. Hauling all that carbon out of the forest will likely emit far more than that.
> Transport alone to the sawmill, then the lumber yard, then the job site might actually release more carbon than the tree is storing.
If we're building the buildings anyway, we have to compare with alternative building materials. That is, how much more would transporting that lumber emit, compared to transporting for instance brick?
Yes, everyone here seems to think CO2 is the most important thing to reduce, but we're not suffering from CO2 (2*C never hurt anybody), we're suffering from increased weather volatility as the homeostatic influence of the biosphere has been destroyed, slash and burned for cow pasture, drained for corn and soy farms, overfished and trawled until nothing is left.
But since CO2 is easier to measure than biomass and ecosystem complexity, everyone is focused on sucking carbon out of the air when we need to be restoring grasslands, forests, and coral reefs.
Source: Charles Eisenstein's "Climate: A New Story"
I'm scared of "climate change" not because of temperature rise, not because of dangerous weather, not even because of ocean acidification. We have practice in handling all those things. I'm scared of C02 directly. It sure as hell does hurt people, we are looking a 685 ppm in 2050[1], over 1000 ppm in 2100[2], spiraling worse than that for the next 5000 years. The problem is that c02 makes us dumber, even small amounts.[3] Carbon Sequestration technology, on a globally ubiquitous and household scale is an overriding priority simply because we might be too dumb to fix it later. If we don't head off this escalation of c02, we are looking at a 5000 year dark age from the cognitive results alone.
I really hope we can curb the damage. We already had four years of political climate denial, lost and gone forever. We need to step up, but I recently read heavy industry is really dragging their feet into the sand.
All fossil fuels were eventually living biomass. I don’t see any reason we wouldn’t “resuscitate” that biomass back into living organisms. It would take a long time for the living biomass to be re-interred into fossil fuels.
> not just “turn deserts into plant areas” or “encourage algae blooms” or something?
That might be slightly more tricky (and less efficient) than you seem to imagine.
Also, the prize is not exclusively for "chemical" carbon extraction, if you can find a way to scale algae bloom to be a long term carbon sink without ruining the environment in other ways you are eligible:
> Any carbon negative solution is eligible: nature-based, direct air capture, oceans, mineralization, or anything else that achieves net negative emissions, sequesters CO2 durably, and show a sustainable path to achieving low cost at gigatonne scale.
All the fossil fuels we've been burning is introducing carbon back into the biosphere. The key to carbon removal is to sequester it back somewhere where it won't be circulating in nature. It's not enough to plant more trees, as those new trees' carbon will just continue to cycle through the environment.
The main problem is that we've released so much, so fast, that there really isn't a productive place for it to go. The other problem is that humanity keeps expanding and there's not much free space left for nature preserves. If you wanted to plant a new rainforest, where would you possibly put it? We're already cutting down swathes of existing ones just to feed and house our expanding populations. So sadly, most of that extra carbon just remains in the air.
If you can increase arable land then other trees will grow there. I would prefer to create as much biomass as possible. Surely the net biomass stored in fossil fuels could be completely resuscitated, so to speak.
The usual way to increase arable land is by cutting down a forest.
"Surely the net biomass stored in fossil fuels could be completely resuscitated, so to speak." - that's a strong no - fossil fuels have accumulated over millions of years, having all that carbon become biomass all at once would not be returning to something that existed earlier but something completely unprecedented, it would require many times more biomass than the Earth has now or has had at any particular moment of history.
A quick google search suggests there are about 500 trillion pounds of oil left and about 1000 trillion pounds of living biomass. Assuming 5:1 mass:carbon ratio, it shouldn’t more than ~quadruple the total biomass. We could definitely fit that by turning the Sahara into a rainforest or something.
At least for terrestrial plants, the math just doesn't work out. Plants are really not fast or efficient enough to suck up carbon in meaningful quantities.
Algae can be >100 times as efficient at that than terrestrial plants, so there might be a there there, but even still, fracking basalt probably beats that by a couple of orders of magnitude.
I understand this concern but I was blown away when I heard this fact which I wanted to share with you.
> Certain species of bamboo can grow 910 mm (36 in) within a 24-hour period, at a rate of almost 40 mm (11⁄2 in) an hour (a growth around 1 mm every 90 seconds, or 1 inch {2.54 centimeters} every 40 minutes).
The giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) is the fastest-growing plant in the world, living mostly on the Pacific coast, off the shores of California and British Columbia. It had economic value at one point, so kelp farming was a major industry in the early 20th century. Though, I suspect if CO2 is all that matters, simple algae is easier to manage than large plants.
Sadly, the natural kelp forests are in really bad shape. I haven't seen the stats on giant kelp, but the bull kelp forests have been practically been wiped off the map by sea urchins and warming waters over the past decade or two. The natural kelp forests probably didn't provide much in terms of CO2 absorption, as dead plant matter would decay quickly in the ocean, but it's been a huge loss for aquatic wildlife.
While it makes for impenetrable forest (scrub? Bush) when mature, you’d have to imagine that the acreage requires to sequester meaningful amounts of carbon would be absolutely vast. Bamboo just isn’t that dense.
My personal experience of having bamboo on my property is that it seems incredibly dense. Bamboo is a actually a grass and has root systems similar to grasses, it grows very close together. here is another resource about the carbon sequestration of bamboo: https://drawdown.org/solutions/bamboo-production
Presumably entrants will skew towards #4 as we don't have as many solutions there, and depending on how quickly you could scale up a good one, it would be quicker than 1-3, you'd expect.
Well, it is causing greenhouse heating, that's the whole point, any freeing up carbon is inherently linked to that. But it is more appropriate to say that we have to reduce net emissions to zero; there would be no problem with emissions if there's a compensating carbon capture of equal amount. At least after we've "paid back the debt" by recapturing the excess emissions of earlier decades - there needs to be some period of negative net emissions before zero net emissions would be okay.
Why do you prefer "freeing up carbon from the ground" ? Usually that's just a sideeffect that happens only because we want some other thing e.g. extract energy from oil or manufacture cement by calcinating limestone; and if we want a stable atmosphere then we can't be freeing up carbon from the ground without putting it back.
But this depends on global willingness to do so by choosing (more expensive) sustainable products and voting for politicians who want to enforce/encourage carbon reductions
1. Is there any reason at all to believe that billions of people will change their minds and make both of them happen in a century or less?
The New Soviet Man was an experiment only 70 years in the making, and it was in no way a successful one.
2. Let's suppose that actually happens. Let's suppose we get to 50% of current emissions in... 50 years.
We currently increase CO2 concentrations by 2.5 ppm/year. This would put us at over 500 PPM in my expected lifetime... In one of the more optimistic interpretations of your predictions.
For bonus points, even if we hit 50% reduction in 50 years, that would way overachieve what the Paris Accord set out. We are currently not on track to hit any of the targets in the Paris Accord.
