I love that you love it so much. I put about ten hours into it to see what the hype was about a while back and had to stop…because otherwise I would’ve put in way more lol.
We need to maintain paper-based systems of information storage and retrieval. People should be familiar with a physical map. If we are too dependent on the technology, that is a risk.
Just keeping the paper isn't a solution, people need to know how to use the back up, and use it regularly. When I delivered pizzas, we had a big paper map of the city that we used to consult for deliveries, drivers quickly learned where nearly all of the streets in the city were and how to get there. For most deliveries, drivers just knew where to go, for the rare times I didn't, I either remembered the main street near my delivery or wrote down some notes on the box. Someone marked new streets on the map, as well as the names of major apartment complexes.
Just having that map on the wall isn't going to do any good since without regular use, no one's going to be able to use it effectively. And it's doubtful that people can be forced into using it.
The correct PR is the one that solves the problem the best. The correct PR's size has nothing to do with the # of lines it is. Tracking time to merge is not that meaningful because merging code does not in itself say anything about the value of that code in production. That is the type of metric that may become a target for a scrum master or project manager despite it being fairly divorced from the reality of moving the right code into the production environment.
We could easily get to net zero much, much sooner than 2050 by planting a lot more trees. It would be fun and planting trees has many other benefits besides capturing CO2.
Planting more trees (and, more important, preserving existing trees) is an important tool in the toolkit, but shouldn't be overestimated, and I don't think the word "easily" is warranted.
Project Drawdown estimates that 3.2 to 4.96 Gt CO₂/y could be sequestered (through 2050) using a combination of tropical forest restoration, temperate forest restoration, and tree plantations on degraded land. The upper figure is only about 10% of worldwide emissions: significant, but not a game-changer. And the projects involved would be nontrivial, to say the least.
This is the kind of thinking that happens when consultants, smart people, environmentalists, statisticians, and politicians get in the same room to write a report to save the planet.
Planting a tree to save the environment is not simply about the carbon it "sequesters". There are huge positive externalities to planting a tree that come in various forms.
E.g. Something as simple as planting a fruit tree in your backyard. Just imagine these effects:
1. Buying less fruit at shops
2. Less fruit being transported
3. Kids growing up with free food grown from the land
4. People buying land that allows planting a fruit tree
5. People (and their kids that watch) learn about taking care of their surroundings
6. Responsibility to care, prune and water a fruit-bearing tree.
7. Poor communities fed by a tree mean less aid means less 1st world carbon spending for fake 3rd world "feed the poor" brownie points.
8. More fruit rotting on the ground means less fertilizer.
9. More fruits means more birds means more seeds being peppered along the landscape.
Sadly, as with carbon credits, this tree planting concept has been "captured" by opportunists and they just have you give them money so they can "plant" a tree easily on your behalf somewhere halfway around the world so you don't have to worry about it.
I'm honestly not sure what your point is. Are you saying that, if there was less cold quantitative analysis of the global CO2 potential from forest management, people would be planting more trees in their local neighborhoods?
Absolutely, trees can provide many benefits separate from CO2 absorption. I was simply responding to GravityLab's comment about CO2. However, it's also worth noting that planting the wrong trees or in the wrong place can backfire: displacing more appropriate vegetation; fire risk; etc.
Another advantage to grasslands is that grasslands help control the tick population. Ticks like shady spots like trees and bushes. They dry out in grasslands.
Every square meter of forest absorbs enough CO2 to offset about 1 Watt of carbon fuel use. The average US inhabitant uses about 10kW on average. About half of US energy use is from fossil sources and the population is about 300 million. So we'd need 150 million new hectares of forest, growing forested land from 1/3 of the country to 1/2. Which is honestly a lot more doable sounding than I'd thought it would be before running the numbers.
EDIT: Eventually the forest will climax and start emitting as much CO2 as it absorbs but that's a lot of time to solve the problem at a more fundamental level.
Yes, planting trees is easy but it is the maintenance. To make sure the trees planted are taken care off until they are grown enough to survive on their own is a task and an expense.
It's a significant amount of trees - smaller than I thought, but perhaps the largest megascale project ever attempted. ~230B trees which is ~7.6% of the global tree stock.
Somehow people want to end everything even if they don't have a stake in the opposite. Where I live is a quite small nature park in a desert ; it rains here, it's green, it works. But when you say plant trees, they say it doesn't matter unless it's 1000s of km2. It's not. This is much smaller and it looks like a cartoon cloud above this place when it rains as everything around is completely dry. Not sure why people don't just try; they'll see it works, but he.
I am glad to hear that it rains and is green in that corner of the desert, my friend. That is a beautiful image indeed. I am really excited about the possibility of reforesting in deserts, although deserts are beautiful habitats in themselves so we should definitely keep deserts around too.
I think people just feel defeated as individuals because they read only doomer content on climate change and as a result they feel overwhelmed unless some larger entity takes on the fight on their behalf. They've come to underestimate the impact individuals can have in effecting great change. I'm optimistic that little by little things can improve and that people can enjoy having a fun time contributing to the fight in positive ways as individuals.
>They've come to underestimate the impact individuals can have in effecting great change.
The tiny thing the GP is talking about, a small park, is completely out of reach of individuals.
Small communities can have an impact. But the only thing individuals can do is to pick what initiatives they support and what they wont have any piece of.
At the risk of sounding like a concern troll, I wish people were more thoughtful with tree planting campaigns. Rich ecosystems (peatlands, grasslands, savannas) have been damaged by attempts to introduce trees where they don't really belong. Surprisingly, this can cause a net decrease in carbon capture! And monoculture forests support relatively little biodiversity even though they look so green.
Sometimes planting more trees is the right answer, and we should absolutely do it. But often it feels like planting trees is a cheap way to score some green points without actually establishing healthy, sustainable ecosystems.
I read once about an idea of forcing every school in the US to have a small nature preserve - just some local trees and flowers and wild grasses. This would create habitats all across the nation which would serve to protect wild animals and give humans a chance, as they're growing, to develop a respect for nature.
Ever since then, I can't get the idea out of my head. It seems really nice. Excuse the pun, but this is one place where grassroots movements can have massively outsized effects.
That's a neat idea. It'd be cool if they also had a school garden as well, then everyone can learn to appreciate growing their own fruits and vegetables as well.
Except, half of all planted trees are dead within 5 years. And my guess is that the easily available planting locations of people planting trees close to them are less likely to survive.
Third, CO2 in trees does not necessarily REMAIN in trees. Need I remind you of last summer's wildfire problems? To fix the wildfire problem, we need to remove large amounts of dangerous overgrowth that a century of fire prevention has encouraged.
Fourth, the current trend is towards losing forests, not gaining them. It is easy to point to land and say, "Add forest there." But people living there who want to plant soybeans and raise cattle have different ideas. That's why rainforest is disappearing. What do you wish done with those inconvenient people?
Yeah, planting trees sounds great. But it is not likely to be a workable solution in the real world. Though it has promise as one of many pieces of a workable solution.
1. The average tree's lifespan is a lot longer than 5 years. It's more like 300-400 years. I've not seen any sources saying that half of all planted trees are dead within 5 years. Even if that is true, 5 years is enough time to keep replanting and maintaining the total number of trees much higher. People can tend to the trees they plant.
2. I got my number for CO2 capture per tree from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Arbor Day Foundation, and the European Environment Agency.
3. I don't think the wildfires materially impact the calculus.
4. There is a lot of land available for reforesting. This is not the same as saying that we should take back land that is used for farming. I would say that agriculture is going to innovate too, with vertical farms and more efficient usage of land where land is still necessary. We can start with land that is already available for reforesting rather than starting with squabbling over land that is now already used as farmland. Making farmland more efficient and innovating with vertical farms will let markets take care of inefficient and unnecessary land usage.
5. Planting trees for CO2 capture is a temporary solution. Eventually machines will sequester CO2 far more efficiently. Planting trees in general is nice for many other benefits too, not just the carbon capture. But yes, planting more trees is not the only thing we need to do.
Your CO2 capture figure is widely quoted, including in those places. But can you find a scientific paper that it goes back to? I'm a little wary of figures that I can't find a real reference for.
Not enough. We both cut down trees and burned underground carbon stores.
Merely replanting trees goes part of the way but it can’t address the whole issue.
The calculations you showed seem to be about blunting annual emissions. But we still have all the excess we previously emitted which has warmed the atmosphere. We need to deal with that eventually.
The amount of trees that could be planted would capture more than the airborne excess carbon, which means they would be capturing previous excess too. Since we're really close to peak global CO2 emissions, this means the new trees would be a carbon sink that keeps capturing excess carbon for at least decades, until far better capture solutions are created than long disruptive pipelines.
There is already enough land available for enough new native trees to capture more CO2 than is emitted into the atmosphere each year. This is before considering recovery of additional brownfield sites, becoming more efficient with industrial and agricultural land usage, and setting more land aside for planting additional trees.
With the full potential unlocked, we'd be able to plant so many trees that they'd capture 2x or more of the total CO2 emissions (total emissions, not just the airborne excess) which means we'd start capturing the past excess emissions as well.
Silvopasture exists. We are becoming reacquainted with better farming practices. Homes, offices, and other kinds of buildings are built in forests all the time. Plenty of opportunities for recreation.
CO2 stored underground in the form of plants dying and rotting for the benefit and use of other plants is also "carbon capture".
Yes it can. The number of trees that could be planted are enough to capture airborne excess CO2. I'm glad there's technology via pipeline but it needs to mature more. We need better solutions than really long and disruptive pipelines, and planting a lot of trees buys us a lot of runway.
Planting trees can certainly do a lot, but it is insufficient. If you went all in on "nature based" solutions, it gets you to around 15-20% of needed reductions. This would require a global reshaping of land use policy.
How has the size of the average home changed? In terms of square feet. I’m curious how that affects the price increase rate. We definitely need to build more housing, that’s for sure. I’m very hopeful that the huge investments into renewables and modernizing the grid will produce a huge growth in worker compensation and another economic boom.
Home size is a factor, but lot size is a more important one. Many cities explicitly or implicitly require minimum lot sizes and setbacks that make it pointless for builders to make small starter houses.
I wouldn't even say lot size is a factor as much as simply zoning rules and regulations. there aren't a lot of high cost of living areas, with the exception of maybe places like Manhattan, that actually don't have space for more housing. and even there, they have plenty of under-utilized space zoned for other things.
Or for that matter, what percentage of housing is new builds? My house is almost 90, and it doesn’t seem notably old, that’s just how old a lot of the housing in my suburb is.
