7 ms·

The most effective way to tackle climate change? Plant a trillion trees

253 points by woutgaze 7y ago

Arbalest 7y ago
I like that the headline on this one actually gives a number. 1 Trillion! Something like 139 trees per person. I read an article similar to this earlier today (not on HN like I posted before I edited this). https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-07-05/climate-change-tree-planting-carbon-dioxide/11267556 https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-07-05/climate-chang...
- krageon 7y ago
  It's closer to 129, though that is still a big number.
  - fit2rule 7y ago
    Not so difficult. I'm sure most people could plant 10 trees a month, given the motivation. Trouble is, how are we going to get people motivated to do this?
    - krageon 7y ago
      I can easily come close to 50 times that in a month (a given being that not all the seeds I throw around become real trees, so let's say it's 5 times). Doing so on a piece of land that won't get it's trees cut in short order is however next to impossible.
    - abdullahkhalids 7y ago
      Make it mandatory (and pay) for schools to ensure that each secondary school or higher kid plants 10 trees a year. The motivation multiplier on the rest of society from this policy will take care of the rest.
      - eitland 7y ago
        Used to be a thing in Norway until the 70ies or early 80ies. Now we Norwegians are busily blaming ourselves for planting Sitka spruce instead of native species, but I guess the right answer might not be to stop planting trees but to be a little more considerate in what we plant and where.
        mrec 7y ago
        What's wrong with Sitka spruce?
        eitland 7y ago
        Replaces local species.
    - Jommi 7y ago
      No, the problem is those trees need to stay alive and grow and not be burned for the carbon capture actually work out.
      - willyt 7y ago
        They could be cut down and turned into cross laminated timber buildings. If the trees are left to grow old and die naturally, does the stored carbon get re-emitted as a bi-product of decomposition? EDIT: According to the discussion below, yes it does.
    - buboard 7y ago
      Planting does not guarantee that a tree can live
growlist 7y ago
Can't come quickly enough in the UK as we have a significantly lower percentage of tree cover compared to Europe, and I love forests dearly. It was said that after WW1 there was barely a tree left standing in the country, and we've never recovered. It pains me that the average Brit seems to think a green field is nature, whereas many are virtual deserts in terms of biodiversity. I'm just hoping we get a decent mix of trees as part of this planting and that it is not subverted by commercial interests into massive monoculture plantations as was the case in Scotland.
- m0nty 7y ago
  > think a green field is nature I see these areas basically as factories, albeit we do have the kind of food security our ancestors could only dream of. Would be fantastic to see more forested areas and associated 're-wilding' projects. Could be hugely beneficial in so many ways if only people can take the long view.
  - tim333 7y ago
    Green fields are of course a kind of nature. It's interesting that the kind of natural environment humans seem to find pleasant - fields with some trees, animals and some water are quite similar to parts of Africa we evolved in eg. the Serengeti here: https://media.gadventures.com/media-server/cache/19/56/19567a3711d9810ad82a42fa2d88e794.jpg https://media.gadventures.com/media-server/cache/19/56/19567... The woods in England where I grew up were more like this https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/media/100142120/flooded-woodland.jpg?cb=409436404&preset=gallery-tab-main-image https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/media/100142120/flooded-woo... - damp crowded, muddy and not that pleasant to hang out in for any length of time. I think our parks are to some extent a way to make things look more like Africa. (eg Hyde Park here https://www.kidrated.com/kidrated/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Screen-Shot-2015-04-27-at-16.44.50-900x506.png https://www.kidrated.com/kidrated/wp-content/uploads/2015/04...)
    - jonnycomputer 7y ago
      Are you from Fenland?
adrianN 7y ago
And then keep on planting trillions more because we keep digging up coal and oil? It would probably be better to cover 1-3% of our land and coastal areas with solar panels and wind turbines.
- 11235813213455 7y ago
  nuclear obviously, the most effective and green way to produce energy
  - adrianN 7y ago
    Now show how to build enough reactors in the next twenty years to completely replace fossil fuels. If your strategy doesn't show at least 75% CO2 reduction by 2030 you've likely missed the 1.5° goal. Building reactors takes a long time. We probably first need to ramp up the industries that manufacture pressure vessels. The forging presses able to produce pressure vessels for modern reactors can manufacture maybe half a dozen a year, and there aren't too many of these massive presses around. You can of course argue that we build a different kind of reactor that doesn't require pressure vessels, but then you need additional time for R&D and proving the design in practice. Don't forget that we also need to train the engineers that staff the new power stations. Nuclear engineering is not a terribly popular major right now. Wind and solar on the other hand are well suited to reducing our CO2 output starting today. Building a wind turbine doesn't take ten years.
    - 11235813213455 7y ago
      maybe wind energy indeed, it's always good to have alternatives. But the electricity demand is mostly when there's not much wind (start and end of day, same for solar) and it's not easy to store that energy solar panels are generating a lost of toxic waste https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/25/18018820/solar-panel-waste-chemicals-energy-environment-recycling https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/25/18018820/solar-panel-was... and are probably a hazard for birds and insects
    - orf 7y ago
      Are there any videos of these presses? The process sounds interesting: the entire industrial capacity of the world to produce these is only a dozen a year? How many are there, and how long does each one take? Surely not that long...
lolive 7y ago
Is there an economical value to that? It will predate a lot of good lands for non-producting results. And probably require some human management. Who will pay for that?
- otikik 7y ago
  It has a similar economical value to having an army.
- ptah 7y ago
  we should plant food producing trees
- ptah 7y ago
  also if we don't stem climate change, it is likely that no one will exist nevermind money
- ptah 7y ago
  " all the locations identified by his team are on degraded land, rather than agricultural or urban areas"
alecmg 7y ago
I would love to have more trees. But not for reason of sucking CO2. Please understand that forests are CO2 neutral. Any CO2 a tree consumes in its lifetime will be converted to leaves and wood and eventually fall to the ground and be converted by insects, fungi and bacteria BACK to CO2. To get rid of CO2 from atmosphere we almost need to do the opposite, chop down trees and bury trunks somewhere where the don't decompose.
- cygx 7y ago
  Existing forests are neutral. Growing new ones is not.
  - GlenTheMachine 7y ago
    Exactly. I get very frustrated by these conversations.. Wood sequesters CO2. Growing more wood will, trivially, sequester more CO2. Is that sequester "as good" as sequestering it deep underground? That depends. If it is sequestered by an ecosystem that persists over time - in other words, if it is sequestered in a forest, and that forest remains there even if the individual trees die and decay - then yes. The CO2 that is pulled out of the atmosphere stays out of the atmosphere unless the forest disappears.
- Gupie 7y ago
  There is a case for burying charcoal, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/407754/the-case-for-burying-charcoal/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/407754/the-case-for-buryi...
  - alecmg 7y ago
    Use more energy to heat up biomass and convert it to a useful energy rich state and then ... bury it. If this is the best solution to CO2 problem, I would rather have a CO2 problem.
    - ryanmercer 7y ago
      So, there are actually companies looking at generating renewable energy WHILE making biochar, one of them that comes to mind is in Australia - although their website seems to be gone here is an article that still exists https://biochar-international.org/pacificpyrolysis/ https://biochar-international.org/pacificpyrolysis/ Basically they were (are?) for 12~ years were powering up to a [200kw generator proccessing up to 300kg](from my previous notes about them) of material an hour of dry biomass. Stuff like collected lawn clipping and branches. You could also use waste like paper sludge, sugar cane refuse, waste water sludge (feces and toilet paper), wood waste from milling, used grain from breweries and distilleries, organic waste from industrial sources etc. Go watch videos on making char cloth, it's a similar process. With char cloth you basically take a can that's mostly air tight, poke a hole in the top, place natural fibers inside like some scrap denim, replace the lid and heat the contents. The gas that gets cooked off is actually flammable and can be a fuel. The process they were using required a rather large machine and ended up not only producing biochar but output more energy than went into the system by being much more controlled and capturing the gasses. I suspect you could also manufacture a system that instead just uses concentrated solar power to process material, instead of needing to get up to 1000C though you'd only need to get around 450C (based on past studies for optimal temperature for producing biochar with optimal soil drainage properties), you could pull the gas off of that and pipe it some distance away to another facility doing the same a more traditional way, using the gas as the fuel source for it.
abdullahkhalids 7y ago
Pakistan completed a billion tree plantation project in 2017 [1]. This is currently being followed up with a 5 year 10 billion tree plantation project, at an annual cost of 7.5 billion PKR (~47 million USD) [2]. Planting 989bn trees for the other 200 countries should not be too difficult. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_Tree_Tsunami https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_Tree_Tsunami [2] http://www.radio.gov.pk/04-07-2019/pms-vision-of-clean-green-pakistan-getting-intl-acclaim-amin http://www.radio.gov.pk/04-07-2019/pms-vision-of-clean-green...
- agumonkey 7y ago
  I remember hearing about it.. but it should be news head title. Also, by making it a socially distributed action. To make people relearn, take part, take ownership, spend more time out.. it could probably cost less.
  - peterburkimsher 7y ago
    It used to be a national holiday in Korea, and many people still celebrate that day by planting trees every year. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbor_Day#Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbor_Day#Korea
    - agumonkey 7y ago
      I often think that to make something free, make it part of the culture. People gathering around doing it because it has large social short and long term value.
- maccard 7y ago
  The fact that it costs 50 million a year is incredible. That's less than 0.1% of what the UK government spends on interest on it's debts per year.
  - tremon 7y ago
    That's not where the cost is. It's in the opportunity cost for that area. Entire forests have been destroyed mostly not for their wood, but to re-use the land for a different, money-generating, purpose.
Gupie 7y ago
When we are currently losing (deforestation) 18 million acres of forest per year!
ptah 7y ago
is that 10^12 or 10^18?
- benpbenp 7y ago
  Well, by my Maths, 10^18 would require close to 7,000 trees for every square meter of dry land on the planet Earth. Even if we allow the use of Bonsai, that would be a stretch :)
- treerock 7y ago
  Trillion is 10^12 in both British and US English.
  - pgeorgi 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion disagrees and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Short_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Short_sc... goes into more detail.
    - tomxor 7y ago
      Oh crap, how are other countries still using this, is that really true? [edit] however @treerock is correct britain formally switched to short scale since 1974 so english is unambiguous, in all but historical contexts. Also recommends using SI prefixes just as done in the article which is unambiguous in all languages. I guess translators must be aware of this when converting words from billion and up.
      - pgeorgi 7y ago
        German has Tausend (1000), Million (1000 Tausend) , Milliarde (1000 Millionen), Billion (1000 Milliarden), Billiarde (1000 Billionen), Trillion (1000 Billiarden), and there aren't even proposals to change, and why should we?
        7y ago
chronolitus 7y ago
Very interesting. I see non-profit orgs advertising 1 planted tree for $1 [1]. Depending on how that scales, and whether this article is true, it should make it possible to effectively combat carbon increase for $1T. Seems like a rather low number, all things considered. [1] https://onetreeplanted.org/products/kenya https://onetreeplanted.org/products/kenya
- woutgaze 7y ago
  Also, https://www.trilliontreecampaign.org/donate-trees https://www.trilliontreecampaign.org/donate-trees quotes several projects with a low price of EUR 0.10 per tree.
- wolco 7y ago
  If they put all of the climate change money into a pot we have enough. Politics decides it is more important to give to a company or class of people in the name of climate change.
- chrsstrm 7y ago
  I can't speak on the Kenyan project you linked, but I did recently complete a 3000 tree habitat project. Even at bulk rates we purchased our trees at between $0.80-0.90 per tree. It took 3 people about 5-6 hours to complete the actual planting using a tractor and a tree planter. Outside of the actual purchase of the trees, other things to consider are: Labor was unpaid, however the county has a cost-sharing program we could have applied for which would have paid ~$8/hr per person to offset labor costs. I wouldn't be surprised if many of these non-profits use volunteer labor but also take advantage of reforestation grants to offset the cost. We borrowed the equipment and only used a couple gallons of diesel, but normally renting that equipment for the day would have been in the hundreds of dollars. Plenty of hours were spent meeting with state foresters to plan where the trees would go for maximum effect and deciding which species to plant. We had to transport the trees from the nursery and store them until they were planted. There is also a very limited window of time between when they are harvested at the nursery and when they need to be planted. If you wait too long many will die. Also to note that we had to call at least 4 nurseries to get the order we wanted. There is a limited supply of seedlings available each season and you have to plan well in advance if you need more than a couple hundred trees. At about a month out we're noticing about 10% dead loss, which is better than expected. Over the next year that could inflate to 30%. The goal shouldn't be to just plant 1T trees, it needs to be adding 1T new healthy trees to the environment, which means you would have to plant 1T + X0B extra to cover the dead loss. So $1T in cost is a good ballpark to start with, but don't be surprised if it balloons pretty quick. Tree planting doesn't scale as efficiently as we might like.
env123 7y ago
Philippines law would require students to plant 10 trees if they want to graduate https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/philippines-tree-planting-students-graduation-law-environment-a8932576.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/philippines-tr...
- daveloyall 7y ago
  Suppose 8 billion people and 1 trillion trees. Each person should plant 125 trees. Neat law though.
hunterx 7y ago
That's quite absurd. Planting 1T trees would be extremely nice to the environment yet we fail to see the big picture. In oceans we have less than half of the phytoplankton than we used to have only a century ago[1]. ""The amount of carbon that we can restore if we plant 1.2 trillion trees, or at least allow those trees to grow, would be way higher than the next best climate change solution," Crowther told CNN." Phytoplankton actually contributes more than trees do to tackle the big construct of "climate change".[2] In the article, all the climate change action is taken against the CO2 levels in the atmosphere - but I think we can all agree there is more to it than just CO2 (and we can go quite deep on that rabbit hole and slash apart lots of this big amorphous mass of a construct). On top of that, there are quite some theories on what drives climate change [3] and different views on it [4]. Yet all mediums speak from the same theory which is CO2 is bad. Period. Now, as said before on a comment by Krageon and Arbalest, it will be the comparable to a person planting 129 trees. Don't get me wrong I love trees, forest and all that - no question that's beautiful and has more profound effects than climate change alone in our environment and society - but one gets fed up by the `simplicity` we think as a society of these problems. I guess this is my personal opinion but I think we can do better with technology (which is why we are all in this community anyway) than that. And, again in my opinion, should be the way we lead and liaise with this problem instead of `go plant more trees`. [1] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-shows-oceanic-phytoplankton-declines-in-northern-hemisphere https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-shows-oceani... [2]https://novapublishers.com/shop/phytoplankton-biology-classification-and-environmental-impacts/ https://novapublishers.com/shop/phytoplankton-biology-classi... [3]http://climatica.org.uk/climate-science-information/long-term-climate-change-milankovitch-cycles http://climatica.org.uk/climate-science-information/long-ter... [4] https://www.bettermeetsreality.com/a-history-of-earths-carbon-dioxide-levels-over-time-carbon-dioxide-level-timeline-how-fast-c02-levels-are-increasing/ https://www.bettermeetsreality.com/a-history-of-earths-carbo...
- pgeorgi 7y ago
  > should be the way we lead and liaise with this problem instead of `go plant more trees`. Why should it be one or the other? Let's do both (plus many more things). Even the authors of this study mention that "planting trees" isn't enough, even for the CO2 issue alone, since planting trees is merely a mitigation for past damage.
lucideer 7y ago
One thing that I rarely see mentioned when tree-planting is suggested is species, biodiversity, and impact of selection of trees to be planted on the environment. 1 tree is not equivalent to 1 tree of a different species. Reports such as this one[0] hint to the impact of tree choice on things like human health, but I'm curious about the effects it has on climate in general (and sustainabiilty of tree populations: disease resistance, etc.). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19835537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19835537
- vijayr02 7y ago
  The first few tree planting drives in Tamil Nadu (a southern state of India; it's capital Chennai recently ran out of water) got significant public backlash [0] for this reason: they planted nothing but Acacia trees (due to their short growth term) and the leaves took a long time to degrade, killing all the undergrowth and creating a monoculture. [0] https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/Acacia-removal-starts-in-Palayamkottai/article16983121.ece# https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/Acacia-rem...!
  - heymijo 7y ago
    > it's capital Chennai recently ran out of water This casual statement made my eyes bulge. Like, what does this mean? How does it happen? Is water permanently gone? What are the ramifications? I found a WaPo article on Chennai, which I see has about half a million more people than NYC. > The city’s reservoirs and lakes are parched and its wells have run dry after two years of scanty rains here. Local authorities are trucking in water and desalinating seawater, but the supply is less than half the city’s basic requirement. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/06/28/major-indian-city-runs-out-water-million-people-pray-rain/?utm_term=.889860296b61 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/06/28/major-indian...
    - heymijo 7y ago
      This reminded me about Yemen. Eight years ago I read that Yemen may be the first country to run out of water. I went to check on where they are. It's not good. Drought is being compounded by conflict and politics. I can't help but think that this is a harbinger of the future in more places than Yemen as climate change continues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in_Yemen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in... https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/an-update-on-yemen-s-water-crisis-and-the-weaponization-of-water https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/an-update-o...
amriksohata 7y ago
Do trees reduce diesel based particulate emissions? What about nitrogen? Or will this just impact co2
- Maximus9000 7y ago
  Yes, trees reduce particulates https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37813709 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37813709 "A study by US-based The Nature Conservancy (TNC) reported than the average reduction of particulate matter near a tree was between 7% and 24%."
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  >What about nitrogen? There are several trees are nitrogen fixing species, they're a pretty important part of permaculture. Some of the mycorrhizal networks that exist in many forests also fix nitrogen. Also, some species like pine trees get a lot of their nitrogen from endophytes living in their tissue.
  - contravariant 7y ago
    Unfortunately the nitrogen fixing species mostly absorb N2. Which I'm fairly sure isn't the compound that OP wanted removed from the atmosphere. They were probably thinking about nitrogen oxides.
fallingfrog 7y ago
I can’t get the whole article to load.. but my hot take is, for the most part, in all the places where the conditions are right for trees to grow, there are trees there already. The exceptions are just those places where the trees have been deliberately cleared by humans, to make room for agriculture or grazing animals (as in pre-Columbian America as I suspect the article points out). But allowing all those areas to regrow cant be sufficient: If it were, could you not make the argument that it was the clearing of all those areas in the first place that caused all the warming we’ve seen so far?
- Tepix 7y ago
  No, trees don't just regrow if you've cut them down on a large scale. The landscape changes permanently.
  - fallingfrog 7y ago
    Well, “permanently” on human lifetime time scales perhaps. I’m just saying you probably can’t get forests to grow in places where they never occurred naturally pre-civilization.
    - gshdg 7y ago
      There are enormous swathes of land that used to be forested that no longer are because we cut or burned trees either to use the lumber or to clear the land for agriculture. Sure, in tens of thousands of years, trees would likely eventually repopulate that land; but that’s an extremely gradual process, as most trees’ seeds don’t disperse very far, and it takes years for each new tree to mature enough to produce seeds to extend the forest’s reach. Whereas if we seed those areas directly, we could have forests again within decades.
      - fallingfrog 7y ago
        Ok, that may be true but you're still not really understanding my argument. I'm going to spell it out. Assume: The land we're reforesting is land that humanity deforested. Hopefully I don't need to make that argument, it should be clear. Assume: If reforesting land causes cooling, then deforesting the same land caused the same amount of warming. Let A=the amount of warming you get by deforesting some land, also the amount of cooling you get by reforesting the same land. Let B=the amount of warming you get from shoving CO2 into the atmosphere. Let C=the total amount of warming so far. Then A+B=C If you're making the argument that A=C, then B=0 But B is not equal to 0. Therefore A is not equal to C. That means: reforesting all the land we deforested is not going to cancel out the CO2 we've put into the atmosphere. Does that help clarify my point? Reforestation BY ITSELF cannot be enough.
HugoDaniel 7y ago
Here is a fork: Plant 1T trees in the defrost areas of the artics ?
- AMerrit 7y ago
  The light difference between winter and summer get too extreme for most trees far enough north. The soil is also extremely poor. This gets brought up by people who think Canada would be hugely successful in a warmer climate, but even if there's no permafrost, the growing season won't change.
mjfern 7y ago
How about creating a simple campaign website, trilliontrees.org, that serves as a rallying call to plant trees and that compares and provides guidance on the myriad of nonprofits involved in planting trees? Anyone interested to partner on this?
- epaga 7y ago
  Something like this? :) https://www.trilliontreecampaign.org https://www.trilliontreecampaign.org
  - mjfern 7y ago
    Ha! Yes.
- uep 7y ago
  I almost think you're joking, since this already exists. https://www.trilliontrees.org/ https://www.trilliontrees.org/
  - mjfern 7y ago
    Weird. I visited this url earlier today and took me to a godaddy parking page. Maybe I mistyped or tried the .com.
sunkenvicar 7y ago
This is better than nuclear? How?
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  Building nuclear power plants is something we should be doing, however simply constructing enough nuclear power plants to replace all fossil fuel plants would create an insane amount of carbon dioxide before they even go online. Creating cement/concrete is one of the primary sources of CO2 emissions - producing a cubic yard of concrete (about 3900 lbs) is responsible for emitting about 400 lbs of CO2. Of course then you have to factor in all of the CO2 produced for manufacturing the structural steel, the fossil fuels that go into all the plastics and wiring, etc.
- gshdg 7y ago
  Replacing fossil fuels with nuclear helps prevent further CO2 emission but doesn’t mitigate past emissions. What’s already been released is enough to have already changed the climate and will continue warming the planet as long as it’s in the atmosphere. Planting trees helps remove CO2 from the atmosphere that we’ve already released. We should be both planting trees (to reverse past emissions) and changing our energy sources (to minimize future emissions).
ryanmercer 7y ago
Planting trees isn't a viable (complete) solution though for various reasons. - Healthy forest has 40-60 trees per acre This means you need 31,250,000~ square miles which is 15.87% of the Earth's landmass. - You need adequate rainfall where you plant the trees - For the healthiest trees, and best carbon sequestration, you also need to 'seed' the mycorrhizal networks that work in cooperation with tree roots. - You'd have to pick appropriate species for appropriate areas - Mature trees, the vast majority of the time, sequester far more than younger trees - There is considerable variation in the amount of carbon various trees can sequester in a given time Some land that actually used to sustain decent tree populations, is now nearly barren. A good example of this is Iceland. When the first settlers reached Iceland in the latter half of the 9th century, forests covered between 25 and 40% of the landscape (nearly 10-16k square miles), it is now around 0.5% with active efforts to reintroduce trees with the reintroduction going very slow. This year they are attempting to plant around 4 million trees but a fraction of those will likely survive.
- thinkingemote 7y ago
  Yes. A tree can be planted when its the size of a bean sprout. I can put a million sprouts in one acre. The target is easy to achieve. Out of those million trees I plant, only 50 will survive.
zimbatm 7y ago
You can help by switching your search engine to Ecosia: https://www.ecosia.org/ https://www.ecosia.org/ Each search result generates revenue (through ads) that sponsors tree planting.
stunt 7y ago
I wonder if the UN can just divide this number to countries base on mass, GDP, pollution, wealth, etc and mandate them to do it.
tluyben2 7y ago
I am trying to turn my garden into a small forest by checking out what grows with most leaves and least water. So far that seems to work; some of them die because then are too young and fragile. But most of them survive and keep growing; it's a nice hobby too.
grandridge 7y ago
I'm already over 100, way ahead of all you virtue signalers ;)
tmaly 7y ago
I think trying to slow the cutting of trees would also help. How many Christmas trees are cut down every year? I bought a synthetic tree many years ago, and I just keep using that to save on killing a tree every year.
- southerndrift 7y ago
  You can also look at this the other way round: By buying a Christmas tree, you create a market for those trees which makes people plant them. This leads to several generations of trees growing at any time, so that there is a net-reduction of CO2.
  - notabee 7y ago
    To make the reduction permanent however, the ultimate fate of all those Christmas trees is important. That market also entails more (fuel burning) economic activity surrounding Christmas and transportation of those trees. If they are disposed of in such a way as to be decomposed by microbes, much of the carbon returns to the environment. It's very hard to store carbon in a more permanent way than deep underground, which was where it was before we foolishly started pulling it all up and burning it.
- Baeocystin 7y ago
  The Christmas Tree Carbon Question is more complicated than you might think. https://www.sightline.org/2015/12/21/your-christmas-trees-carbon-footprint/ https://www.sightline.org/2015/12/21/your-christmas-trees-ca... The tl;dr is that usually cut trees are better in terms of carbon footprint, but not always.
dang 7y ago
Discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356859. But this story has been so popular that we might as well let run again.
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  I twice submitted a great talk that goes into more depth on this and other things, but both times it failed to get many views ([1] [2]), despite my having a hunch that there would be significant interest in it. Any thoughts on how to give the talk some more visibility? [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20150835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20150835 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20057134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20057134
mh8h 7y ago
Wildfires and insect infestations will be an issue, and they are very difficult to model. Canada has a lot of trees, but they emit more Carbon than they absorb. [1] [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/canada-forests-carbon-sink-or-source-1.5011490 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/canada-forests-carbon...
- asauce 7y ago
  Very interesting. Thanks for sharing!
- lixtra 7y ago
  > but they emit more Carbon than they absorb That’s a strange way to put it. The trees form a carbon reservoir. If they burn or decompose then they release carbon. But they cannot grow and release carbon indefinitely. If they emit carbon long enough then there won’t be trees left. On the other hand if the total mass of trees grows long enough they will have trapped more carbon.
b_tterc_p 7y ago
Why don’t we try making super fast growing, sterile GMO trees to do carbon capture and reduce the cost of wood?
ecoled_ame 7y ago
I think if only 1% of the global population reproduced for a few generations it would be way more effective than tree planting. It seems like all the environmental "fixes" are external, and not related to our replication rate.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- X6S1x6Okd1st 7y ago
  Good luck with that.
- helkafen 7y ago
  To reach the 2030 and 2050 targets (-45%, -100%), this change alone would be very insufficient. It would help during the second half of the century though, when emissions will likely need to be negative.
  - ecoled_ame 7y ago
    Cool, because I'm trying to plan for humanity's distant future, not just 50-100 years from now.
dotsarefun 7y ago
Plague is the "most effective way," actually.
coinward 7y ago
Turns out trees are great carbon capture devices and oxygen production engines
warmcat 7y ago
Planting is only effective when trees are nurtured and watered after planting. I have seen too many planting efforts over the years where, after the initial enthusiasm, there is no care for the saplings and they die off only for people to lament and blame the government.
thinkingemote 7y ago
Planting trees is easy. Trees grow from seed. My back yard can have a million trees. What counts is how many survive and what they are used for. Are the trees sustainable or do we just care about the equivalent of lines of code? Many trees are planted to be used as bio fuel. More are planted to be converted to paper and pulp, others for construction. All forestry involves thinning weaker trees from the forest. Planting trees shouldn't be what's measured at all but areas of sustainable forest created.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Bioremediation of carbon is almost certainly the best possible option. Plants are natural carbon-sequestration factories. Hectare for hectare wetlands are even more effective than forests, and encouraging and protecting swamps, bogs, marshes, wetlands, and mangrove forests would be an even better notion.
Doubl 7y ago
Cool, that's 167 per person alive and our family of 5 already planted 1500 over a decade ago. I am awesome.
rfonseca 7y ago
Photographer Sebastião Salgado and his wife have re-forested his family's farm, planting over 2M trees over 20 years, and have developed the know-how to make this reproducible at much more granular scales than big government-led projects. http://www.institutoterra.org/eng/conteudosLinks.php?id=22&tl=QWJvdXQgdXM=&sb=NQ== http://www.institutoterra.org/eng/conteudosLinks.php?id=22&t...
alephnan 7y ago
I'm surprised no one has mentioned using robots to automate planting of trees.
- true_tuna 7y ago
  There are a couple really cool drone tree planter projects out there that are able to plant thousands of trees an hour. https://www.fastcompany.com/40450262/these-tree-planting-drones-are-about-to-fire-a-million-seeds-to-re-grow-a-forest https://www.fastcompany.com/40450262/these-tree-planting-dro...
robocat 7y ago
What about 50 years later when the CO2 capture of the forest reaches equilibrium? Do we then plant another trillion trees? It's still worthwhile (and I also like trees, although usually not monocultures).
- eloff 7y ago
  Is it really only fifty years? I would have guessed a couple hundred at least. Climate change is really a time problem. Given hundreds of years we'll be off carbon based economies purely for economic reasons. In fact I think that will largely be true in less than a century. So anything like this that buys us time may actually be all it takes. But how about stopping deforestation? That seems like it would be more effective - pay developing countries based on maintaining their forested areas, policed using satellite data. I think we should also focus on planting trees and basically every other mitigation we can at the same time - doing one thing doesn't preclude others. This is being done with some success in the rain forests of one of those deforestation happy palm oil producers, Indonesia. https://www.wri.org/blog/2019/02/indonesia-reduces-deforestation-norway-pay https://www.wri.org/blog/2019/02/indonesia-reduces-deforesta...
- nanomonkey 7y ago
  The trees can be gasified and turned into biochar, and buried into the soil to capture the carbon and improve the soil quality (while generating electricity and heat). Then new trees can be planted in their place. Or they can be used to build buildings which sequesters carbon similarly (albeit for a shorter span of time).
new299 7y ago
The publication mentioned has now been published, I believe this is it: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6448/76/tab-pdf https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6448/76/tab-pdf
dang 7y ago
For those interested, there's an Ask HN thread about this now too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20361651 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20361651.
thomk 7y ago
Here's my question: which type of trees would be best? I assume the trees that convert co2 to o2 the quickest, which means the trees that grow the fastest, right? Maybe is it better to plant trees that are more disease resistant instead.
gdubs 7y ago
One of the best resources I’ve found lately is the book “The Carbon Farming Solution.” [1] If you’re interested in how different species of plants and trees compare in terms of carbon impact, different types of land-management, perennial staple crop exploration, etc, it’s really well written and researched. Bottom line: planting trees is great, and there’s a ton of ways we can improve the land. But maybe the single biggest impact thing we can do is stop cutting down forests for grazing cattle. At the end of the day the planet needs natural, wild forests, at a massive scale. 1: http://carbonfarmingsolution.com http://carbonfarmingsolution.com
Roritharr 7y ago
For the briefest moment I just considered buying a forest in Germany, one that I could visit with my son, having some high-minded talk with him about sustainability while feeling very smug. Then I found a german forest marketplace[1], that has a good FAQ regarding the regulations of owning a forest in Germany. After reading this I don't want to go anywhere near owning a forest, having to have insurance for the case anyone walking through my forest trips and injures himself, having to pay taxes for the very rain that penetrates the ground and may end up in the sewage system... [1] https://www.wald-boerse.de/wald-kaufen/ https://www.wald-boerse.de/wald-kaufen/
hathym 7y ago
Maybe stop cutting trees ?
trickstra 7y ago
Yes, but not only plant them. You also need to keep them and then you can never let them decompose or burn. Or you have to keep planting a new tree whenever one dies. Basically the "Plant 1T trees" means "increase the total number of trees by 1T and keep it that way". Also we would need to increase that number every time we increase our greenhouse gas emissions. No matter how "green" that sounds, that's just unsustainable. We still need to decrease our fossil fuel extraction to basically zero. And we need some way to put that sequestered CO2 back into ground or somewhere where it doesn't get back to atmosphere. Just planting 1T seedlings, collecting subsidies, and congratulating each other how we sequestered that calculated amount of CO2 is a totally fake activity. We really need to do this one right.
- fulafel 7y ago
  If the trees are used for wood or paper production, replanting logged trees is economically a no brainer.
  - trickstra 7y ago
    Yes, but then you still have the same problem when you discard that paper or wood product. It either decomposes or burns, which releases the stored carbon, and you have to catch it again with another fully grown tree. What I'm saying is that yes, we should plant more trees, but it must not be just about "planting", like this article and many others are trying to portray. Otherwise it will be all for nothing. And we still have to do the other two parts - lowering our overall energy demand and getting off of fossil fuels. We have to do all three.
- jacques_chester 7y ago
  Yes, though as an interim measure it's a start. A very large stock of trees can renew itself, so while individual trees return most or all of the carbon they capture, the stock of all trees becomes a stable stock of carbon sequestered from the atmosphere. That doesn't solve the problem of increasing CO2 emissions, but it blunts the trajectory and with any luck prevents some of the more destructive potential positive feedback loops from winding up.

253 points by woutgaze 7y ago

I like that the headline on this one actually gives a number. 1 Trillion! Something like 139 trees per person. I read an article similar to this earlier today (not on HN like I posted before I edited this). https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-07-05/climate-change-tree-planting-carbon-dioxide/11267556 https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-07-05/climate-chang...

krageon 7y ago
It's closer to 129, though that is still a big number.
- fit2rule 7y ago
  Not so difficult. I'm sure most people could plant 10 trees a month, given the motivation. Trouble is, how are we going to get people motivated to do this?
  - krageon 7y ago
    I can easily come close to 50 times that in a month (a given being that not all the seeds I throw around become real trees, so let's say it's 5 times). Doing so on a piece of land that won't get it's trees cut in short order is however next to impossible.
  - abdullahkhalids 7y ago
    Make it mandatory (and pay) for schools to ensure that each secondary school or higher kid plants 10 trees a year. The motivation multiplier on the rest of society from this policy will take care of the rest.
    - eitland 7y ago
      Used to be a thing in Norway until the 70ies or early 80ies. Now we Norwegians are busily blaming ourselves for planting Sitka spruce instead of native species, but I guess the right answer might not be to stop planting trees but to be a little more considerate in what we plant and where.
      - mrec 7y ago
        What's wrong with Sitka spruce?
        eitland 7y ago
        Replaces local species.
  - Jommi 7y ago
    No, the problem is those trees need to stay alive and grow and not be burned for the carbon capture actually work out.
    - willyt 7y ago
      They could be cut down and turned into cross laminated timber buildings. If the trees are left to grow old and die naturally, does the stored carbon get re-emitted as a bi-product of decomposition? EDIT: According to the discussion below, yes it does.
  - buboard 7y ago
    Planting does not guarantee that a tree can live

growlist 7y ago

Can't come quickly enough in the UK as we have a significantly lower percentage of tree cover compared to Europe, and I love forests dearly. It was said that after WW1 there was barely a tree left standing in the country, and we've never recovered. It pains me that the average Brit seems to think a green field is nature, whereas many are virtual deserts in terms of biodiversity. I'm just hoping we get a decent mix of trees as part of this planting and that it is not subverted by commercial interests into massive monoculture plantations as was the case in Scotland.

m0nty 7y ago
> think a green field is nature I see these areas basically as factories, albeit we do have the kind of food security our ancestors could only dream of. Would be fantastic to see more forested areas and associated 're-wilding' projects. Could be hugely beneficial in so many ways if only people can take the long view.
- tim333 7y ago
  Green fields are of course a kind of nature. It's interesting that the kind of natural environment humans seem to find pleasant - fields with some trees, animals and some water are quite similar to parts of Africa we evolved in eg. the Serengeti here: https://media.gadventures.com/media-server/cache/19/56/19567a3711d9810ad82a42fa2d88e794.jpg https://media.gadventures.com/media-server/cache/19/56/19567... The woods in England where I grew up were more like this https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/media/100142120/flooded-woodland.jpg?cb=409436404&preset=gallery-tab-main-image https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/media/100142120/flooded-woo... - damp crowded, muddy and not that pleasant to hang out in for any length of time. I think our parks are to some extent a way to make things look more like Africa. (eg Hyde Park here https://www.kidrated.com/kidrated/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Screen-Shot-2015-04-27-at-16.44.50-900x506.png https://www.kidrated.com/kidrated/wp-content/uploads/2015/04...)
  - jonnycomputer 7y ago
    Are you from Fenland?

adrianN 7y ago

And then keep on planting trillions more because we keep digging up coal and oil? It would probably be better to cover 1-3% of our land and coastal areas with solar panels and wind turbines.

11235813213455 7y ago
nuclear obviously, the most effective and green way to produce energy
- adrianN 7y ago
  Now show how to build enough reactors in the next twenty years to completely replace fossil fuels. If your strategy doesn't show at least 75% CO2 reduction by 2030 you've likely missed the 1.5° goal. Building reactors takes a long time. We probably first need to ramp up the industries that manufacture pressure vessels. The forging presses able to produce pressure vessels for modern reactors can manufacture maybe half a dozen a year, and there aren't too many of these massive presses around. You can of course argue that we build a different kind of reactor that doesn't require pressure vessels, but then you need additional time for R&D and proving the design in practice. Don't forget that we also need to train the engineers that staff the new power stations. Nuclear engineering is not a terribly popular major right now. Wind and solar on the other hand are well suited to reducing our CO2 output starting today. Building a wind turbine doesn't take ten years.
  - 11235813213455 7y ago
    maybe wind energy indeed, it's always good to have alternatives. But the electricity demand is mostly when there's not much wind (start and end of day, same for solar) and it's not easy to store that energy solar panels are generating a lost of toxic waste https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/25/18018820/solar-panel-waste-chemicals-energy-environment-recycling https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/25/18018820/solar-panel-was... and are probably a hazard for birds and insects
  - orf 7y ago
    Are there any videos of these presses? The process sounds interesting: the entire industrial capacity of the world to produce these is only a dozen a year? How many are there, and how long does each one take? Surely not that long...

lolive 7y ago

Is there an economical value to that? It will predate a lot of good lands for non-producting results. And probably require some human management. Who will pay for that?

otikik 7y ago
It has a similar economical value to having an army.
ptah 7y ago
we should plant food producing trees
ptah 7y ago
also if we don't stem climate change, it is likely that no one will exist nevermind money
ptah 7y ago
" all the locations identified by his team are on degraded land, rather than agricultural or urban areas"

alecmg 7y ago

I would love to have more trees. But not for reason of sucking CO2. Please understand that forests are CO2 neutral. Any CO2 a tree consumes in its lifetime will be converted to leaves and wood and eventually fall to the ground and be converted by insects, fungi and bacteria BACK to CO2. To get rid of CO2 from atmosphere we almost need to do the opposite, chop down trees and bury trunks somewhere where the don't decompose.

cygx 7y ago
Existing forests are neutral. Growing new ones is not.
- GlenTheMachine 7y ago
  Exactly. I get very frustrated by these conversations.. Wood sequesters CO2. Growing more wood will, trivially, sequester more CO2. Is that sequester "as good" as sequestering it deep underground? That depends. If it is sequestered by an ecosystem that persists over time - in other words, if it is sequestered in a forest, and that forest remains there even if the individual trees die and decay - then yes. The CO2 that is pulled out of the atmosphere stays out of the atmosphere unless the forest disappears.
Gupie 7y ago
There is a case for burying charcoal, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/407754/the-case-for-burying-charcoal/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/407754/the-case-for-buryi...
- alecmg 7y ago
  Use more energy to heat up biomass and convert it to a useful energy rich state and then ... bury it. If this is the best solution to CO2 problem, I would rather have a CO2 problem.
  - ryanmercer 7y ago
    So, there are actually companies looking at generating renewable energy WHILE making biochar, one of them that comes to mind is in Australia - although their website seems to be gone here is an article that still exists https://biochar-international.org/pacificpyrolysis/ https://biochar-international.org/pacificpyrolysis/ Basically they were (are?) for 12~ years were powering up to a [200kw generator proccessing up to 300kg](from my previous notes about them) of material an hour of dry biomass. Stuff like collected lawn clipping and branches. You could also use waste like paper sludge, sugar cane refuse, waste water sludge (feces and toilet paper), wood waste from milling, used grain from breweries and distilleries, organic waste from industrial sources etc. Go watch videos on making char cloth, it's a similar process. With char cloth you basically take a can that's mostly air tight, poke a hole in the top, place natural fibers inside like some scrap denim, replace the lid and heat the contents. The gas that gets cooked off is actually flammable and can be a fuel. The process they were using required a rather large machine and ended up not only producing biochar but output more energy than went into the system by being much more controlled and capturing the gasses. I suspect you could also manufacture a system that instead just uses concentrated solar power to process material, instead of needing to get up to 1000C though you'd only need to get around 450C (based on past studies for optimal temperature for producing biochar with optimal soil drainage properties), you could pull the gas off of that and pipe it some distance away to another facility doing the same a more traditional way, using the gas as the fuel source for it.

abdullahkhalids 7y ago

Pakistan completed a billion tree plantation project in 2017 [1]. This is currently being followed up with a 5 year 10 billion tree plantation project, at an annual cost of 7.5 billion PKR (~47 million USD) [2]. Planting 989bn trees for the other 200 countries should not be too difficult. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_Tree_Tsunami https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_Tree_Tsunami [2] http://www.radio.gov.pk/04-07-2019/pms-vision-of-clean-green-pakistan-getting-intl-acclaim-amin http://www.radio.gov.pk/04-07-2019/pms-vision-of-clean-green...

agumonkey 7y ago
I remember hearing about it.. but it should be news head title. Also, by making it a socially distributed action. To make people relearn, take part, take ownership, spend more time out.. it could probably cost less.
- peterburkimsher 7y ago
  It used to be a national holiday in Korea, and many people still celebrate that day by planting trees every year. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbor_Day#Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbor_Day#Korea
  - agumonkey 7y ago
    I often think that to make something free, make it part of the culture. People gathering around doing it because it has large social short and long term value.
maccard 7y ago
The fact that it costs 50 million a year is incredible. That's less than 0.1% of what the UK government spends on interest on it's debts per year.
- tremon 7y ago
  That's not where the cost is. It's in the opportunity cost for that area. Entire forests have been destroyed mostly not for their wood, but to re-use the land for a different, money-generating, purpose.

Gupie 7y ago

When we are currently losing (deforestation) 18 million acres of forest per year!

ptah 7y ago

is that 10^12 or 10^18?

benpbenp 7y ago
Well, by my Maths, 10^18 would require close to 7,000 trees for every square meter of dry land on the planet Earth. Even if we allow the use of Bonsai, that would be a stretch :)
treerock 7y ago
Trillion is 10^12 in both British and US English.
- pgeorgi 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trillion disagrees and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Short_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Short_sc... goes into more detail.
  - tomxor 7y ago
    Oh crap, how are other countries still using this, is that really true? [edit] however @treerock is correct britain formally switched to short scale since 1974 so english is unambiguous, in all but historical contexts. Also recommends using SI prefixes just as done in the article which is unambiguous in all languages. I guess translators must be aware of this when converting words from billion and up.
    - pgeorgi 7y ago
      German has Tausend (1000), Million (1000 Tausend) , Milliarde (1000 Millionen), Billion (1000 Milliarden), Billiarde (1000 Billionen), Trillion (1000 Billiarden), and there aren't even proposals to change, and why should we?
      - 7y ago

chronolitus 7y ago

Very interesting. I see non-profit orgs advertising 1 planted tree for $1 [1]. Depending on how that scales, and whether this article is true, it should make it possible to effectively combat carbon increase for $1T. Seems like a rather low number, all things considered. [1] https://onetreeplanted.org/products/kenya https://onetreeplanted.org/products/kenya

woutgaze 7y ago
Also, https://www.trilliontreecampaign.org/donate-trees https://www.trilliontreecampaign.org/donate-trees quotes several projects with a low price of EUR 0.10 per tree.
wolco 7y ago
If they put all of the climate change money into a pot we have enough. Politics decides it is more important to give to a company or class of people in the name of climate change.
chrsstrm 7y ago
I can't speak on the Kenyan project you linked, but I did recently complete a 3000 tree habitat project. Even at bulk rates we purchased our trees at between $0.80-0.90 per tree. It took 3 people about 5-6 hours to complete the actual planting using a tractor and a tree planter. Outside of the actual purchase of the trees, other things to consider are: Labor was unpaid, however the county has a cost-sharing program we could have applied for which would have paid ~$8/hr per person to offset labor costs. I wouldn't be surprised if many of these non-profits use volunteer labor but also take advantage of reforestation grants to offset the cost. We borrowed the equipment and only used a couple gallons of diesel, but normally renting that equipment for the day would have been in the hundreds of dollars. Plenty of hours were spent meeting with state foresters to plan where the trees would go for maximum effect and deciding which species to plant. We had to transport the trees from the nursery and store them until they were planted. There is also a very limited window of time between when they are harvested at the nursery and when they need to be planted. If you wait too long many will die. Also to note that we had to call at least 4 nurseries to get the order we wanted. There is a limited supply of seedlings available each season and you have to plan well in advance if you need more than a couple hundred trees. At about a month out we're noticing about 10% dead loss, which is better than expected. Over the next year that could inflate to 30%. The goal shouldn't be to just plant 1T trees, it needs to be adding 1T new healthy trees to the environment, which means you would have to plant 1T + X0B extra to cover the dead loss. So $1T in cost is a good ballpark to start with, but don't be surprised if it balloons pretty quick. Tree planting doesn't scale as efficiently as we might like.

env123 7y ago

Philippines law would require students to plant 10 trees if they want to graduate https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/philippines-tree-planting-students-graduation-law-environment-a8932576.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/philippines-tr...

daveloyall 7y ago
Suppose 8 billion people and 1 trillion trees. Each person should plant 125 trees. Neat law though.

hunterx 7y ago

That's quite absurd. Planting 1T trees would be extremely nice to the environment yet we fail to see the big picture. In oceans we have less than half of the phytoplankton than we used to have only a century ago[1]. ""The amount of carbon that we can restore if we plant 1.2 trillion trees, or at least allow those trees to grow, would be way higher than the next best climate change solution," Crowther told CNN." Phytoplankton actually contributes more than trees do to tackle the big construct of "climate change".[2] In the article, all the climate change action is taken against the CO2 levels in the atmosphere - but I think we can all agree there is more to it than just CO2 (and we can go quite deep on that rabbit hole and slash apart lots of this big amorphous mass of a construct). On top of that, there are quite some theories on what drives climate change [3] and different views on it [4]. Yet all mediums speak from the same theory which is CO2 is bad. Period. Now, as said before on a comment by Krageon and Arbalest, it will be the comparable to a person planting 129 trees. Don't get me wrong I love trees, forest and all that - no question that's beautiful and has more profound effects than climate change alone in our environment and society - but one gets fed up by the `simplicity` we think as a society of these problems. I guess this is my personal opinion but I think we can do better with technology (which is why we are all in this community anyway) than that. And, again in my opinion, should be the way we lead and liaise with this problem instead of `go plant more trees`. [1] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-shows-oceanic-phytoplankton-declines-in-northern-hemisphere https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-shows-oceani... [2]https://novapublishers.com/shop/phytoplankton-biology-classification-and-environmental-impacts/ https://novapublishers.com/shop/phytoplankton-biology-classi... [3]http://climatica.org.uk/climate-science-information/long-term-climate-change-milankovitch-cycles http://climatica.org.uk/climate-science-information/long-ter... [4] https://www.bettermeetsreality.com/a-history-of-earths-carbon-dioxide-levels-over-time-carbon-dioxide-level-timeline-how-fast-c02-levels-are-increasing/ https://www.bettermeetsreality.com/a-history-of-earths-carbo...

pgeorgi 7y ago
> should be the way we lead and liaise with this problem instead of `go plant more trees`. Why should it be one or the other? Let's do both (plus many more things). Even the authors of this study mention that "planting trees" isn't enough, even for the CO2 issue alone, since planting trees is merely a mitigation for past damage.

lucideer 7y ago

One thing that I rarely see mentioned when tree-planting is suggested is species, biodiversity, and impact of selection of trees to be planted on the environment. 1 tree is not equivalent to 1 tree of a different species. Reports such as this one[0] hint to the impact of tree choice on things like human health, but I'm curious about the effects it has on climate in general (and sustainabiilty of tree populations: disease resistance, etc.). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19835537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19835537

vijayr02 7y ago
The first few tree planting drives in Tamil Nadu (a southern state of India; it's capital Chennai recently ran out of water) got significant public backlash [0] for this reason: they planted nothing but Acacia trees (due to their short growth term) and the leaves took a long time to degrade, killing all the undergrowth and creating a monoculture. [0] https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/Acacia-removal-starts-in-Palayamkottai/article16983121.ece# https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/Acacia-rem...!
- heymijo 7y ago
  > it's capital Chennai recently ran out of water This casual statement made my eyes bulge. Like, what does this mean? How does it happen? Is water permanently gone? What are the ramifications? I found a WaPo article on Chennai, which I see has about half a million more people than NYC. > The city’s reservoirs and lakes are parched and its wells have run dry after two years of scanty rains here. Local authorities are trucking in water and desalinating seawater, but the supply is less than half the city’s basic requirement. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/06/28/major-indian-city-runs-out-water-million-people-pray-rain/?utm_term=.889860296b61 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/06/28/major-indian...
  - heymijo 7y ago
    This reminded me about Yemen. Eight years ago I read that Yemen may be the first country to run out of water. I went to check on where they are. It's not good. Drought is being compounded by conflict and politics. I can't help but think that this is a harbinger of the future in more places than Yemen as climate change continues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in_Yemen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in... https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/an-update-on-yemen-s-water-crisis-and-the-weaponization-of-water https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/an-update-o...

amriksohata 7y ago

Do trees reduce diesel based particulate emissions? What about nitrogen? Or will this just impact co2

Maximus9000 7y ago
Yes, trees reduce particulates https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37813709 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37813709 "A study by US-based The Nature Conservancy (TNC) reported than the average reduction of particulate matter near a tree was between 7% and 24%."
ryanmercer 7y ago
>What about nitrogen? There are several trees are nitrogen fixing species, they're a pretty important part of permaculture. Some of the mycorrhizal networks that exist in many forests also fix nitrogen. Also, some species like pine trees get a lot of their nitrogen from endophytes living in their tissue.
- contravariant 7y ago
  Unfortunately the nitrogen fixing species mostly absorb N2. Which I'm fairly sure isn't the compound that OP wanted removed from the atmosphere. They were probably thinking about nitrogen oxides.

fallingfrog 7y ago

I can’t get the whole article to load.. but my hot take is, for the most part, in all the places where the conditions are right for trees to grow, there are trees there already. The exceptions are just those places where the trees have been deliberately cleared by humans, to make room for agriculture or grazing animals (as in pre-Columbian America as I suspect the article points out). But allowing all those areas to regrow cant be sufficient: If it were, could you not make the argument that it was the clearing of all those areas in the first place that caused all the warming we’ve seen so far?

Tepix 7y ago
No, trees don't just regrow if you've cut them down on a large scale. The landscape changes permanently.
- fallingfrog 7y ago
  Well, “permanently” on human lifetime time scales perhaps. I’m just saying you probably can’t get forests to grow in places where they never occurred naturally pre-civilization.
  - gshdg 7y ago
    There are enormous swathes of land that used to be forested that no longer are because we cut or burned trees either to use the lumber or to clear the land for agriculture. Sure, in tens of thousands of years, trees would likely eventually repopulate that land; but that’s an extremely gradual process, as most trees’ seeds don’t disperse very far, and it takes years for each new tree to mature enough to produce seeds to extend the forest’s reach. Whereas if we seed those areas directly, we could have forests again within decades.
    - fallingfrog 7y ago
      Ok, that may be true but you're still not really understanding my argument. I'm going to spell it out. Assume: The land we're reforesting is land that humanity deforested. Hopefully I don't need to make that argument, it should be clear. Assume: If reforesting land causes cooling, then deforesting the same land caused the same amount of warming. Let A=the amount of warming you get by deforesting some land, also the amount of cooling you get by reforesting the same land. Let B=the amount of warming you get from shoving CO2 into the atmosphere. Let C=the total amount of warming so far. Then A+B=C If you're making the argument that A=C, then B=0 But B is not equal to 0. Therefore A is not equal to C. That means: reforesting all the land we deforested is not going to cancel out the CO2 we've put into the atmosphere. Does that help clarify my point? Reforestation BY ITSELF cannot be enough.

HugoDaniel 7y ago

Here is a fork: Plant 1T trees in the defrost areas of the artics ?

AMerrit 7y ago
The light difference between winter and summer get too extreme for most trees far enough north. The soil is also extremely poor. This gets brought up by people who think Canada would be hugely successful in a warmer climate, but even if there's no permafrost, the growing season won't change.

mjfern 7y ago

How about creating a simple campaign website, trilliontrees.org, that serves as a rallying call to plant trees and that compares and provides guidance on the myriad of nonprofits involved in planting trees? Anyone interested to partner on this?

epaga 7y ago
Something like this? :) https://www.trilliontreecampaign.org https://www.trilliontreecampaign.org
- mjfern 7y ago
  Ha! Yes.
uep 7y ago
I almost think you're joking, since this already exists. https://www.trilliontrees.org/ https://www.trilliontrees.org/
- mjfern 7y ago
  Weird. I visited this url earlier today and took me to a godaddy parking page. Maybe I mistyped or tried the .com.

sunkenvicar 7y ago

This is better than nuclear? How?

ryanmercer 7y ago
Building nuclear power plants is something we should be doing, however simply constructing enough nuclear power plants to replace all fossil fuel plants would create an insane amount of carbon dioxide before they even go online. Creating cement/concrete is one of the primary sources of CO2 emissions - producing a cubic yard of concrete (about 3900 lbs) is responsible for emitting about 400 lbs of CO2. Of course then you have to factor in all of the CO2 produced for manufacturing the structural steel, the fossil fuels that go into all the plastics and wiring, etc.
gshdg 7y ago
Replacing fossil fuels with nuclear helps prevent further CO2 emission but doesn’t mitigate past emissions. What’s already been released is enough to have already changed the climate and will continue warming the planet as long as it’s in the atmosphere. Planting trees helps remove CO2 from the atmosphere that we’ve already released. We should be both planting trees (to reverse past emissions) and changing our energy sources (to minimize future emissions).

ryanmercer 7y ago

Planting trees isn't a viable (complete) solution though for various reasons. - Healthy forest has 40-60 trees per acre This means you need 31,250,000~ square miles which is 15.87% of the Earth's landmass. - You need adequate rainfall where you plant the trees - For the healthiest trees, and best carbon sequestration, you also need to 'seed' the mycorrhizal networks that work in cooperation with tree roots. - You'd have to pick appropriate species for appropriate areas - Mature trees, the vast majority of the time, sequester far more than younger trees - There is considerable variation in the amount of carbon various trees can sequester in a given time Some land that actually used to sustain decent tree populations, is now nearly barren. A good example of this is Iceland. When the first settlers reached Iceland in the latter half of the 9th century, forests covered between 25 and 40% of the landscape (nearly 10-16k square miles), it is now around 0.5% with active efforts to reintroduce trees with the reintroduction going very slow. This year they are attempting to plant around 4 million trees but a fraction of those will likely survive.

thinkingemote 7y ago
Yes. A tree can be planted when its the size of a bean sprout. I can put a million sprouts in one acre. The target is easy to achieve. Out of those million trees I plant, only 50 will survive.

zimbatm 7y ago

You can help by switching your search engine to Ecosia: https://www.ecosia.org/ https://www.ecosia.org/ Each search result generates revenue (through ads) that sponsors tree planting.

stunt 7y ago

I wonder if the UN can just divide this number to countries base on mass, GDP, pollution, wealth, etc and mandate them to do it.

tluyben2 7y ago

I am trying to turn my garden into a small forest by checking out what grows with most leaves and least water. So far that seems to work; some of them die because then are too young and fragile. But most of them survive and keep growing; it's a nice hobby too.

grandridge 7y ago

I'm already over 100, way ahead of all you virtue signalers ;)

tmaly 7y ago

I think trying to slow the cutting of trees would also help. How many Christmas trees are cut down every year? I bought a synthetic tree many years ago, and I just keep using that to save on killing a tree every year.

southerndrift 7y ago
You can also look at this the other way round: By buying a Christmas tree, you create a market for those trees which makes people plant them. This leads to several generations of trees growing at any time, so that there is a net-reduction of CO2.
- notabee 7y ago
  To make the reduction permanent however, the ultimate fate of all those Christmas trees is important. That market also entails more (fuel burning) economic activity surrounding Christmas and transportation of those trees. If they are disposed of in such a way as to be decomposed by microbes, much of the carbon returns to the environment. It's very hard to store carbon in a more permanent way than deep underground, which was where it was before we foolishly started pulling it all up and burning it.
Baeocystin 7y ago
The Christmas Tree Carbon Question is more complicated than you might think. https://www.sightline.org/2015/12/21/your-christmas-trees-carbon-footprint/ https://www.sightline.org/2015/12/21/your-christmas-trees-ca... The tl;dr is that usually cut trees are better in terms of carbon footprint, but not always.

dang 7y ago

Discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356859. But this story has been so popular that we might as well let run again.

mehrdadn 7y ago
I twice submitted a great talk that goes into more depth on this and other things, but both times it failed to get many views ([1] [2]), despite my having a hunch that there would be significant interest in it. Any thoughts on how to give the talk some more visibility? [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20150835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20150835 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20057134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20057134

mh8h 7y ago

Wildfires and insect infestations will be an issue, and they are very difficult to model. Canada has a lot of trees, but they emit more Carbon than they absorb. [1] [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/canada-forests-carbon-sink-or-source-1.5011490 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/canada-forests-carbon...

asauce 7y ago
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing!
lixtra 7y ago
> but they emit more Carbon than they absorb That’s a strange way to put it. The trees form a carbon reservoir. If they burn or decompose then they release carbon. But they cannot grow and release carbon indefinitely. If they emit carbon long enough then there won’t be trees left. On the other hand if the total mass of trees grows long enough they will have trapped more carbon.

b_tterc_p 7y ago

Why don’t we try making super fast growing, sterile GMO trees to do carbon capture and reduce the cost of wood?

ecoled_ame 7y ago

I think if only 1% of the global population reproduced for a few generations it would be way more effective than tree planting. It seems like all the environmental "fixes" are external, and not related to our replication rate.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
X6S1x6Okd1st 7y ago
Good luck with that.
helkafen 7y ago
To reach the 2030 and 2050 targets (-45%, -100%), this change alone would be very insufficient. It would help during the second half of the century though, when emissions will likely need to be negative.
- ecoled_ame 7y ago
  Cool, because I'm trying to plan for humanity's distant future, not just 50-100 years from now.

dotsarefun 7y ago

Plague is the "most effective way," actually.

coinward 7y ago

Turns out trees are great carbon capture devices and oxygen production engines

warmcat 7y ago

Planting is only effective when trees are nurtured and watered after planting. I have seen too many planting efforts over the years where, after the initial enthusiasm, there is no care for the saplings and they die off only for people to lament and blame the government.

thinkingemote 7y ago

Planting trees is easy. Trees grow from seed. My back yard can have a million trees. What counts is how many survive and what they are used for. Are the trees sustainable or do we just care about the equivalent of lines of code? Many trees are planted to be used as bio fuel. More are planted to be converted to paper and pulp, others for construction. All forestry involves thinning weaker trees from the forest. Planting trees shouldn't be what's measured at all but areas of sustainable forest created.

dredmorbius 7y ago

Bioremediation of carbon is almost certainly the best possible option. Plants are natural carbon-sequestration factories. Hectare for hectare wetlands are even more effective than forests, and encouraging and protecting swamps, bogs, marshes, wetlands, and mangrove forests would be an even better notion.

Doubl 7y ago

Cool, that's 167 per person alive and our family of 5 already planted 1500 over a decade ago. I am awesome.

rfonseca 7y ago

Photographer Sebastião Salgado and his wife have re-forested his family's farm, planting over 2M trees over 20 years, and have developed the know-how to make this reproducible at much more granular scales than big government-led projects. http://www.institutoterra.org/eng/conteudosLinks.php?id=22&tl=QWJvdXQgdXM=&sb=NQ== http://www.institutoterra.org/eng/conteudosLinks.php?id=22&t...

alephnan 7y ago

I'm surprised no one has mentioned using robots to automate planting of trees.

true_tuna 7y ago
There are a couple really cool drone tree planter projects out there that are able to plant thousands of trees an hour. https://www.fastcompany.com/40450262/these-tree-planting-drones-are-about-to-fire-a-million-seeds-to-re-grow-a-forest https://www.fastcompany.com/40450262/these-tree-planting-dro...

robocat 7y ago

What about 50 years later when the CO2 capture of the forest reaches equilibrium? Do we then plant another trillion trees? It's still worthwhile (and I also like trees, although usually not monocultures).

eloff 7y ago
Is it really only fifty years? I would have guessed a couple hundred at least. Climate change is really a time problem. Given hundreds of years we'll be off carbon based economies purely for economic reasons. In fact I think that will largely be true in less than a century. So anything like this that buys us time may actually be all it takes. But how about stopping deforestation? That seems like it would be more effective - pay developing countries based on maintaining their forested areas, policed using satellite data. I think we should also focus on planting trees and basically every other mitigation we can at the same time - doing one thing doesn't preclude others. This is being done with some success in the rain forests of one of those deforestation happy palm oil producers, Indonesia. https://www.wri.org/blog/2019/02/indonesia-reduces-deforestation-norway-pay https://www.wri.org/blog/2019/02/indonesia-reduces-deforesta...
nanomonkey 7y ago
The trees can be gasified and turned into biochar, and buried into the soil to capture the carbon and improve the soil quality (while generating electricity and heat). Then new trees can be planted in their place. Or they can be used to build buildings which sequesters carbon similarly (albeit for a shorter span of time).

new299 7y ago

The publication mentioned has now been published, I believe this is it: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6448/76/tab-pdf https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6448/76/tab-pdf

dang 7y ago

For those interested, there's an Ask HN thread about this now too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20361651 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20361651.

thomk 7y ago

Here's my question: which type of trees would be best? I assume the trees that convert co2 to o2 the quickest, which means the trees that grow the fastest, right? Maybe is it better to plant trees that are more disease resistant instead.

gdubs 7y ago

One of the best resources I’ve found lately is the book “The Carbon Farming Solution.” [1] If you’re interested in how different species of plants and trees compare in terms of carbon impact, different types of land-management, perennial staple crop exploration, etc, it’s really well written and researched. Bottom line: planting trees is great, and there’s a ton of ways we can improve the land. But maybe the single biggest impact thing we can do is stop cutting down forests for grazing cattle. At the end of the day the planet needs natural, wild forests, at a massive scale. 1: http://carbonfarmingsolution.com http://carbonfarmingsolution.com

Roritharr 7y ago

For the briefest moment I just considered buying a forest in Germany, one that I could visit with my son, having some high-minded talk with him about sustainability while feeling very smug. Then I found a german forest marketplace[1], that has a good FAQ regarding the regulations of owning a forest in Germany. After reading this I don't want to go anywhere near owning a forest, having to have insurance for the case anyone walking through my forest trips and injures himself, having to pay taxes for the very rain that penetrates the ground and may end up in the sewage system... [1] https://www.wald-boerse.de/wald-kaufen/ https://www.wald-boerse.de/wald-kaufen/

hathym 7y ago

Maybe stop cutting trees ?

trickstra 7y ago

Yes, but not only plant them. You also need to keep them and then you can never let them decompose or burn. Or you have to keep planting a new tree whenever one dies. Basically the "Plant 1T trees" means "increase the total number of trees by 1T and keep it that way". Also we would need to increase that number every time we increase our greenhouse gas emissions. No matter how "green" that sounds, that's just unsustainable. We still need to decrease our fossil fuel extraction to basically zero. And we need some way to put that sequestered CO2 back into ground or somewhere where it doesn't get back to atmosphere. Just planting 1T seedlings, collecting subsidies, and congratulating each other how we sequestered that calculated amount of CO2 is a totally fake activity. We really need to do this one right.

fulafel 7y ago
If the trees are used for wood or paper production, replanting logged trees is economically a no brainer.
- trickstra 7y ago
  Yes, but then you still have the same problem when you discard that paper or wood product. It either decomposes or burns, which releases the stored carbon, and you have to catch it again with another fully grown tree. What I'm saying is that yes, we should plant more trees, but it must not be just about "planting", like this article and many others are trying to portray. Otherwise it will be all for nothing. And we still have to do the other two parts - lowering our overall energy demand and getting off of fossil fuels. We have to do all three.
jacques_chester 7y ago
Yes, though as an interim measure it's a start. A very large stock of trees can renew itself, so while individual trees return most or all of the carbon they capture, the stock of all trees becomes a stable stock of carbon sequestered from the atmosphere. That doesn't solve the problem of increasing CO2 emissions, but it blunts the trajectory and with any luck prevents some of the more destructive potential positive feedback loops from winding up.