The Breakthrough Energy Coalition

[Umbran]

Which is better (more efficient use per square foot or whatever): trees, millions of smaller plants like grass or algae for sucking up carbon?

What matters most is *mass*. My understanding is that, acre for acre, and rate of growth, forest wins on drawing carbon out of the atmosphere. Certainly, it is the most efficient low-hanging fruit for us, because we have the land that used to be forest that could be returned to being forest. We don't have stretches of ocean that isn't already loaded with algae, and algae wold have to be *massively* better at sequestering carbon to make building land-based algae farms for that purpose would be a good idea.

In a similar note, remember how cow farts are supposed to be bad?

How come all the American Buffalo weren't a problem back then?

(which having had this factoid checked recently, outnumbered all the current level of Cows)

I question that. When I look around, I find I find that the National Cattleman's Beef association says there's about 90 million head of cattle in the US. Historic estimates for bison herds range from 30 to 60 million at their height before 1800. So, we have more cows now than there were bison.

 

[tomBitonti]

Some nice maps of livestock (pigs and cows, &etc) in several countries:

http://www.fastcoexist.com/3031945/...-all-the-cattle-pigs-and-other-livestock-live

Thx!

TomB

 

[Janx]

What matters most is *mass*. My understanding is that, acre for acre, and rate of growth, forest wins on drawing carbon out of the atmosphere. Certainly, it is the most efficient low-hanging fruit for us, because we have the land that used to be forest that could be returned to being forest. We don't have stretches of ocean that isn't already loaded with algae, and algae wold have to be *massively* better at sequestering carbon to make building land-based algae farms for that purpose would be a good idea.



I question that. When I look around, I find I find that the National Cattleman's Beef association says there's about 90 million head of cattle in the US. Historic estimates for bison herds range from 30 to 60 million at their height before 1800. So, we have more cows now than there were bison.

Thanks for the corrected stat. Somebody else checked it and found the cow count was just under the bison count. I think a point is, that we've always had lots of critters farting. Bison were replaced by cows.

What happens when the Vegans win the DietWar and we all stop eating meat? Wouldn't we kill off all the cows? Would the Bison population increase over time if we left them alone (since there's all that pasture not being used)?

Would we need more farmland than ever to feed our PureVeggie diet?

Would the farming for PureVeggie living have other impacts that were actually balanced in the OminvorousDiet?

 

[Ovinomancer]

Is it possible to stop burning fossil fuels? Yes. There are enough wind, solar, and hydroelectric sources for us to no longer emit carbon in our energy generation. Now, other forms of energy do have their own drawbacks - the batteries in electric cars, for example, pose a chemical pollution problem. But *ANYTHING* you do on the scale of the entire human population will have drawbacks. However, those drawbacks may be more manageable than baking the planet to a crisp.

There's actually not enough to replace fossil fuels without a drastic drawback of current energy usage. If you're serious about rapid reduction of fossil fuels, you have to go nuclear. Even there, the cost is prohibitive.

Ultimately, that's why these argument fail. Once the average person realizes that the cost of implementing a carbon free economy will essentially have them destitute, they're no longer that interested in preventing a few degrees of warming with uncertain outcomes sometime in the future.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for supporting renewables (which is why the crap pulled by the OP coalition pisses me off - it's political grandstanding, not solution seeking) and improving their share of the economy. I'm also for rapid proliferation of nuclear power. But, in the meantime, I'm much more in favor of adaptation policy than mitigation policy for global warming. Which I also think is very much likely to occur, even if I think it will be on the lower end of the IPCC probability distribution of ECR. And I think that because that's what every observation bounded study recently has shown -- the lower half is much more likely than the upper.

So planning to adapt to changing climate makes more sense economically and politically than assuming unproven and unlikely disaster and cripplingly the world economy to attempt to prevent it (it's unclear if anything could).

And, ultimately, we will *have* to stop burning fossil fuels anyway. Even if it didn't cause warming, there's a finite supply - at some point, it would run out.

Peak oil keeps shuffling off to the right, though. I agree that such a thing is highly likely, but it's not a pressing matter on policy right now.

In theory, one can go one step better, and start removing carbon from the atmosphere, and lock it back into the ground. This is not easy to do in a way that we are sure that it won't leak out in some way or another, and it isn't cheap - in terms of energy, doing this is on the same order as *unburning* the coal and oil.

CCS, while an interesting idea, hasn't shown itself to be functionally workable yet, with every attempt to go large scale failing. It also has the same issues that nuclear waste storage has, but on a much larger and more dangerous scale (waste leaks, large concentrations of highly pressurized gas tend to rupture instead of leaking, both have potential leak impacts measured in 100s of years).

 

[tuxgeo]

Re: "Forest wins on drawing carbon out of the atmosphere":

It partly depends on the age of the trees. When newly planted, saplings draw hardly any carbon out of the atmosphere; at age 50 years, they draw out a lot more; and at age 250 tp 500 years, they draw out great loads of carbon. Some current tree-harvesting practices call for the trees to grow for 50 years before being harvested; but some scientists (sorry, don't have a link handy) have calculated that the landowners would get a higher return over the long term by letting the trees grow for a few more centuries.

Of course, it helps not to have a mortgage on the forest land in order to do that, because of the lack of cash-flow to service the mortgage.

 

[tomBitonti]

Re: "Forest wins on drawing carbon out of the atmosphere":

It partly depends on the age of the trees. When newly planted, saplings draw hardly any carbon out of the atmosphere; at age 50 years, they draw out a lot more; and at age 250 tp 500 years, they draw out great loads of carbon. Some current tree-harvesting practices call for the trees to grow for 50 years before being harvested; but some scientists (sorry, don't have a link handy) have calculated that the landowners would get a higher return over the long term by letting the trees grow for a few more centuries.

Of course, it helps not to have a mortgage on the forest land in order to do that, because of the lack of cash-flow to service the mortgage.

I think its a great thing, but do folks really have 100-500 year plans for forest management? That is amazingly long term planning.

... which is what we need to be doing. This is more my (glad) surprise to see folks doing it.

Thx!

TomB

 

[tomBitonti]

Thanks for the corrected stat. Somebody else checked it and found the cow count was just under the bison count. I think a point is, that we've always had lots of critters farting. Bison were replaced by cows.

The difference seems to be diet. Cows fed inefficient grains apparently fart a lot more than buffalo that eat wild grasses and such. This is discussed in the long post that I posted.

Thx!

TomB

 

[Janx]

CCS, while an interesting idea, hasn't shown itself to be functionally workable yet, with every attempt to go large scale failing. It also has the same issues that nuclear waste storage has, but on a much larger and more dangerous scale (waste leaks, large concentrations of highly pressurized gas tend to rupture instead of leaking, both have potential leak impacts measured in 100s of years).

I may be missing something here, but how is a containment breach of a carbon/CO2 container worse than nuclear waste breach. The latter being radioactive and directly bad for biological exposure.

Accidentally dropping some barrels of CO2 in the year 2230 is just going to reset our progress on atmo-scrubbing. Nuclear waste causes cancer and cell destruction.

Given also that CO2 is just Carbon + 2 Oxygen, seems like we'd be doing further science to get the O2 back and just bury carbon, which might even be a boring solid by then.

 

[Janx]

I think its a great thing, but do folks really have 100-500 year plans for forest management? That is amazingly long term planning.

... which is what we need to be doing. This is more my (glad) surprise to see folks doing it.

Thx!

TomB

I think the conundrum is whether we can plan and stick to such long term goals.

If I own 500 acres of trees and chop down one acre per year and replant it, I can ensure the plan goes through until I die. And then we hope my kid sticks to the rules. Then his kid. Eventually, one of them sells out or is in a financial bind and has to break the rule to get more money. Plus there's issues if the forest burns down (which by the way, we need to be allowing to happen in more cases)

Now, what do we do about the folks in South America. Who aren't us, and won't follow our advice?

Is the first step to wipe out everybody who isn't us? That kind of solves lots of problems with the environment by giving us the buffer of being down 6.x billion people who were just going to jack up the plan anyway.

Pretty sure that's been the plot of Star Trek episode...

 

[tuxgeo]

I think its a great thing, but do folks really have 100-500 year plans for forest management? That is amazingly long term planning.

... which is what we need to be doing. This is more my (glad) surprise to see folks doing it.

Eh, it isn't so much that folks are doing that kind of forestry; rather, it is a case of scientists trying to show that they should, for the sake of efficiency.

The US Forest Service, for instance, has no mortgages on the government-owned forest land they manage, so they could theoretically manage their stands of timber that way. Private firms such as Weyerhauser would have more difficulty in following such practices, because they have to be much more aware of cash-flow.

I think I recall that the studies that supported this long-term conclusion were conducted at the Forestry Department of Oregon State University, but I never kept a link when I first read it.