This discovery could be big green energy news

[Umbran]

And trees are a very long term carbon sink.

Define "long term". A typical maple, for example, lives for no more than a century, and then dies and *releases the carbon* as it rots. And it only grows slowly, to boot.

Give people property tax breaks for planting new trees and for not cutting down existing trees on their properties.

Don't bother. You're thinking on the wrong scale. Those people who live in the US suburbs or rural areas (so that they have trees and space to plant them), are in the minority.

We release about 40 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere *per year*. That means about 11 billion tons of carbon. A fully adult tree may weigh between one and 10 tons. Even if they were pure carbon (which they aren't), you need billions of trees. Even if every human (from infant on up) in the US planted a tree, that's only around 300 million trees. You are short of the issue by a couple or few factors of ten, there. And that's required *each year* just to catch what we are releasing.

This carbon didn't come out of our current biosphere. You can't really expect the current biosphere to absorb it on human timescales.

Build continental water infrastructure so that whole regions of a continent don't dry out and lose significant portions of their carbon eating plantlife.

Um, where's that water coming from? You need a *source* of fresh, clean water. "Infrastructure" does not make more fresh water fall from the sky. In general, the areas with surplus water and those that are short are thousands of miles apart - infrastructure to gather and move appropriate amounts of water that far would probably be the largest civil engineering effort ever seen on the planet, done several times over for various continents.

 

[tuxgeo]

If maples are so short-lived, try other species?

Douglas-Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) "commonly live more than 500 years and occasionally more than 1,000 years."
English Oak or Pendunculate Oak (Quercus robur) "is a long-lived tree . . ." with examples having ages of 1500 years, 1200 years, 1000 years, 700 - 800 years old. In England, the Bowthorpe Oak in Lincolnshire is estimated to be 1000 years old.
Red Pine (Pinus resinosa) "is a long-lived tree, reaching a maximum age of about 500 years."
Western Red Cedar (Thuja plicata) "is long-lived; some individuals can live well over a thousand years, with the oldest verified being 1460 years."

It doesn't have to be maples.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Their general usefulness as a carbon sink aside, the question would be what resources- water, nutrients, space, etc.- any given tree species requires vs others. A long lived tree that requires more water and space, or that grows slowly as compared to maples might not sequester as much carbon as a stand of short-lived maples.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Define "long term". A typical maple, for example, lives for no more than a century, and then dies and *releases the carbon* as it rots. And it only grows slowly, to boot.



Don't bother. You're thinking on the wrong scale. Those people who live in the US suburbs or rural areas (so that they have trees and space to plant them), are in the minority.

We release about 40 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere *per year*. That means about 11 billion tons of carbon. A fully adult tree may weigh between one and 10 tons. Even if they were pure carbon (which they aren't), you need billions of trees. Even if every human (from infant on up) in the US planted a tree, that's only around 300 million trees. You are short of the issue by a couple or few factors of ten, there. And that's required *each year* just to catch what we are releasing.

This carbon didn't come out of our current biosphere. You can't really expect the current biosphere to absorb it on human timescales.



Um, where's that water coming from? You need a *source* of fresh, clean water. "Infrastructure" does not make more fresh water fall from the sky. In general, the areas with surplus water and those that are short are thousands of miles apart - infrastructure to gather and move appropriate amounts of water that far would probably be the largest civil engineering effort ever seen on the planet, done several times over for various continents.

Lol I have to go to work, so I haven't time right now, but I have actually researched all of this, and it is all feasible and effective.

The one thing i have time to address is that you seem to approach each thing in a vacuum, which is frankly nonsensical. You can't approach the impact on re/afforestation without also considering the various methods of reducing carbon emmisions, for instance. And you're definately wrong about the trees and other plants in cities thing. The overwhelming majority of American houses have space for multiple trees, as do most apartment complexes and business lots, but even if we ignore that, it is again one part of the solution, not something to be discussed as if I'm suggesting it will fix all the problems all by itself.

 

[Umbran]

If maples are so short-lived, try other species?

Douglas-Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) "commonly live more than 500 years and occasionally more than 1,000 years."
English Oak or Pendunculate Oak (Quercus robur) "is a long-lived tree . . ." with examples having ages of 1500 years, 1200 years, 1000 years, 700 - 800 years old. In England, the Bowthorpe Oak in Lincolnshire is estimated to be 1000 years old.
Red Pine (Pinus resinosa) "is a long-lived tree, reaching a maximum age of about 500 years."
Western Red Cedar (Thuja plicata) "is long-lived; some individuals can live well over a thousand years, with the oldest verified being 1460 years."

It doesn't have to be maples.

Maples were an example of a generic, middle of the road, typical tree to represent the broad average.

There are some that live longer, sure. But in general you can/should only plant what's native to the area in question, or you are asking to have other ecological issues. The Douglas Fir, Red Pine, and Western Red Cedar all have ranges that make them unsuitable for reforestation over most of North America. The English Oak is better about the range it'll grow in, but while there are some escaped in the wild, as you can guess from the name they aren't actually native to North America. The extra-long-lived examples are maintained and pruned by humans to extend their longevity, so 1000 years is hardly typical. And oaks, in general, grow slowly, typically taking decades to reach maturity, so that their impact might be felt a generation and more down the road. Do you think you have a generation to spare?

 

[Janx]

So what can we all actually do?

Because at some point, the largest factor is not us as individuals. Like my 8 trees in my yard that replaced the 3 pine trees I had. Or the mere 12K miles /year I put on my vehicles total. Or the new good (and expensive) double-pane windows I had installed this year. Or the completely new AC system last year. I've been recycling trash for nearly 20 years.

I can't afford solar panels (gonna be paying off them windows for years).

Short of turning Amish, I've done more than most. And going farther starts affecting my lifestyle more drastically. And, as Umbran notes, my trees don't amount to a hill of beans.

While there are certain parts of the problem (wastefulness, consumerism and disposable appetites) where we as individuals add up to be the problem, large swaths of it are the industries, that we all have to go to work to, who use inefficient technologies.

 

[tuxgeo]

. . . < snip cogent and valuable comments about trees, in order to concentrate on timelines>
Do you think you have a generation to spare?

Very little about all of this is "spare." (Even the old quote of, "Woodman, Spare that Tree!" is hardly relevant.)
Not all carbon in trees automatically evaporates into the ionosphere upon the death of the tree. Instead, some of the wood from trees felled decades ago is still in solid form -- as wood-framed houses, paper in books and magazines, furniture, and other uses. (Tool-handles?) Further, trees have the habit of reproducing themselves via seeding, so not all the trees we need for sequestration need to be planted by hand -- the trees themselves will do a lot of the work for us if we place well-selected species in groups where they can cross-pollinate each other. (A stand of tamarack here, a stand of loblolly there, a stand of Balm-of-Gilead down by the river; they add up, and multiply naturally with each other's help.)

However, the larger issue is that none of that can overwhelm the human race's annual release of CO2 into the atmosphere -- at current rates of consumption of fossil fuels. Hence, we need to reduce rates of consumption of fossil fuels.
We're working on that, through incremental additions of solar, wind, tidal, nuclear, and other non-carbon-releasing sources of energy.
We need to continue our work on that. However, the energy economy of the world is very large compared to the size of our annual efforts, so it's going to take us years, and much more likely decades, to get anywhere near close to an annual carbon balance.

It isn't a matter of having "a generation to spare": Nobody in this thread (that I know of) is suggesting that we "wait a generation" before beginning efforts to reduce Carbon release; instead, it is recognized that we are already making efforts to reduce Carbon release.

Rather than being a matter of having "a generation to spare," it's a matter of doing the things we can when we can to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, replacing them with cleaner sources, while at the same time mitigating the effect of the Carbon that has already been released into the atmosphere.

We don't actuallly have to wait until we have replaced all use of fossil fuels with nuclear power before we start to plant more trees to sequester more of the CO2 that we have already released into the atmosphere. Instead, the two projects -- namely, reducing use of fossil fuels for one, and sequestering atmospheric Carbon for the other -- can be active at the same time, operating in parallel.

. . . and then there's the geological process of the production of Limestone at the bottoms of the seas, which sequesters some Carbon in the rocks; but that's not anything we can do much to advance or retard.

 

[tomBitonti]

Hard to address this issue without talking politics, so I'll be brief and generic: A very big impediment to any answer is getting folks to work together on a global scale. Take your pick based on your estimate of human nature to say whether we will act in time.

(Needless to say, I'm of the opinion that fairly dramatic changes in behavior will be necessary. Going green requires us to use less energy.)


Thx!
TomB

 

[tomBitonti]

To address the original note, here is the abstract and first paragraph of the paper.

Doesn't address where the energy comes from, but seems to provide a way to create ethynol from CO2 if an electrical source is available. The benefit would seem to be the displacement of using fossil fuels, I presume using a cleaner energy source such as solar or wind or nuclear.

It would seem that We would still be facing a problem of an inadequate primary energy source.

Abstract

Though carbon dioxide is a waste product of combustion, it can also be a potential feedstock for the production of fine and commodity organic chemicals provided that an efficient means to convert it to useful organic synthons can be developed. Herein we report a common element, nanostructured catalyst for the direct electrochemical conversion of CO2 to ethanol with high Faradaic efficiency (63 % at −1.2 V vs RHE) and high selectivity (84 %) that operates in water and at ambient temperature and pressure. Lacking noble metals or other rare or expensive materials, the catalyst is comprised of Cu nanoparticles on a highly textured, N-doped carbon nanospike film. Electrochemical analysis and density functional theory (DFT) calculations suggest a preliminary mechanism in which active sites on the Cu nanoparticles and the carbon nanospikes work in tandem to control the electrochemical reduction of carbon monoxide dimer to alcohol.
Introduction

Closing the carbon cycle by utilizing CO2 as a feedstock for currently used commodities, in order to displace a fossil feedstock, is an appropriate intermediate step towards a carbon-free future. Direct electrochemical conversion of CO2 to useful products has been under investigation for a few decades. Metal-based catalysts, such as copper,[1] platinum,[2] iron,[3] tin,[4] silver,[5] and gold,[6] along with carbons such as g-C3N4 [7] have been the primary focus for CO2 reduction, with some very high Faradaic efficiencies for methane conversion. Copper is arguably the best-known metal catalyst for electrochemical CO2 reduction,[8] capable of electrochemically converting CO2 into more than 30 different products,[9] including carbon monoxide (CO), formic acid (HCOOH), methane (CH4) and ethylene (C2H4) or ethane (C2H6), but efficiency and selectivity for any product heavier than methane are far too low for practical use.[10] Competing reactions limit the yield of any one liquid product to single-digit percentages.[8]

Thx!
TomB

 

[Umbran]

Lol I have to go to work, so I haven't time right now, but I have actually researched all of this, and it is all feasible and effective.

Appeal to authority?

The one thing i have time to address is that you seem to approach each thing in a vacuum, which is frankly nonsensical.

Approaching it in an isolated manner is the best way to demonstrate the scope of the problem. The issue is not going to be handled by suburbanites planting a few trees in their yards. Reforesting the entire Amazon is more the required scale.

What is nonsensical is claiming something will work, without stating the requirements surrounding that function. "This will work, if we also make unspecified reduction of emissions," is not convincing. It has the effect of hiding how difficult the problem is - especially in this case when managing reduction of emissions has to date been extremely difficult.

The number of trees you have to plant only reduces linearly with the reduction of emissions - if you halve the emissions, you halve the number of trees required. We would require *billions of trees a year* to offset current yearly emissions. If you halve the emissions, you have to plant half the trees, but half of billions is still a number in the billions!

And you're definately wrong about the trees and other plants in cities thing. The overwhelming majority of American houses have space for multiple trees, as do most apartment complexes and business lots

I'm not wrong. I'm thinking about it differently. We are talking about needing multiple trees per person - not per household, but for *each person* in the household - and doing that *each year*. My own home has just my wife and myself. My plot of land might fit two more trees... and then we are done. No more room. But, to offset my own carbon consumption, I need eventually to plant a small forest - a handful of trees a year for my forseeable life. My personal property won't handle that. Most people's personal property won't handle that. That limits using homeowner properties to being a short term, feel-good measure that doesn't really impact the long-term problem.

Also note that large areas of the country are not in a position to grow trees. California is in a major drought - in fact, the entire American southwest has been looking at looming water crisis for years to decades. Growing loads of trees in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico? Not really a good plan.

Plus, we would want to talk about *other* things that could be done with the property that might be superior. Planting trees might give some small amount of carbon capture, sure. But giving that same land over to power generation by wind or solar could cut emissions in an ongoing manner, or gardening on that land could cut the emissions incurred in food transport.