from the plant-a-tree-and-watch-it-grow dept.
Storing carbon through tree planting, preservation costs more than thought:
Dec. 1 (UPI) -- Planting trees and protecting forests are two of the myriad strategies for keeping carbon out of the atmosphere.
Of all the options, they're considered the most eco-friendly, or greenest, but new research suggests planting and protecting trees does come with costs -- and those costs are quite a bit larger than has been previously estimated.
According to a new study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, planting trees and conserving forests could reduce carbon dioxide emissions by as much 6 gigatons a year between 2025 and 2055.
Researchers calculated the reductions would come with an annual price tag of $393 billion.
"There is a significant amount of carbon that can be sequestered through forests, but these costs aren't zero," study co-author Brent Sohngen, professor of environmental economics at the Ohio State University, said in a news release.
[...] "Better understanding the costs of mitigation from global forests will help us to prioritize resources and inform the design of more efficient mitigation policies," said Austin, a senior policy analyst with RTI International, a nonprofit research institute based in North Carolina.
Journal Reference:
K. G. Austin, J. S. Baker, B. L. Sohngen, et al. The economic costs of planting, preserving, and managing the world's forests to mitigate climate change [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-19578-z)
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday December 03 2020, @01:21AM (29 children)
Couldn't tease us with a couple of examples? You gotta irrigate them? What? Whatever it is, just mechanize it.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday December 03 2020, @01:57AM (11 children)
You let the land be, in 20 year's time you gonna have it all foresty and gamey as around Chernobyl.
What's that? ... No, you don't need to blow up a nuclear reactor first, just abstain from entering the area.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by krishnoid on Thursday December 03 2020, @02:10AM (5 children)
You're going to have to keep a lot of people from entering those areas. So, a law? A fence? Nah, governments are too corrupt.
How about a curse -- maybe something that says you die seven days after entering the area. How to implement, how to implement ... actual curse, serial killer ...
I know! We can spread a lot of toxic elements around the area, like poison -- but that degrades too quickly. How about something radioactive with a 1-100 year halflife? Solved!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2020, @02:42AM
How about a Wall?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2020, @02:59PM
Nuclear eco-terrorism... Sounds exciting.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Friday December 04 2020, @04:22AM (2 children)
You could also just declare the area a park and prohibit people from building stuff in there. It's a solved problem.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by krishnoid on Friday December 04 2020, @05:24AM (1 child)
You could try [theguardian.com]. Re: my point about government corruption.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Saturday December 05 2020, @02:50AM
(Score: 2) by corey on Thursday December 03 2020, @08:58AM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday December 03 2020, @04:51PM (1 child)
Listening to economists and scientists is about as dumb of an idea as listening to medical doctors for advice about COVID-19.
We should only be listening to politicians to give us our answers. Forget about doctors, scientists and economists.
If we stop teaching Math, even at the most basic levels of arithmetic, then we will no longer need to worry about economic policy or the national debt.
The future is bright.
The Centauri traded Earth jump gate technology in exchange for our superior hair mousse formulas.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday December 04 2020, @04:25AM
Keep in mind those economists and scientists are funded by those politicians.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday December 03 2020, @06:03PM (1 child)
The problem is the billions of trees required to capture sufficient carbon to make a difference.
Lets say trees capture about 48 lbs of carbon per year. [tenmilliontrees.org]
The US emitted 5130 million metric tons of just C02 (ignoring other GHGs) in 2019 [eia.gov]
5130 * 1000000 * 2205 = 113,116,500,000,000 lbs of CO2 emissions in 2019.
113,116,500,000,000 / 48 = a lot of fucking trees!
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday December 03 2020, @11:36PM
The problem is introduced by your implicit assumption that planting trees is the only solution available to the excessive carbon emissions.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday December 03 2020, @02:13AM (14 children)
Or maybe they don't have a strong influence on abatement costs. You'll never be able to tell from this. One wonders, for example, why they choose to use the phrase "intertemporal trade-offs" instead of merely "trade-offs". After all, choices made in the future do not result in trade-offs in the past. The "intertemporal trade-off" is just a standard trade-off with some trade-off coming from the future of the choice, which is so common a situation in trade-offs as to refute the need for a specialized term.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday December 03 2020, @02:28AM (5 children)
The "costs" stuff mostly only makes sense if you're planting and managing a plantation forest, which does have costs, but they're low, like really low compared to almost any other form of farming. (My brother has a bunch of hectares in forest as a retirement fund).
If you're planting forest to capture carbon, you wind up with a whole bunch of other really good things too like biodiversity returning, but that needn't cost anything after the original planting.
The planting costs would presumably be mostly money paid to a bunch of local guys who would go out a plant trees, then spend that money on stuff in their local community which sounds like a very good thing indeed, but maybe I'm missing something.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 03 2020, @05:13AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2020, @06:45AM (1 child)
There are other costs as well.
Like you know planting doesn't actually achieve anything in the longrun, it simply sequesters the CO2 until the tree runs through it's natural life cycle and releases it again. But if you just plant recklessly and 'let it go' you very much risk creating lots of little California's everywhere. I don't know exactly how much CO2 they've sequestered, but the most recent wildfires in California were responsible for about 2% [bloomberg.com] (111.5 million California wildfires vs 4.8 billion national) of entire national emissions for the year.
That also excludes the emission cost in keeping those fires as "small" as they were. All that said, I absolutely love forests and would love to see more public wildlands. But forest management, as is absolutely necessary in any sort of a dry/warm area, is an extremely expensive and never-ending task.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by legont on Thursday December 03 2020, @09:36AM
Not exactly. After a tree is grown, you cut it, treat it against rot, and use as a wonder construction material.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday December 03 2020, @09:43AM (1 child)
I agree with you in general, but there are consequences sometimes. I biked Bordeaux last summer where they are planting trees on former grape fields. I don't know what's wrong with grapes, but the artificial forests are really ugly. The undertows is impenetrable bushes with spikes that are so bad they actually trap and kill animals.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2020, @03:23PM
Growing forests for agricultural purposes will always be ugly. The trees will be planted in rows, all at once, probably all the same type. Depending on the uses of the tree, they will be clear cut or trimmed of fruit bearing branches regularly.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by legont on Thursday December 03 2020, @09:33AM (2 children)
Exactly. After all, forest is grown as a business quite successfully.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday December 03 2020, @11:45AM (1 child)
You mean, if the trees are then chopped down and sold. Which kind of defeats the purpose of the exercise.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2020, @01:32PM
> if the trees are then chopped down and sold
If firewood, then of course the carbon is released. But if used for construction the carbon is still sequestered (unless the building burns).
I wonder how much sequestered carbon is being released as old paper archives (think municipal document storage) are scanned and the paper shredded (perhaps some of the carbon is captured in recycled paper?)
(Score: 2, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Thursday December 03 2020, @03:16PM (2 children)
Personally, I just couldn't grasp the bullshit they are trying to sell. Sounds like somebody that doesn't want to clean up their mess.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by qzm on Friday December 04 2020, @08:19AM (1 child)
Now, I suggest you go and purchase a nice big area of land (shouldnt cost you more than a few million.. so long as its far enough 'out'), pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to plant it - several times unless you will also pay the same to have irrigation for the first few years.
Then upkeep it - remember you cannot let it become a fire hazard (for many reasons, including the fact that that would release all the evil carbon!), protect it from disease spread, etc.
Dont forget to follow all required regulations, wich probably include controlling vermin, invasive species growth, etc.
Also dont forget to pay the land taxes of course, since this wonderful investment in the future is yours, after all.
And lastly, dont do anything else useful with it, just let it sit there sucking your wallet dry.
I'm assuming you will start immediately.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday December 04 2020, @09:08PM
No, we expect people to clean up the mess they make, if they chop down trees, they should replant. They should be made to restore strip mined land and remove the poisons they spill. It's not complicated
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday December 03 2020, @06:14PM (1 child)
Consider the simple model above I'm using to demonstrate the scale of the problem. [soylentnews.org]
But what about all the tree that are already alive? What happens if we plant 100k trees per year? And what happens when one place harvests their trees after 10 years but another harvest them after 20 years and all the trees in the National Forest are allowed to live as long as they can.
The model starts getting a bit more complicated and you need to account for temporal factors...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday December 03 2020, @11:37PM
You would need to anyway. The thing here is that trade-off factors are normally time dependent. You don't get any additional clarity by hanging a five dollar word in front of it.
At 100 trees per acre, it'd take about 15% of the US's acreage and collecting that 50 pounds per year every year. My take is that we can't expect standing trees by themselves to absorb enough carbon to keep up due to saturation effects. It'd take aggressive harvesting and sequestering of that wood every few years to keep the absorption rate up high enough.
(Score: 2) by bmimatt on Thursday December 03 2020, @02:18AM
Who said the deployment and maintenance costs have to be zero or even near-zero?
This is not a nice-to-have, we need real, deployable and working solutions yesterday.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday December 03 2020, @06:51AM
The "cost" is as compared to the "default state" of logging and selling all the wood.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2020, @01:30AM (1 child)
Family "retreat" property in central NY State, 110 acres, no utilities on the dirt road to get to the frontage. We don't do anything except let the trees grow. We used to have camp fires there (slightly reducing the carbon capture...), but don't to much of that now that we are older. Not good farmland (the local Amish settlement stops at the end of the good local farmland, about 15 miles away).
Well, I guess you could say there is one cost, I pay the taxes on the property. But it's slated to go to a land conservancy (registered charity), at which point the taxes will end.
(Score: 2) by qzm on Friday December 04 2020, @08:27AM
So, you dont consider the cost of the investment someone (I am assuming from your thinking, probably not you) put in?
You dont think money has value, and if it was sold that money could, you know, earn more?
Interesting. I am guessing you are not big on investment.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Thursday December 03 2020, @01:39AM (2 children)
This story amused me. Anything that man hopes to do on a global scale is going to be unbelievably costly. Reforesting a few thousand acres costs Weyerhauser a couple weeks wages for a crew of two to five people. Looking at a global scale, we're talking about feeding and housing tens of thousands of people, more or less indefinitely. The job won't be done in a year, or ten years, it will be an ongoing cost for a lifetime.
Global. Forget about mere millions of dollars, even with the cheapest labor that can be found.
Of course, we've been pumping dino juice and burning it at tremendous expense for well over 100 years. We've been cutting and burning the forests down for a couple hundred years. Think global, and think in terms of centuries. That's how much work we've put into poisoning the world. Don't expect the repairs to be quick, easy, or cheap.
Mangroves are where we should be concentrating. Replacing the mangroves we've chopped away to expose beaches would help to protect some low-lying lands from storm damage and flooding. Many thousands of many-years, and trillions of dollars is where you start measuring.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2020, @08:05AM
What you talkin' 'bout, Runaway? Are you totally ignorant of silvicuture? What a bad farmer you are, and even worse political pundit with a Gateway.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday December 03 2020, @06:17PM
One unbelievably costly thing can be even more unbelievably costly than another.
Most of us would prefer the least unbelievably costly option available and trees do not appear to be it.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2020, @02:18AM
https://www.fastcompany.com/90504789/these-drones-can-plant-40000-trees-in-a-month-by-2028-theyll-have-planted-1-billion [fastcompany.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 03 2020, @02:22AM (6 children)
Planting trees doesn't permanently sequester carbon. Trees are made of wood. Wood burns, releasing not just the carbon but also plenty of small carbon particles, making the air dangerous to breathe.
Carbon tax credits for trees is a massive scam.
The Fort McMurray fire by itself increased Canada's carbon emissions by 10%. Who knows how much the annual firenadoes in California cost in terms of Carbon emissions?
The only effective solution is to reduce carbon-based fuels, instead of the shell game of planting trees and claiming offsets that are only temporary in nature and literally go up in smoke.
Yes, Al Gore and his carbon trading was a scam.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday December 03 2020, @02:33AM (3 children)
Yeah, trees burn and give up their carbon.
Would you care to estimate how many trillions of tons of trees man has removed from the cycle, just here in North America? Those trillions can be sequestered again, just as they were when we got here. Side benefits include habitat for wildlife, a cleaner atmosphere overall, less rain runoff which improves water tables, better filtration of the water tables, and a more pleasant "greener" environment in which children can grow up.
It's worth the investment.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 03 2020, @03:46AM (2 children)
Also, much above 30°C trees consume more oxygen than they produce, and it's getting hotter every year. Time to switch to green energy, not green-washing wig bullshit offsets that don't really work.
Most of the trees planted die. It's not like there's ongoing maintenance and supervision, watering as needed, protection from grazing, etc. But hey, herbivores gotta eat too. So most of the supposed carbon sequestration ends up being turned into methane in animals intestines, or in the poop on the ground.
There's a reason that most old grown Forest was hardwood and not softwood - pine so turns pine trees into big candles that easily spread fire. Hardwoods, not so much, especially since they drop their leaves in the winter and even if the litter on the forest floor burns, larger hardwoods survive.
Only idiots or people planning to harvest the softwood lumber replace hardwood trees with softwood. But even the harvested lumber isn't really sequestering the carbon permanently. Buildings still burn, and the wood chips are made into pellets and burned as fuel.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday December 03 2020, @07:17AM
Uh-huh. And, little of that matters. Before man diddled it, the biosphere supported umpteen zillion tons of trees. We come along, screw things up, and we're left with about half that mass of trees. Of course no tree is permanent, but the forest is more-or-less permanent. You plant your trees, watch 'em grow, and they suck gigatons of carbon out of the air, all while replenishing the forest. Eventually, a tree dies, and releases ten tons of carbon back into the biosphere - and another tree takes it's place, and slowly absorbs that carbon again. Go watch Simba, and listen to the song, 'The Circle of Life' again.
No, not at all. They ALL die. Refer back to the last sentence of my first paragraph. The longest lived trees on planet earth will die, just like the longest lived man and/or woman will die.
While I tend to agree with that, let's take whatever we can get. Plant softwood trees if that's what is available, and if worst comes to worst, we can always cut it down twenty years from now in patches, to be replaced with good hardwood trees.
WTF, you're going to let perfect stand in the way of good?
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday December 05 2020, @04:39PM
So is life.
People should still have to restore what they cut down, or let it regrow by itself
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Informative) by khallow on Thursday December 03 2020, @05:28AM (1 child)
Pumping water out of New Orleans, which is several meters below sea level, doesn't permanently keep water out of New Orleans, but somehow New Orleans manages to stay dry enough to live in.
Trees are also good at making more trees, even after wood burns. So when a fire happens, and the carbon is released, then the trees grow back and the carbon is resequestered. The result is a net permanent sequestering of carbon as advertised. The real problems from wildfires are the above pollution, and fire damage to humans and their stuff (plus the efforts made to protect against such damage).
Which is nice if you can afford to reduce carbon-based fuels, that is, your country isn't developing world.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Thursday December 03 2020, @11:29AM
Actually, that is a misconception. Doing a search in a moment, but very little of New Orleans is even 10 feet below sea level, most is right about sea level, and parts are above sea level.
https://elevation.maplogs.com/poi/new_orleans_la_usa.30293.html [maplogs.com]
https://elevationmap.net/new-orleans-orleans-us-1002062238 [elevationmap.net]
https://vacationidea.com/louisiana/new-orleans-elevation.html [vacationidea.com]
I believe that when New Orleans was established and originally built up, pretty much all of it was a foot or two above sea level. One of the consequences of building a city on a swamp is, the city sinks over time.
Standing at the seawall, looking in toward the city, there is very little "downhill". Been there many times. :^)
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2020, @02:29AM (4 children)
articles going around. My guess is that the same old players have a bunch of scams waiting in the wings and they're sock puppets are hard at work.
No doubt oil cartels will have a new sequestration program that will only burn 50 gallons of oil for every lb of CO2 sequestered. It will "put so many people to work" etc. etc. The payout will be fat, the oversight completely absent, and some sucker will be found a billion dollars later to take the fall. SSDD.
Most CO2 sequestration projects don't have a conservation of energy yield. Which basically makes them perpetual motion scams. You see crap like: "We are going to put crushed marble on the beaches and it will soak up CO2 from the ocean." ... Mmm Hmm. So your going to crush and carry a billion tons of rock, and SAVE energy. Good luck with that.
Plants actually change their chemistry to adjust to CO2 concentrations. They get more efficient as CO2 increases, and you don't have to do anything to accomplish that. Tree planting is cheap, can be done nearly anywhere on the planet, and work NOW.
No worries though. I sure some whizbang machine will happily outperform a million years of evolutionary engineering. Provided of course the kickbacks are high enough to ensure nobody checks the math. Of course eventually one propeller head will eventually break through the din after several years of his/her life wasted screaming bloody murder. At which point the government will be shocked and surprised. /s
I'm done putting up a fight. I just designed a "trees are stupid T-shirt" and had a vendor rip out a few hundred. If you can't beat em....
(Score: 2) by EJ on Thursday December 03 2020, @02:47AM
On the scale of intelligent lifeforms, trees ARE pretty stupid.
They come in just above Slashdot posters in the hierarchy.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 03 2020, @03:51AM (2 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2020, @03:21PM (1 child)
40c is 104f. So you saying trees shouldn't be planted in the desert. Except, that trees nuetralize ambient temperature where they are planted. The desert is as hot and cold as it is, BECAUSE there are no trees. Which is why in both China and central Africa there are massive plantings going on in desert in order to stop wind errosion and reclaim soils.
As for the "trees die" argument. This is true, but they also reseed themselves without any help from humans. Just look at the planet from google earth and see all the lands there were previously forest, that now aren't. Literally millions of acres. Which is to say the planet can take a billion tons of standing carbon sequestration right now, without fancy engineering. If every person on the planet, planted one tree; just one, we'd be half way to solving the whole problem in 50 years. Even if there is tech that willl work, the system has to stay balanced. You can't just take one thing out, and expect that you are going to improve anything.
Maybe worthwhile tech will come along. But that isn't the challenge. The challenge is changing ourselves. Because it is the structure of our economies that are both the cause, and the barrier to a solution.
So now I will have to print 2 T-shirts. "Trees are stupid'", and "Trees are smart", and play both sides off against the middle. Make a drama out of the thing. Of course I will have to make them from the skins of protected species from the amazon, because that is the only way MM news would carry the story... I've GOT IT. COVID-TREE! Millions of trees are rampaging all over the planet! Knocking over the hollywood sign, knocking down building, spitting lava, and farting lightning bolts!
If I wrote it that way do you think I could get a star wars franchise?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2020, @03:40PM
We have trees that grow in deserts too - cacti. In fact, cacti are even better carbon accumulators than trees.
(Score: 2) by EJ on Thursday December 03 2020, @02:43AM
De Beers has sequestered TRILLIONS of tons of carbon in their vaults to artificially push up the price of diamonds.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2020, @04:55AM (5 children)
Surprise, surprise! An anti-environmental Runaway1956 submission! When will the Eds learn to spot these, and weed them out, like sick trees that will never sequester any carbon? First: Economic costs are not environmental costs. The people who run the economy can all fuck of and die, for all I care. Second, trees grow, you know, really slow. More or less slower than any corporate spreadsheet can cover. So lets go with the trees, and stop fuck-face Loser Donald from allowing timber mining in the Tsongass, OK? And in the meanwhile, lets clear-cut Arkansas, off at the knees, since nothing good has ever come outta there.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday December 03 2020, @11:58AM (4 children)
Kinda sorta - except Weyerhauser and a few other mega-corps actually keep spreadsheets and account for tree growth.
And, trees actually grow faster than you seem to think. The plantation next to my property has been cut twice in the 30 years I've been here, and there is a fresh crop of trees coming up. Genetically engineered, fast growing, trashy soft pine, specifically engineered for paper production, but they are still trees.
For that matter, hardwoods grow faster than many people realize. A white pine outside my window served as one end for a dog run cable about 30 years ago. That cable left a scar around the tree, just about 7 feet off the ground. Today, that scar is about 12 or 13 feet off the ground, and the tree limbs reach up to nearly 30 feet.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2020, @01:52PM (3 children)
> ... Today, that scar is about 12 or 13 feet off the ground
BS detected! See, for example, http://www.dof.virginia.gov/infopubs/_forest-facts/FF-How-A-Tree-Grows_pub.pdf [virginia.gov]
But just think about it for a moment -- the inner core of the tree would have to stretch for a mark on the tree to move up with growth. Had any luck stretching a 2x4 recently?
While looking for the ref above, found this interesting page too, https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/39966/20191116/to-assess-tree-health-look-for-the-scars [northcountrypublicradio.org] Turns out you can tell a lot about the health of a tree by looking at some details--who would have guessed!! Also explains why some planted trees die "young" (25 years), if the burlap wasn't removed from the root ball--the roots circle around and eventually the trunk grows into the old roots, effectively girdling itself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2020, @06:08PM
If trees never grew 'up' then how do they get as high as they do?
As a child I could climb the tree in my parents front yard. Nice low hanging branch to grab onto and swing myself up. By the time I was 20 and much taller I could not reach that limb. By the time I was 40 and they had to cut it down because of a wind storm that split the tree and it was dying and was going to fall on the house I would have had to get out a ladder to reach that same limb. It was already about 20-30 years old by the time I started climbing it. Not all trees are the same. They had that 'plant trees' for some money gag going on YT last year. Bunch of youtubers all pitched in. One showed off how his dad had done something similar when he was a child. *all* of the trees were dead. Because they had not burned the trees. They needed to be exposed fire to grow after 1-2 years. Planting trees is a bit more than 'YOLO' it. One dude I worked with planted a california redwood in his front yard. "do you hate your neighbors?" "nope dont care I am selling the house and moving to another state". YOLO....
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 03 2020, @06:13PM
But,
It is Runaway thinking! He just knows stuff! (Oh, and Pine, even White Pine (white, coincidence?) is not hardwood. Runaway knows his wood!)
(Score: 2) by qzm on Friday December 04 2020, @08:25AM
And you (and your article) are wrong.
Trees do grow through their entire length, just much MUCH slower in the trunk than at the tips.
So, even though you may find this impossible, he could be right.
The somewhat obvious effect of this is that most large trees dont have a bunch of branches coming out near ground level.
Of course when they were saplings most of the branches formed in the first few feet, but now you have to jump or climb to get to them - gee, I wonder how that happened!
Different types of tree have different relative growth rates - it is one of the reasons for different shapes.
A little critical though, mixed with life experience, is a damn dangerous thing.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sonamchauhan on Saturday December 05 2020, @10:30AM
2/3rd of Japan's land is forest -- the way it's meant to be:
https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/forest-area-percent-of-land-area-wb-data.html [tradingeconomics.com]
(That's one reason they have dense cities)
Not having carbon credits to trade makes their landholdings so inefficient. All those useless forests - they must be bleeding Japan dry. Japan must be an ultra-poor country!
There's only one way carbon capture makes sense - and that's via afforestation. There's only one way afforestation makes sense. That's by government buying land cheaply and reestablishing forests. Not some money-changing carbon trading scheme with all forests in private hands. Forests in private hands aren't forests - they're farms. Setting and policing a massive financial scheme with only private forests is just asking for governments to be hijacked by vested interests, complete with paid-for scientists and lobby groups.