What about genetically modified trees?
In fairness, this might be the one billionaire scumbag that could be tricked into giving away a bunch of his money through internet pressure/memes.
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He’ll end up giving away $6M with some promise of more if certain undefinable metrics are met in the distant future.
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@sweet summer child
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Is this true? Leaves strictly control gas exchange with the atmosphere to avoid losing too much water. Photosynthesis is actually really inefficient because the reactions are massively poisoned by excess O2 and not enough CO2.
not an organic chemist, but as an armchair data scientist, it seem surface area of the total canopy is maximized by the tree, especially seasonally. it also seems likely, that if there was a more efficient way for trees to sequester atmospheric co2 and sunlight in competition with other plants, the trees would perhaps continually evolve towards it.
One of the parts of several 2020 candidates’ climate plans was r&d on carbon sequestration farming techniques, as well as providing incentives to farmers who adopted them. It’s still planting things, though.
to put this in perspective, $6b is about a fifth of just USDA’s farm subsidies every year. subsidies themselves are just a fraction of what the feds spend on agriculture.
it’s so little, it’s definitely in range of “we should just pay $6b as penance every year, so that 42m won’t starve.”
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Plants have to balance a bunch of requirements though and have much more restricted toolbox. Long-term carbon storage by trees is a side-effect of them wanting to be tall to get more sunlight. From the tree’s perspective, investing valuable glucose in inert wood is a regrettable but necessary cost of doing what it actually wants to do, which is grow seeds.
It’s also worth noting that trees would grow much faster if they could fix atmospheric nitrogen, but they can’t, because evolution didn’t figure out how to do that in the plant kingdom. That fact doesn’t disprove that nitrogen fixation is possible.
Finally, consider that SpaceX’s success is largely based around landing rockets, which was widely considered impossible by lots of experts before it was done, based on similar arguments of incredulity. “You’re going to point the grossly un-aerodynamic end of a rocket into a supersonic stream of air and not only will it not be torn to shreds, you’re going to successfully start it??” All good ideas have obvious, apparently fatal flaws, otherwise someone would have done them already. Invention is basically synonymous with taking something that “obviously” won’t work and figuring out a workaround for the obvious problem.
If you want to do some thermodynamics and demonstrate that extracting CO2 from the atmosphere has a preposterous energy cost, that would prove that it’s impossible, absent a revolution in energy. But the fact that it’s a daunting engineering challenge with major technical risks only shows that it’s likely to be unsuccessful, not that it’s not a worthwhile course of research.
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I’m quite certain the path to real progress towards solving this immensely complicated, existential problem is not “the Chilean miner pedophile accuser guy running a Ponzi scheme company has a manic episode on Twitter.”
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Sure, but why do you dismiss trees out of hand? It’s widely thought to be quite a practical method to sequester carbon. Canada is planting about 200 million trees per year all by their lonesome.
Reforesting some of the enormous swaths of old-growth forest seems like a great shovel-ready anti-carbon project to throw 100M at. Seems like the trick is finding ways to speed up growth and bury the wood to keep carbon from getting back into the atmosphere.
I’m not anti-tree! I think trees are great! Planting trees is a good idea for many reasons, including capturing CO2 from the atmosphere. I just don’t accept that trees are a sufficient solution to global warming or that it’s certain that trees represent the pinnacle of attainable carbon-capture technology.
Who said anything about needing the absolute pinnacle of technology?
There’s like a 99.8% chance you’re right…
Yesterday the WH issued a long term strategy for economywide decarbonization by 2050. Chapter 6, which begins on p 45, discusses carbon removal and the use of US lands, if that is of interest …
Interesting …
• OCEAN-BASED CDR.
This is a CDR approach that removes dissolved CO2
from the ocean. Ocean-based approaches include
nature-based approaches (e.g., kelp afforestation),
engineered approaches (e.g., electrochemical CO2
capture from seawater), or a combination of the
two (e.g., growing macroalgae and sinking it to the
sea floor). Ocean-based CDR is in early stages of
research and development and merits closer study.
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this is a good post, i don’t want to argue with you too aggressively because these are valid points. i don’t think anyone here is ever saying no to more scientific research. we should of course pursue gamechanging technologies even if failure rate on those is 99.8%. the spacex rocket anecdote is cool, but i think you are misstating the reaction to that idea a bit. space race age engineers had some of the boldest ideas and imaginations, and they probably felt that they hadn’t YET built the technology to make a booster rocket belly flop and then set itself on a bullseye.
the point i was making is that solution Tree is: 1) available at the present time, and 2) comes with other side benefits, like better soil, a huge number of jobs, mitigation of climate change, and 3) it could extend the time during which to discover, deploy, and scale a technological solution.
you are correct that the tree is evolving to propagate, rather than sequester carbon, but you are overlooking that nitrogen-fixing bacteria has already evolved in the soil which works more or less directly with the tree roots, and the soil itself is a carbon sink that could be as big as the trees.
and if we are looking for tech breakthroughs, who is to say that the breakthrough must be a CO2 sucker geothermal power plant, and could not be something that can boost tree growth by 50s%, or restore soil in 10 years instead of 100?
one of the most ingenious ideas i’ve read is planting kelp on floating buoys and lines that eventually sink under the kelp’s weight. if the seafloor is even 100m, it’s deep enough to keep the carbon sunk for centuries. it’s remarkably low cost, fast growing, requires no land infrastructure, can be deployed by independent fishermen boats, and potentially improves fisheries as well.
elon might impress me if he tweeted about doing that.
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Sure, I agree with this, subject to one caveat. If trees are cheap and effective and have all these great benefits, and there are no technical hurdles to planting trees, why haven’t we planted trillions of trees to stave off climate change? There’s a hold-up somewhere, or the problem would be fixed by now. I have no idea what the sticking point is, but it must exist. So the decision is not between (A) go plant some trees or (B) invent RoboTrees, it’s between (A) resolve the nontechnical hurdles to planting lots of natural trees or (B) solve the technical challenge of inventing RoboTrees. (Or do both, that’s good too!) But if you have lots of money and cachet with engineers, you’re much, much better position to solve hard technical problems than to finagle even modest political/legal/regulatory challenges.
worldwide, people have planted trillions of trees already. we’ve done it for timber, fruit farming, landscaping, making paper, and charcoal. whole countries have done it. germany is a net exporter of lumber and they are somehow increasing their forests.
but most countries have never given a financial incentive to just let the carbon build. it seems that having lots of money and charitably throwing it at this existing solution is just not what elon wants. he wants to cachet with engineers and keep the profit motive for future interests. twitter shade fully deserved imo.