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Comment by EGreg | Hacker News Reader

Can someone PLEASE tell me why there haven't been more efforts underway to have commnities around the world plant more trees and engage in planned reforestation?

This is as close as you can get to a globally available mechanism for pulling carbon dioxide out of the air (and methane can burn leaving carbon dioxide).

I mean this very seriously. Richard Branson is looking to fund ways to pull Carbon out if the atmosphere. China has developed a way to leave carbon in rock. Meanwhile we have had a way all along - TREES! Those and algae in the oceans.

The "answer" I often hear is that the carbon will eventually be released when the trees burn in forest fires. Well, first of all, what matters is the overall biomass of trees. And secondly even if it didn't, that buys us many decades.

PS: How come this is being so heavily downvoted?

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Trees are not a carbon processing factory, they are a carbon battery. If they die the carbon will be released again during decomposition. Once they are planted they must be maintained into perpetuity, unless they are planted where they will naturally survive. Maintaining these forests will probably involve energy usage that releases more carbon.

We need method of fixation that is both permanent and does not have the constraints that tree planting does.

They don't have to be maintained into perpetuity. The trees covered a lot more of the planet when left alone. It is HUMANS that reduced the biomass of trees over the last few thousands of years. And especially last 100.

"Maintaining" the forests simply involves restraining humans from interfering. Or even better, chop the trees down and replant, using the wood for construction after fireproofing it!!

swedens working on it:

https://qz.com/1010273/the-algoland-carbon-capture-project-i...

(wood burning power plant is the second subject, under How to heat a cold country in the 21st century section)

That's not completely true. When the soil is healthy, trees provide CO2 to soil bacteria in "exchange" for nutrients.

We are. The lumber and paper companies replant all the time. Sometimes directly, sometimes they don't have to because natural processes will do it. Many forests in the US are over populated.

There is a lot of land that cannot support a forest though.

Where we really go wrong is not lighting forest fires every year. As a result dead trees build up until the slightest spark (lightening) results in a hot fire that burns up everything in a massive fire that cannot be controlled. All the carbon turns back into CO2. If instead we lit a fire every year the smaller cooler fire would result in a lot of carbon that isn't turned into CO2 and just sits on the ground. The result is sequestered carbon in the form of charcoal.

Why not simulate the smaller fires by chopping down trees and using them in construction after fireproofing the wood?

fireproofing wood generally involves toxic chemicals you don't want. Historically these chemicals have been found to offgas long after they are thought safe.

It also isn't worth it because one cheap way to get rid of a house after the end of its useful life is burn it.

But we... but um... the whole point is to NOT release the CO2 back into the atmosphere. "Cheap" way to undermine the whole point! "Not worth it to fireproof"? This is actually pretty funny.

> Can someone PLEASE tell me why there haven't been more efforts underway to have commnities around the world plant more trees and engage in planned reforestation?

There's no money in it? Whereas there's plenty of money in deforestation.

Tragic, but that is the world we live in.

Trees are for chumps. People should be planting grasses, and bamboo in particular.

The larger bamboo species grow faster than any tree, and can be exploited by the human economy on a shorter timescale, thus making people more likely to plant bamboo forests on their own initiative.

Grow bamboo. Cut it down. Use it for building and consumer products, such that its carbon content does not quickly return to the atmosphere as CO2 (and hopefully never as methane).

The key is phrase is "... such that its carbon content does not quickly return to the atmosphere". Growing grasses for biofuel wouldn't help.

Growing grass for biofuel can help: if you burn just the hydrogen and not the carbon you can then sequester that carbon. It is called making charcoal.

Pulling the above off in an energy positive way is left as an exercise to the reader. (read I am not sure you can, but I wish you would)

Bamboo can be used to make biochar and then buried, sequesters carbon and enriches the soil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar

But I thought capitalism is the thing that can solve any problem?

Couldn't agree more. Here in the UK we have a lower percentage of forested land than many other European countries and I much prefer forest to the barren green fields which we have in many places. Sadly I think lots of my countrymen think of green fields being the default state of rural UK and don't realise it's the legacy of deforestation by stone age man.. I can only imagine what the UK must have been like prior to that. It must have been truly idyllic.

> Sadly I think lots of my countrymen think of green fields being the default state of rural UK and don't realise it's the legacy of deforestation by stone age man..

Much if not most of the deforestation in the United Kingdom took place in the Middle Ages and later, to extract resources during the Industrial Revolution. For example the Caledonian Forest in Scotland experienced massive destruction following the Highland Clearances in the 18th and 19th centuries. William the Conqueror had large tracts of forested land set aside as protected parks that were later destroyed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_forests

Well if we want to be really pedantic then WW1 and WW2 are better examples then those you give.

How so?

So they say, after WW1 in particular there was hardly a tree left standing in the country.

Well, I guess Russia sees a lot of reforestation-by-neglect.

This is usually useless forests and they're not very good because succession fails on them due to unbalanced ecosystem, but that's what is aplenty.

Where would you expect new forests to appear? I mean, Eurasia is so huge it probably has more forests than the rest of the planet combined. Most countries only cover a marginal area of the globe and so they can't possibly cause serious reforestation impace.

> Can someone PLEASE tell me why there haven't been more efforts underway to have commnities around the world plant more trees and engage in planned reforestation?

The prevailing political and economic system.

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