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Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

The author misses the point of these programs. It's already understood that there will be waste and failure and graft and corruption and people who just plain cheat; that's an inevitable result of ANY subsidy program.

The whole point of carbon credits and such (despite the touchy-feely PR speak on the surface) is to increase the number of people economically motivated to preserve trees, even if just for a little while, and less people to pollute, even if just a little bit. Technology changes quickly, but trees grow slowly. The idea is to preserve as many slow growing trees as we can while waiting for the technology to catch up.

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The problem is that the economic incentive to exploit the environment will always outweight the economic incentive to protect it.

The article cited a ton of research that showed that carbon credits don't have a meaningful impact on carbon usage. It seems like what usually happens is that the carbon credits get shuffled around, but overall the carbon output stays the same.

Solutions like green technology or carbon credits seem to rest on this assumption that we can prevent environmental collapse without significantly changing our consumerist economy, standard of living, and energy consumption. This seems like magical, faith-based thinking. There are theoretical limits on how efficient any energy conversion will be, no matter how advanced our technology is. The more our economy grows, the more we consume and produce...the more energy we use and the more waste we create. We have to start thinking about ways to move away from an always-growing, consumerist economy.

Except that there a numerous examples in the past century where we’ve put the environment ahead of economic concerns: The Clean Water Act, a significant reduction in urban smog, the reversal of the Ozone hole through cap-and-trade.

As far as our overall economic system, the immediate problem is figuring out how to de-carbonize growth, first-and-foremost. And simultaneously reduce the carbon floating around in the atmosphere. I’m all for exploring alternatives and agree we don’t need so much “stuff”. But I don’t necessarily agree that that means we have to turn off economic growth either. We need to de-carbonize it.

An analogy I like to use is this: If you have a popular website and it’s becoming overwhelmed with customers, you have a couple of options. Turn everyone away and start kicking people off — or identify the bottlenecks and solve them. We’re running society on an inefficient algorithm, and that needs to change. We’ve built an amazing server that has drastically reduced conflict, poverty, and starvation, worldwide. Do we close the door to that, or do we find a more efficient algorithm?

> The problem is that the economic incentive to exploit the environment will always outweight the economic incentive to protect it.

That's quite literally why government exists. To solve coordination problems like these.

> Solutions like green technology or carbon credits seem to rest on this assumption that we can prevent environmental collapse without significantly changing our consumerist economy, standard of living, and energy consumption. This seems like magical, faith-based thinking.

On the contrary, thinking the opposite - e.g. that everyone could "just" reduce our consumption - is magical thinking, because it goes directly against the gradient of human nature. Humans want to improve lives for themselves and their children, which creates incentives for consumption, and utterly suck at coordinating at scale to achieve a long-term goal, which is why we had to invent governments and markets to provide necessary incentive structures. Any solution for the climate crisis has to work with these constraints, not against them.

> There are theoretical limits on how efficient any energy conversion will be, no matter how advanced our technology is.

We're nowhere near the limits of efficiency in technology.

> The more our economy grows, the more we consume and produce...the more energy we use and the more waste we create.

More energy is good. We need energy to fix the damage we've done to the climate. And waste is a waste management problem, only partially related to the issues that are critical now. Trying to shut down the economy won't help save us from upcoming climate issues, it'll only make a lot more people suffer. The problem of weaning off the growth-based economy is something we can handle later.

(It's also worth pondering, what exactly is it that we want to save here. The planet? No, the planet will be fine; we can't really do anything to hurt it. The animals? To the extent of our knowledge, animals don't care. They don't think. Human race? Humans as a species will be fine too, no expected climate damage scenario would wipe us all out. What we're trying to save here is ourselves, our children, our way of life. Which essentially boils down to technological civilization. Civilization that's dependent on the shape of the economy we have now. Trying to drastically alter it is as risky as climate change itself.)

> The idea is to preserve as many slow growing trees as we can...

We need to manage forests wisely. I'm in the Northern Rockies, so I only know about pines, but preserving as many as we can isn't healthy. When they are packed too tight they aren't healthy. Their growth and structure is weak from competition and they are more susceptible to disease and insects. I've seen whole forests wiped out by bark beetles.

On my own land, we selectively logged, removing some of the larger trees or infested trees, thinning many smaller trees and sometimes just pulling out many saplings. Since then I've noticed the remaining trees putting on more growth and looking healthier overall. What happened to the logs? All the larger ones went to a mill. Someone at a big box improvement store can buy some wood and build shelves. They can sequester some carbon right in their own home.

I see such a negative, almost knee jerk reaction (not you specifically, but in general) to cutting down a tree that I wish people could come live where trees are weeds. I love the forest, I live in it and want it to be healthy, but it takes management and that means some trees need to be put to use doing something besides storing carbon.

Carbon credits or not, increasing the number of acres of healthy forest is always a good thing.

> Technology changes quickly, but trees grow slowly.

When you phrase it like that, it sounds like all we need are faster growing trees. Cue grey goo scenario, but with trees.

I'm sitting here, half-way through Nick Lane's "The Vital Question", and I keep wondering - why can't we grow chloroplast in vats, force-flow CO₂ through them, and dump the resulting products into a mine shaft?

You would also need to dry up the product, and preferably burn out most of the hydrogen out of it, to form coke (the black, not the white powder), and then dump it. Else you'll quickly run out of empty mines' space, and likely contaminate the water table around them.

Not just that: we need fast-growing trees that don't let the carbon back into the atmosphere.

For that, the trees may not rot, may not be used as firewood, and may not be processed into paper or other products that eventually get incinerated in a waste-processing plant.

Ideally we should play artificial Carboniferous, and let these trees sink in lifeless bottomless oxygen-depleted bogs where they get preserved for millennia, and turn eventually back into coal deposits, to replace the ones we've depleted for last 300-400 years, putting the carbon from them into the air.

This takes much more than just fast-growing tress, or more land allocated to growing them. We also need these carbon burial grounds, that likely won't look (and likely smell) as pretty as a nice pine forest. Drowning in a carbon burial bog would be a hazard for hikers, too.

We also need economic incentives to bury the carbon from these carbon-fixating trees, and not to use them productively in the economy.

A genetically engineered plant that grows fast, does not require a lot of water, accumulates lots of anti-microbial and anti-fungi substances that prevent rotting, and produces timber which is not nice and desirable timber, to avoid the temptation, which is also heavier than water to make drowning easier, could be helpful.

Along these lines, Biochar is a promising technique as well:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar

> and produces timber which is not nice and desirable timber, to avoid the temptation

Why is this necessary? Wouldn't using it as timber still capture the carbon, albeit not as completely as the scenario above?

If that timber stays a wooden structure for several centuries, it would, for that time!

Maybe we should start to build more long-term things from timber, likely we would fire-proof them well. But steel, concrete, and plastics are still much easier to use for long-term structures like large buildings, bridges, roads, etc.

If it's used to produce paper, or wooden packaging, or for making chopsticks, etc, it would likely not. All these things are expendable, and most likely will end up either burned or rotted, releasing the carbon as CO2. Recycling helps this, of course.

> The idea is to preserve as many slow growing trees as we can while waiting for the technology to catch up.

What if technology doesn't catch up? And if it does, how to deal with the environmental consequences of building that new technology?

If technology doesn't catch up, then we're doomed. But that's unlikely; there's nothing like a crisis to spur innovation.

We're dealing with human nature here. People have their own problems to deal with, and tend to ignore things that aren't an immediate concern. So you need to adjust their environment in a way that aligns their goals with some environmental goals, all without destroying your economy. Do it too fast or hard, and your economy crashes, and all environmental incentives go out the window as your country's focus changes to getting out of bankruptcy.

It calls for finesse and timing.

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