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Comment by tima101 | Hacker News Reader

Nature already has powerful carbon-removing technology, it's called a tree. Why reinvent the wheel? Simply fund reforestation efforts. Plus many wildlife species will be saved from extinction. For example, orangutans in forests of Borneo island.

EDIT And besides, humans will survive climate change, we are 7.8 billion. But we made 1000s of species go extinct. So I say carbon capture is the wrong problem to solve.

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> Nature already has powerful carbon-removing technology, it's called a tree. Why reinvent the wheel?

Trees haven’t been carbon sinks for hundreds of millions of years [1].

They absorb carbon while growing, but release it in decay. Short of planting and burying gigatonnes of forest, trees aren’t going to be our way out of this.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous

What about trees used as building material?

Extends the period during which some carbon is sequestered but still ultimately returns to the atmosphere - Typical wood building construction periods are in the order of 50 years expected lifespan. That's with treated woods too, which introduce issues with environmental contamination from their treatment methods. Untreated lumber construction is more in the order of 10 years useful building life and another 10 years (guesstimate) breakdown period.

> They absorb carbon while growing, but release it in decay

Can you backup this claim? I haven't been able to find anything conclusive.

This is the furthest I've gone: https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/9089/does-o... https://www.gardenmyths.com/forests-remove-co2/

Have there been any reputable studies on the subject? Is this the consensus?

The problem is scale. Doing a lot of carbon capture with trees doesn't mean you're growing a nice biodiverse forests, it means you're growing vast tree plantations that you periodically chop down and sequester, e.g. with biochar.

A while back I saw a paper in Nature claiming that we could use trees to absorb up to 1 gigaton carbon annually, but more than that and we'd seriously impact biodiversity. There are probably other estimates around, but regardless of the exact threshold, it wouldn't be a bad thing to have technology able to do the same thing with a thousand times less land area. Then we can let the forests grow undisturbed.

To your edit: climate change itself is making species go extinct, so it's not like we can solve the extinction problem without addressing climate change too.

This is exactly the sort of effort that this revenue redirection goes to.

You can see their applicants: https://github.com/stripe/negative-emissions-source-material...

Droneseed, for example, is directly applicable

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