14M ton of carbon offset forest is burning in California
twitter.com
twitter.com
It escapes me how anyone can consider it for long-term carbon storage/offsetting of excess atmospheric co2 derived from fossil fuels.
There's been a lot of talk about burying it as it matures.
I have a question though. Why can't we compost it and make soil out of it? I gather that this would release some carbon back to the atmosphere (in both anaerobic and aerobic composting) but wouldn't it be a net capture?
You can sequester carbon with any kind of organic matter. As long as the compost product contains carbon, you'll be sequestering it. The only problem is that if you just leave it around, plants will eventually extract it for nutrients, which means it will reenter the carbon cycle. To sequester it long term you have to prevent it from being used by lifeforms, eg. burying it really deep.
Not sure how effective it would be from a CO2/$ standpoint.
I am looking at you Goldman Sachs.
There's some opportunity to consider Vermacompost or bokashi to reduce the CO2 output
For those interested:
And in case you haven't noticed, the climate is changing. Whatever assumptions you may have about the probability of abundant fuel left on the planet's surface going up in smoke are unlikely to stay correct, if they even are today.
[0] https://www2.illinois.gov/dnr/education/Pages/ILPrairies.asp...
Fossil fuels come from accidents of evolution. When plants first evolved lignin there was nothing around that could decompose it and so it built up in large layers, later to be converted into fossil fuels under pressure. Now there are fungi which can decompose lignin and so there will never be a natural build-up of lignin again.
Our best bet is to grow trees to sequester carbon and then cut them down and use the wood for durable goods such as houses and furniture. If we can take care of this wood to prevent it from rotting or burning then it’ll sequester carbon for a long time. We’ll have to find ways to cut out fossil fuels from the wood supply chain though.
But at the same time those old trees are rotting, new trees are growing. So long as the forest exists (as opposed to say prairie), the carbon is sequestered.
It just doesn't get much press when it is in the middle of nowhere, generally, as compared to blanketing one of the most populous states in the US.
You can think of a forest like a giant spring. The more it grows, the more energy it stores/the more compressed it is, until eventually the right conditions happen and BLAM, it lets loose. This is true of all forests and frankly all collections of carbon. The ones underground just happen to be particularly well 'trapped'.
Even peat bogs catch on fire sometimes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-seam_fire
Hopefully the really deep stuff doesn't have the oxygen available to combust.
Because, the occasional fire notwithstanding, it's not ephemeral. The canonical idea here is taking stripped land like farms, which has had all the carbon removed and burned off into the atmosphere, and replacing it (over a century or two) with a mature forest where very large amounts of carbon is stored in biomass. Yes, it burns sometimes. But over time forests house vastly more carbon than farms. So planting them is a win.
The ding against forest sequestration isn't fires, it's that they just don't work fast enough. It's not enough to scrub all the CO2 out of the air by 2221 AD, we need it done now.
It's great if you have a bunch of land that COULD have a forest, but currently doesn't for some reason (harvested?) - but there isn't a lot of that anymore. If it doesn't have it now because the last one burned, then it's just getting back to it's previous storage point, not really changing the overall equilibrium. You can't easily make more land be forestable, as it requires quite a lot of water, and most places with a lot of water already have forests.
So forests here are very ephemeral indeed. The idea that people keeping a forest here forever would fight global warming is mind boggling.
What happens in a fire isn't that the forest goes away, it's just that the dead fuel burns. In fact in a healthy forest, total carbon uptake significantly increases after a fire (as younger, faster-growing plants rush into the voids left by the removed cover).
Yes, "plant a tree" is absolutely part of the solution. It's not sufficient, but it's important. Turning forests into low-productivity farms is a disaster, and reversing that is a huge win for carbon balancing.
In some of these dryer areas, it isn’t clear it will ever come back the way it was, or if it does it may be hundreds of years from now.
You're right and that doesn't change the basic point. That is: California and the West broad has an excess of trees and tree-density so keeping a given forest as a carbon sink is ridiculous and impractical.
In fact in a healthy forest, total carbon uptake significantly increases after a fire (as younger, faster-growing plants rush into the voids left by the removed cover).
California has insufficient wetland and grassland. Some of a given burned forest will become that. The ultimate, stable California ecology has a substantially lower density of trees than the existing ecology and so the fires that happen in that context tend to just clear the existing brush, leaving the trees, etc.
And still, doesn't change the basic point.
Edit: Reading my original post, I can't see where I claim fires "deforest" a region. Fires do lower tree density, how could they do otherwise?
Edit again: there's a limit to how much carbon a given landscape can absorb, determined by its ecology broadly speaking. Through fire suppression, California and the West have managed to go past that limit. It's biting us, I'm wearing two masks outside and this is the present reality. How hard is that grasp?
I mean, we're not going to do that. Forests won't save us from global warming. But I'm pretty sure that's one of the mechanisms so much carbon got tucked away.
No, forest cover over the whole planet has been pretty consistent over the past hundred million years or so. It's only recently that we've seen widespread continent-scale deforestation. A simple return to the geological status quo would effect a ton of carbon sequestration.
In fact in the longer term (since "forests" have existed anyway) forest have been absolutely enormous carbon sinks. It took until the end of the carboniferous (the name is not an accident!) ~300M years ago for bacteria to even be able to decompose wood. Most tree trunks from that era never rotted at all, they got buried and turned into coal.
There are immense areas on Earth right now which were deforested within the past few centuries and are still perfectly capable of supporting forest today.
Dead trees - in the form of lumber, coal, whatever, IS how carbon is long term sequestered.
The California timber industry is dead. It's dead because global lumber demand is shrinking, the world lumber industry is competitive, California cut down the big trees a while back and because the exurbanites don't like trucks driving by their mansions.
Lumber isn't a solution to fire because companies only want to cut the big tree that would survive the fires and aren't interested in the small, spindly trees and brush that are burning. Lumber isn't a solution to overall carbon capture because humans hold a fixed amount of wood at a time and cutting more trees in a given location isn't going change that amount. And fantasies that you can open the flood gates and restart logging are ridiculous and reprehensible imo.
Stopping CO2 production global is really the only solution but biochar is the only meaningful carbon capture form if we need to go there also (this would reverse coal mining, essentially - that would capture the substance). California and the North West US have too much forest (of spindly trees and brush), that and global warming is why things are burning. California mountains would be a good site for biochar but this isn't going to be a profitable venture, the government will have to pay. The present mess really can only be solved by state intervention and the OP gives further evidence that "market based solutions" are a despicable sham.
Yep, that's a significant factor in reducing the demand for trees overall since every bit of each cut tree can used. But big and medium sized trees are still going to be more profitable to cut and with total demand shrinking, you won't get to the small trees even if you have the technology to use them.
The thing is, clear cuts are fire hazards since they allow underbrush to build up. A fire safe approach is clearing undergrowth and leaving large trees. Modest fires do that but there's no free way to do that. You'd need to pay people - that would be a good thing near towns and cities but beyond that, we need controlled burns or we get uncontrolled burns, as we see today.
What I'm interested in is, do they have time to make up the losses? If they re-plant, can they wait ~100 years before measuring how successful the project was?
if you want cheap land, you can get a full 640 acre parcel(one square mile) for ~$500-600k, they even have roads on them.
I kind of wish there was something like "Kickstarter for cities". Basically, you get a few thousand or more people to put down some amount of money that would collectively cover buying a few square miles of land and connecting it to roads and electrical and water infrastructure. Everyone gets a plot of land in the new city, and the development and funds are managed by a non-profit that eventually becomes the new city government once people start moving in and there's enough population to run elections. The non-profit/government retains unsold lots that are auctioned off to finance construction of schools, fire departments, police stations, additional roads, and so on.
Ideally, you'd partner with one or more major employers and/or a University that wants to build a new campus so that people coming in have jobs.
This is potentially a workaround to the problem of "there's only a few cities that everyone seems to want to move to, and those are getting really crowded and housing is unaffordable". We just need more nice places to live.
This is really the beginning and end of planned cities. If you don't have an answer to "jobs" you're really planning a retirement community, not a city.
But, unfortunately, present-day people don't want to do that. They want instant gratification. The feeling that they are doing something to address the problem, even if it makes no sense in the long term. And the politicians keep sell them that feeling at a cost of such fiascos.
Imagine if all of those fury forests were to be converted to power
*Really rough, rugged mountainous terrain, that most ski resorts would love to have
The first nations did practice controlled burns for the sake of wildlife management (to increase open grazing land) for sure, and smaller scale forest fires did/do happen. But nothing like out west.
Forest fire are sufficiently cyclical that some trees, like the pitch pine, depends on them for the seeds to open.
Recently, there was a story about how when we keep the forests from burning we are causing major issues.
It depends on what you're comparing it against. A forest contains more biomass (and therefore more carbon) than a grass field or a corn field. If before tree planting a plot of land had 100 Tons of biomass, and after planting + growth it had 200 Tons, then you sequestered 100 tons of carbon. If it goes up in flames some of that biomass will get released, but it will eventually grow back, recapturing all the lost carbon.
With that in mind, I don't see anything fraudulent about selling carbon offsets during the initial planting. Sure, it's not as good as burying carbon deep underground, but you're still sequestering carbon.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s much better than nothing. I just think they should probably pick locations that aren’t as prone to burning as the colville forests. So the carving stays locked a bit more long term.
Or apply a discount factor. eg. for a simple model: if a forest has n Tons of sequestered carbon when fully grown, but every 40 years it gets burned bare for 4 years, then it's really only sequestering 0.9n tons of carbon over the long run.
> So the carving stays locked a bit more long term.
I think you got the adjectives flipped. If anything the sequester is long term, but there's cyclical short term release/recapture.
Trees are pure carbon?
There are various ways of offsetting emissions that aren’t vulnerable to leakage. For example, you can capture methane from landfills and burn it. Since methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, burning it has a net greenhouse reduction. And there’s no chance of leakage — water, CO2 and oxygen aren’t going to spontaneously turn back into methane in the atmosphere.
In addition, in some cases it’s more cost effective to make a mostly reliable system and correct errors than to build perfectly reliable systems. Would you rather plant 2M T of trees and have none burn down or 10M T and have 20% burn down?