Spending that money on intensive lobbying and forest advocacy in rapidly-deforesting countries could have an impact, too.
The trick, of course, is that neither of these techniques compound for the individual nor a startup. They are pure charity for the planet.
1. Automate tree/crop planting
2. Reform regulations stipulating that planting of trees/crops/plants should be required on any and all uninhabited lands, as a matter of "imminent domain" regardless of the land owner. Perhaps even as a tax incentive to land owners.
3. The development of a maintenance and management policy and system around all that is planted
4. In conjunction with the RFS for flooding deserts, develop a multi-stage water transfer to desert desalinization ponds, then to be used in irrigation of the tree planting efforts.
We already have autonomous farming combines with excellent ability to harvest crops and plant seed. They should be put to use at scale in panting trees.
Further, we could make an effort to employ the vast amounts of humans with little opportunity to be productive to build, plant and deploy a massive effort such as this.
We dont need to try to do everything with robots, when we have millions and millions of humans.
If we are so progressive and smart, maybe learning how to manage a labor force in the millions to accomplish a great work such as terraforming a desert is someting we should attempt again.
https://www.biocarbonengineering.com/ These guys use drones to shoot tree seeds in the ground.
Also regarding terraforming a dessert, I think one of the biggest problems with is the number of water needed in the area, but I do think that this will be a really interesting part of the solution. Maybe the increase of land prices due to the decrease of arable land might make such ventures more profitable. There's a great ted talk about reversing desertification: https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_worl...
Given that you need to do this once every 25-40 years (maturity cycle of the tree), is doing it with drones really that big a win?
Historically non violent direct action has been successful in changing politics (see womens suffrage, civil rights movement). This is the primary goal of the Extinction Rebellion http://extinctionrebellion.org
That's an interesting option, but I wonder how a company might sustain itself doing this.
Lease land to eco-friendly activities like zipline adventures or something?
Also sounds like a good reason for expansion of National Parks services.
Buying land and planting trees there will cost something like $2000 per acre and retain something like one ton of CO2 per acre per year (an order of magnitude estimate - depending on details both the cost and CO2 effect can be very different).
Industrial carbon capture at power plants can do that for something like 70$ per ton. That's much cheaper than forestry, but that's still not good enough. ycombinator is obviously looking for technologies that scale better than these existing approaches, something that might achieve large scale carbon removal at maybe $10/ton or less, at which stage the option "just pay a lot of money to reverse the effect of our emissions" might be plausibly considered affordable to our society.
And then you have a lot of captured carbon dioxide on your hands - next big cost is the storage/conversion.
IPCC summary on cost of forest sequestration :
> Estimates of the private costs of sequestration range from about US$0.10-US$100/tC, which are modest compared with many of the energy alternatives (see Table 3.9 and Figure 4.9). Additionally, it should be noted that most forest projects have positive non-market benefits, thus increasing their social worth
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg3/index.php?idp=171#fig...
Let say you can have 100 000 trees per square km. If 40 trees gives you 1 ton of carbon per year then spending $25 000 gives you $10/ton.
The founders of Patagonia and The North Face brands did start conservacion patagonia together. [1]
It is one amazing project. [2]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservaci%C3%B3n_Patag%C3%B3n... 2. http://www.conservacionpatagonica.org/aboutus_oh.htm
"Doesn't concentrate wealth exponentially; BZZT rejected!"
At some point, we apparently forgot that wealth/power inequality itself massively contributes to environmental problems.
* If you have no political power, you can't defend yourself and your land from pollution.
* If a large portion of the society has no political power, a large portion of the society cannot defend themselves and their land from pollution.
* In a society with extreme wealth, the price mechanism can't "kick in" to protect increasingly-scarce renewable resources (ie saving a species from extinction). Donella Meadows gives a much better explanation than I can, using fisheries as an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMmChiLZZHg&t=18m48s
EDIT: after reading other comments on how trees arent the greatest solution, replace trees with the best option and tie it to a continent wide / global wide black mirror credit score system.
I've been researching what's involved in reforesting, and it looks like a ton of work and a non-trivial cost. And maybe not the most efficient dollar / CO2 ratio, but also something that has the nice side effect of having a living forest around. (And also the side effect of providing exercise, access to the outdoors, etc.)
