Also, one can plant fruit trees in their yard. I put in 6 last fall and plan to put in another dozen in the next 2-3 weeks. Over the winter I added about 6 truck loads of wood chips to the yard to reduce water usage. (My general feeling at this point from working with the soil is that the wood chips reduce watering needs by at least 80% here. This is a form of xeriscaping, if you're interested.) With all this food growing in the coming years we'll be taking fewer trips to the grocery store while eating better. And probably giving away and trading a lot of food - we're already starting to trade for eggs from a friend, for example.
My neighbors sometimes wondered why I don't trim it up and make it look "nice" right up to the water like some folks do.
I like it wild, lots of trees and wildlife. I even let the wildness take a bit more of the yard than when i moved in. A few big trees quickly sprung up, no maintenance (compared to a yard) it looks great wild.
Perhaps if only out of laziness (yard work is kinda a pain). A few other neighbors who were maliciously caring for their lawn right up to the marsh (well the area you can do that to legally) have done the same as I have and we've got a much larger wild area now. It's full of blue jays, finches, cardinals, rabbits, owl visitors. We even get visited by some beautiful red foxes from time to time (i suspect quite often but they are very sneaky).
The kids mostly play in the front yard anyway where I actually bother to do more yard work to make it looks nice so a big lawn in the back makes no sense if nobody is really enjoying it.
It's funny how urban adaptation affects perceptions of rarity. I live in fairly-central London and you can hardly set foot outside after dark without tripping over a red fox or three. Out in the countryside they're still pretty wary (with reason, since farmers will shoot them).
Are urban foxes a thing in the US too, or is this still a UK phenomenon?
I think you meant meticulously, but it works either way. :)
Really I think part of the cultural problem with home design environmentally - aside from the density issues is that so many don't even try to adapt to the environment and do daft things like trying to grow lush water thirsty grasses in the desert or cut away trees in areas that really need the drainage. They often do the equivalent of going around with a brazier of burning coals at 50F instead of putting on a jacket.
It takes a long time for best practices to become accepted and normal, and there just isn't the geneological inertia to develop that anymore
Some of the trees also attract rats, which drives my dogs nuts at night and is then a source of anxiety given the high crime rate in our country. Trees along the perimeter of the property have damaged the boundary walls, and other trees have ruined sewerage lines. If you want to plant trees, make sure you understand the potential future costs associated with them.
Seriously, I don't get the weird obsession with rooftop PV as if it's the only way to be green. PV is great, but, it doesn't work for every house. Personally, I have big oaks out front helping block passive solar windows in the summer, and the peak of my roof runs north-south so cell mounting would be tricky. That doesn't mean I can't get clean energy, it just means I buy it from a utility company, who are buying it from my neighbor's house where the orientation and canopy placement makes sense to do PV.
Regardless of the environmental angle, having trees near your house is not worth it financially.
Also do you recommend any resources for a beginner to get started on the fruit trees? Soil prep, watering schedule, etc.
I am now living in Monrovia, Liberia, where you will often find large trees for shade, often mango, sometimes moringa or coconut. There's also a bougainvillea shading a bench in every village between Monrovia and Yekepa. :-)
Edit: I also want to mention the concept of agroforestry [1], a part of permaculture agricultural design principles, where trees (often fruit bearing) are used with lower vegetation, shrubbery and crops, creating a food forest. Incidentally, this is what farms often look like in West Africa, with coconut, banana, cocoa, papaya, cassava, etc growing intermingled on the farmland.
[0] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A5rdtr%C3%A4d [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture#Agroforestry
I live in Michigan and have four large trees surrounding the house, although we let their branches hang over the house, so 3 or so hours around noon, the house gets no shade.
Although not everyone is onboard. To be sure, there are still drab boxy houses with nothing but lawn that run their sprinklers every morning and the A/C all day. Preferable to spending two hours a year raking up leaves in fall, I'm told.
Georgetown https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/01/georgetow...
Rhode Island https://www.providencejournal.com/news/20190414/proposed-ri-...
Prineville Oregon(I dont' know how many trees will be cleared for this, maybe it will be on existing farmland) https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2018/07/massive_so...
If the power could be used to create and concentrate ammonia, much of needed generation could be shifted to farms. Of course farms have other uses for sunlight, so wind is a better choice there.
Generating ammonia with wind power eliminates the problem of intermittent availability. You only produce ammonia when there is power for it.
Overall, you're over-reaching with the RI claim that we're clearing forest for solar farms, as I've been local for decades and seen no evidence of that.
There is no justification at skepticism and entertaining back-of-the-envelope gotchas about the climactic and environmental value of tree planting and enhanced forestry at this late stage. It needs to be supported !
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...
" Reducing emissions from deforestation; reducing emissions from forest degradation; conservation of forest carbon stocks; sustainable management of forests; and enhancement of forest carbon stocks (REDD) consists of forest-related activities implemented voluntarily by developing countries that may, in isolation or jointly lead to significant climate change mitigation. REDD was introduced in the agenda of the UNFCCC in 2005, and has since evolved to an improved understanding of the potential positive and negative impacts, methodological issues, safeguards, and financial aspects associated with REDD implementation. " (page 865)
More seriously, though: the article claims there’s “ample acreage” for such an endeavor but I didn’t see where exactly they’re referring to. Are we supposed to imagine these are sprinkled here and there around the earth, and that there’s plenty of space just waiting for a tree to be planted, or is this something where we need to create or re-create vast forest lands for it to work?
(The historical reason trees were absent from the great plains was periodic fire.)
It doesn't seem like a particularly practical solution.
http://forestandrange.org/southernpine/magement/planting/rea...
The total suitable land area needed (more than the area of the USA, by my estimate) is much more likely to be the limiting factor than the per-person difficulty.
If over one year everyone planted 3 trees per week, and we employed a work force of people to cultivate them further, we would make a huge dent in our catastrophic risk exposure? Sure, it's seemingly impractical alongside the status quo of land distribution and use ( $$$ into develop all the land and farm humans for rent!!), but... more green will be good for the health of nearly all the living things on Earth, and at the very least give us more time to find even better solutions.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34134366 Earth's trees number 'three trillion'
"Scientific research has shown that there were once six trillion trees on our planet, and now there are around three trillion left.[1] Human activity was the main driving force for this decrease and humans can, therefore, be the main driving force in increasing it again!" source: Trillion Trees Three major international conservation organizations – the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the World Wide Fund for Nature - UK (WWF-UK) and BirdLife International (BLI)
We probably also need to remake the economic system what parameters it optimise's for, so that it does not focus on exponential economic output growth as that will drive exponential energy consumption. Reasoning, the planet is already literally on fire due to global warming, why put more fuel on the fire?
The actual presentation:
https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2019/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/23744
Under a business-as-usual climate scenario our model suggests that warming would drive the loss of ~55 gigatons of carbon from the upper soil horizons by 2050. This value is around 12–17 per cent of the expected anthropogenic emissions over this period.
I wonder how many of those 1.2T trees could be accomplished without starting huge new forests or in places that require irrigation.
There are cities in places with ample rain that already have 1,000's of vacant lots. Ten trees per vacant lot could start to make a big difference, if only regionally.
Maybe Americans should stop thinking of Arbor Day and the Arbor Day Foundation as quaint square leftovers from a past generation, and start thinking of them as a framework to save the planet.
I'd welcome two new trees in my front yard and two in the back, but my HOA won't allow it. I've already reached my maximum vegetation allowance.
That said it could also:
- absorb some heat
- create new wind / rain cycles
- provides a lot of material (construction/furniture) to replace cement and plastics
- kill millions of people of exhaustion from planting that many trees
We'd probably have to sequester them somewhere anaerobic. Bottom of a deep-sea trench or underground. Which also reduces the net carbon footprint of the activity.
Ironically, they grow much faster on the other side of the world (New Zealand) due to its wetter climate but the wood is not as hard due to this so they aren't useful in construction. Basically the ultimate carbon sync and useless for humans.
It worked 49 million years ago.
Trees have been around for a very, very long time; much longer than we have. Complex evolutionary forces have shaped trees and forests into their current robust configurations.
Trees are intimately connected with their ecosystems, and interact with their surroundings in both known and unknown ways. For example, it has been discovered recently that trees communicate with one another through chemical, hormonal and slow-pulsing electrical signals, including through the air, using pheromones and other scent signals [1][2]
Mother nature is complex. We do not have enough understanding of her complexity, and neither enough computational power to reliably model and subsequently change diverse ecosystems.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering...
Luckily such recklessness is unnecessary.
This might be something you are referring to.
EDIT: I just looked it up: there are roughly 4-10 trillion trees on earth right now.
It's not the planting that counts, it's the leaving the trees alone.
And that's what's missing from the title (the "if we stop cutting down so many trees" part)
Any research or innovation on that front ?
Also looks like a similar project in Africa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Green_Wall
References: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_greening
Desert greening is essentially question of water availability and reversing soil erosion but you may also need the nutrients.
There have been many attempts in desert greening and oasification but they are expensive and have not been very successful in large scale. It's much easier to create a desert than do the opposite.
Many places we think of as ancient deserts were climax forests in historical times, such as Petra. It became desert when too many trees were cut.
http://www.kalanit.org.il/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/IMG_000...
I'm sure we could build aqueducts.
Eg https://medium.com/invironment/an-army-of-ocean-farmers-on-t...
Also floating solar, with compressed-air energy storage in under-sea airbags (could work on hydro reservoirs too)
100 Billion trees.
Holy Crap.
So if every household in the UK planted a tree in their (often non existent) garden, that would be about 22 Million trees - or about 2 hours worth.
Holy fucking crap. that's a lot of CO2
No, our most powerful weapon against climate change is reducing human GHG emissions.
In my mind a solution needs to be implementable in a meaningful way by single actors. I'm not sure about the state of the art of direct air carbon capture, but for me it seems like a much easier solution. "Just" push X billion/trillion USD into an enormous plant somewhere in a dessert with access to solar/nuclear power and suck it up.
Maybe negative emission solutions will turn out to be not feasible anyways, and the best we can do is to focus our efforts on reaching close to zero new emissions.
At the current rate of growth, we're not that far from directly producing more heat than the earth can radiate into space.
Entertain my thoughts: Suppose you could have a tree X. It grows fast, is very water efficient and better at trapping sunlight and C02 than existing specifies. It’s wood grows straight and makes a great building material. We could plant billions of it in semi-deserts and it would terraform the land into a livable habitat.
Basically the promise is rather than planting trillions of trees, can we plant billions of 1000x efficient trees in places where current trees don’t exist.
anyone got any other suggestions for organizations to donate to to get trees planted fast ? Because I love trees regardless of whether they going to help save our home planet
they have Guinness record for most tree saplings planted in a day, over 28M planted so far.
- according to 5 sec of googling
I'm the founder of Pachama (YC W19) where we're working to help make this market efficient and accountable.
Successfully completed in 2017
Still, every little helps.
Go through every forest on earth and cut down every third tree and sequester it so it won’t decompose and release the carbon. Then the forest rengerates itself and pulls all that carbon out of the atmosphere.
Or an idea for a billionaire. Buy out the entire worlds annual output of lumber and sequester it.
You could dump vegetables or corn in a hole though, but I've read that's not a cost effective solution either.
I'm tired of the jeremiad of gloom from Eeyore. Boastful optimism is tiring too, but somewhere in-between is a nice place. Can we have some realism tempered optimism in our kids ability to un-fuck-up the last 100 years? Please?
From https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00122-z
> Several analyses in the past few years suggest that these warming effects from forests could partially or fully offset their cooling ability.
What's consoling is that at least planting trees is unlikely to harm (although rapid tree plantation will certainly send ripples in the complex, inter-connected ecological chains).
The satellite images of continuing, and still accelerating, forestry loss were the most striking part of Attenborough's Climate Change prog for me.
Currently, we are paying them to cut down rainforests and plant oil palms, so that we can buy cheap oil from them.
If anyone fancies donating to plant a few 100 or 1000 trees https://donate.trees.org/campaign/trees-for-the-futures-eart... does good stuff for about 15c/tree. It doesn't take very much to cancel out your personal CO2 load that way. I donated I think $100 for 1000 trees a while back.
My money is on humans.
* It costs $0.50 per tree planted,
* trees absorb 1 ton of CO2 each,
* Teslas cost $15,000 more than regular cars
* Teslas emit 1 gallon of fuel less than regular cars per 25 miles (starting after 50,000 miles: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324128504578346...)
* 1 gallon of gas produces 20 lbs of CO2
* Cars will last 250,000 miles
Then we have Teslas saving us: ( (250,000-50,000) miles * 1 gallon per 25 miles * 20 lbs per gallon)/$15,000 = 10 pounds of CO2 saved per dollar spent on Teslas, compared to 4,000 pounds of CO2 saved per dollar spent on planting trees.
This is why I associate myself with climate skeptics despite their negative reputation. An economic analysis of climate change seems to suggest that the world will be worse off with climate change mitigation, as it's currently being practiced, than with climate change itself.
Edit: It's actually quite interesting to see that your username resembles the name of Bjorne Lomborg, a famous scientist who often makes arguments about the economics of climate change and comes to similar conclusions as I do.
How about creating giant floating tracts of mangrove trees. They’re naturally able to live in saltwater.
Maybe make the islands out of waste plastic.
That's about 150x smaller than most other estimates for the cost of carbon sequestration. I think your math is probably wrong.
I think the more important question is, can they scale that cost per tree planted? Hard to say until it's tried.
Also, my calculations assume 22 tons emitted by the average US resident.
“In the American system one billion is 1,000,000,000 and a trillion is 1,000,000,000,000 so one trillion is one thousand times one billion. In the British system one billion is 1,000,000,000,000 and one trillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 so one trillion is one million times one billion.”
“In British English, a billion used to be equivalent to a million million (i.e. 1,000,000,000,000), while in American English it has always equated to a thousand million (i.e. 1,000,000,000). British English has now adopted the American figure, though, so that a billion equals a thousand million in both varieties of English.
The same sort of change has taken place with the meaning of trillion. In British English, a trillion used to mean a million million million (i.e. 1,000,000,000,000,000,000). Nowadays, it's generally held to be equivalent to a million million (1,000,000,000,000), as it is in American English.”
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/how-many-is-a-bill...
Planting ecologically native trees back into their native land is the best way to minimize unintended consequences and just get this done.
Australia has announced a plan to plant a billion more by 2050 as part of its effort to meet the country’s Paris Agreement climate targets.
But perhaps we can find a way to make the Sahara into a forest? That’s about what it would take.
- Plant heliostat molten salt reactors in desert coastal areas (the concentrated solar kind)
- Use generated heat to desalinate water
- Use desalinated water to provide irrigation
- Plant (potentially GMO'ed) bootstrapping organisms to create a soil (greening)
- Plant trees
- Rinse repeat.
I mean, this is a great conclusion, but what are we supposed to do with it?
There are also recent studies that highlight some of the potential environmental impacts of large-scale terrestrial carbon removal as a primary mechanism for reversing the effects of climate change. Optimizing for sequestration means converting the most productive agricultural land or using even more natural land, devastating either food production or natural ecosystems,[1] in addition to drawing heavily on water resources and fertilizers on a massive scale, risking other planetary boundaries.[2] The more realistic scenarios risk both, albeit to less catastrophic degrees, but do so by decreasing potential sequestration and limiting its effects on global temperatures. Put a bit glibly, it's jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.
That's not to say that it isn't part of the solution. It is, as the first paper explicitly states in its conclusion, and "can significantly contribute as a “supporting actor” of the mitigation protagonist, if it gets started and deployed immediately." But it won't be a primary mechanism, nor will it reach anywhere near 1.2 trillion trees. Even the more limited "pertinent options available now, which include reforestation of degraded land and the protection of degraded forests to allow them to recover naturally and increase their carbon storage" need to be priorities.
Other geoengineering proposals, such as possible solar radiation management techniques, might extend the period during which we can use tCDR and other carbon removal mechanisms to mitigate past emissions beyond just slowing the rate of temperature increase. But without drastic emissions reductions in the immediate future, all of those possible options become more difficult, with even more deleterious consequences. Not to mention more expensive.
In other words, there's no easy or even optimal answer. Assuming, of course, that 1.2 trillion trees can be considered "easy."
0. http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/wsfs/docs/Issues_pape...
1. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a712/e761c2360f927cbff0ee54...
But we don't plant one carrot per second.