The guilty parties here are politicians, bureaucrats and corporations who wanted to be seen as 'doing something' or selling 'responsible stewardship' to the public while actually doing nothing. I honestly have more respect for the outfits that didn't even bother with such bogus PR claims (ExxonMobil) vs the shady fraudsters who tried to greenwash their image this way (BP 'Beyond Petroleum', Chevron's 'sustainability program'). Politicians like Al Gore hyped these schemes as well, while not doing much that would actually decrease fossil fuel use (like a massive increase in solar/wind/storage technology R&D and manufacturing support). Countries like Canada used this nonsense to justify continuing with the dirtiest fossil fuel production system on the planet, i.e. Alberta tar sand mining, all while portraying themselves as green enviromentalists.
Such opportunistic politicization of the issue has resulted in major problems ever since when it comes to explaining the science to skeptics, who understandably started to think it was all about politics.
Even 30 years ago when these schemes were first trotted out as 'cap and trade' scientists knew they were bogus. Forests weren't capable of expanding to absorb fossil carbon being pumped into the atmosphere and predictions of continental drying (reduced growth rates), warmer winters (allowing insect infestations), and longer fire seasons (burning down the forests) all pointed to steady reductions in standing biomass, not increases.
I do think the general state of offsets is improving. There are more high-quality offsets hitting the market every day. They're much too expensive, but I'd rather see "real" offsets at a high price than the complete make-believe we've had up until recently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonate_rock
The sci-fi approach that would be great is pulling atmospheric CO2 out of the air and making diamond from it. The technology is sort of there already but the costs are ludicrous. The pathway is atmospheric CO2 + water -> methane -> synthetic diamond production. That last is a slow energy-intensive process, but such diamonds would be easily distinguishable from the 'real' geologic diamonds (as they'd have the same amount of carbon-14 as the atmospheric CO2 does). Worth someone writing a business plan I think.
The mountain forests in Southern California (near Yosemite, etc) have been burnt out hellscapes for years.
Of course, this is all rounding error vs. the loss of 90% of the kelp forest, which many people didn't notice, since it's underwater. The kelp biomass the has been lost in the last few years is equal to 100% of the redwood forests.
As I like to shout from the rooftops, gasoline could be made carbon negative with a ~ $1/gallon direct air carbon capture tax. (And similar for the other fossil fuels.). I recently saw $7.99 / gallon, so that's a bit over a 10% tax in some areas.
Yes, poor people need gasoline too. We should tax new ICE vehicles at some astronomical rate and plow the money into steeper EV subsidies.
Alternatively, we could tax ICE new vehicles so (assuming they run for 250K miles) the purchaser pays 100% of the carbon recapture cost up front.
We could also allow for community net metering so poor high density areas could establish nonprofit solar/wind farms that lower their electricity bills.
As far as I can tell, all these plans are deficit neutral and would also boost the economy.
We should be pursuing every possible avenue, especially those that might have side benefits. Sequestering dead trees could help with fuels reduction and potentially improve soil health.
(If anyone reading this wants to help scale DAC, consider joining me in OpenAir collective discord! https://openair.cc/)
Just tax carbon. Use proceeds to subsidize situations where the hardship is too high (e.g. energy used by poor people).
Start small and phase in over time.
In what universe is Yosemite in Southern California?
Is this something that one could do now ? I don't know where you'd begin on something like that but I'm loving this idea.
The state of california should enact these plans so we can all see how it goes. If it works other states will follow suit. If it doesn't, more people will leave california.
>As I like to shout from the rooftops, gasoline could be made carbon negative with a ~ $1/gallon direct air carbon capture tax. (And similar for the other fossil fuels.). I recently saw $7.99 / gallon, so that's a bit over a 10% tax in some areas.
I know that gas prices are high because of putin's price hike (tm), but wasn't calfornia gas already much more expensive than other states because of state taxes? How is this one going to be different?
It will be at least a decade before used EVs with >200mi range trickle down to the $10-15k used market. Saying we should tax gas when poor people can't even afford it as is is a gross misunderstanding of the financial situation of poor people today. You can't even buy a >200mi EV for less than 40k today.
> establish nonprofit solar/wind farms
Who's going to pay for them? And who's paying for the storage?
> also boost the economy
Boosting the price of fuel would have hugely inflationary effects while everyone is still stuck on ICEs. We saw this in the 70s, we're seeing it now.
I have not studied or worked with bio-oils, but on biochar: As a soil amendment, many soil types are incompatible with addition of biochar. Biochar tends to retain water, which is a problem if you add it to already poorly draining soils. Biochar also shifts soil pH. In some cases this is good, in other cases it is bad. I think it is the minority of soils that are actually improved by adding biochar. I am not aware of any studies that show that biochar is a suitable carbon storage scheme. The last time I reviewed the research, the behavior of carbon in soils is as yet poorly understood and appears to be quite complex. It may be a decade or more before we understand what biochar does when added to different soil types, and we might learn that the majority of it ends up as CO2 within a couple years.
Finally you mention burying trees: it may be that this accelerates the release of Carbon. Depending on climate, standing timber often lasts longer. Dead wood on the ground (or buried) is often wetter, which favors decomposition.
I am not trying to sound negative here. You bring up a lot of points that are being actively researched and worked on. But there are not any clear easy solutions. We need to work on this problem. I wish we (as a society) were putting a lot more into this effort.
Is there a fundamental reason you can't treat the wood to make it non flammable and non digestible, and just stack them in big piles somewhere?
Edit: Hope yall realize this was sarcasm and none of these options would sequester the carbon long term.
The majority of pine-beetle related deaths are in the southern range of the Sierras, south of Yosemite, but it occurs well into the North, as mentioned. Even conservatives, cant-be-bothered people have noticed the huge stands of dead trees, because you see them when driving to Yosemite for vacation. Meanwhile greens have been flipping out amongst themselves for years.
The forest carbon studies executed on Azure cloud mentioned here, have agenda and suffer from ordinary capitalist-picked experts problems, but generally we should all support more quantitative, fact-based decision making.
The dunce cap here definitely goes to the US Forest Service, and cronies, who have for 100 years, exercised their extensive muscle to prove without a doubt that they are in fact, red-neck badge-wearing troglodytes from a Robin Hood movie, for the most part; dramatic exceptions within the ranks noted.
> A portion of those credits are put into a buffer account, an insurance mechanism tapped in the event that projects are lost to wildfire, disease, pests or financial risks such as bankruptcy. Those credits are meant to guarantee carbon stocks for at least 100 years. But that promise is falling short as climate change fuels intense wildfires, drought and disease, the researchers said.
> Wildfires have depleted nearly one fifth of that buffer pool in less than a decade, the analysis found.
So, they're generally giving the impression this is all a terrible scam, but the figures they quote suggest that there was planning for fire and diseas, and that the buffer is slightly more depleted than expected after a decade.
And that if lots of trees die, this will "wipe out" the extra carbon credits put aside specifically to cover the eventuality that some trees might die.
Which is good. They seem to specialise in data-based approaches to validating whether carbon offsets do what they say.
They're not trying to discredit offsets in general, they're nerding out on subtle details of how these work.
But the story amplifies the nitpicking to the level that other commenters can say "these are just outright fraud with made up numbers" and generally gives a false impression which feeds into the whole climate hoax thing.
When, in reality there's a fairly complex system built-in with certification and incentives and insurance buffers. And that insurance might turn out to not be sufficient, but even if the insurance totally fails, it only then starts to eat away at the benefits.
Note the insurance is pooled and as new projects get added, it spreads the risk further.
Also the trees are spread across 29 states, which diversifies risk from fire and disease.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2022.93042...
I've even debated on twitter with published scientists on this issue. It's odd how susceptible to naturophilia even very well educated people can be, to the point of denying what seems like an obvious conclusion.
Growing forests is one of many things that can be part of fixing this.
No amount of trees or other biomass can revert what we have done or even make a significant dent.
Currently, all biomass on Earth equals about a decade of our emissions from carbon we dug out. Even doubling all biomass, which is impossible to do, would only be roughly equal to pausing our emissions for a decade.
That is, assuming all that biomass does not revert into carbon through fires and other ways.
