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[DrudeFiegler]

I don't know how serious it is, but apparently one of the proposals is to grow trees (capturing the carbon) and then cut them down and bury the lumber.  Which sounds laughably expensive to me.

But also you have to make sure they don't rot!  Which led to the podcasters joking about using the same hole as a nuclear waste dump.  Wild stuff.

That seems overly complex yes, and not at all feasible. Wood rots since the end of the Carboniferous, and it won't stop anytime soon. Best to do is planting a lot of trees and plants as to quickly develop a complex forest. The more complex it is, the more CO2 it stores, because you have layers upon layers of organism/lichens/mushrooms/plants.
But to do so, you have to limit human interference to the minimum, and the area quickly become unwalkable.

[wierd]

I would suggest instead:

Aggressive algal harvesting from a lake surface, followed by drying and hermetic charring using solar heating-- then mixed with low temperature soda glass.  All that could be accomplished with pure solar power.  It would capture the carbon in a geologically stable form.

[delphonso]

Carbon capture is just a way to shift focus from emission reduction, despite emission reduction being more economical.

[feelotraveller]

Increasing the amount of carbon retained in the soil is just a good thing^TM.

Carbon capture is just a way to shift focus from emission reduction, despite emission reduction being more economical.

In terms of the daily sound-bite cycle, yes.

Pragmatically having both is what we want.  Trouble is the the mad-scientist schemes which replace the viable existing carbon sequestration/capture options.  (Oh and the way those mad schemes 'capture' the public imagination...)

[Starver]

I don't know how serious it is, but apparently one of the proposals is to grow trees (capturing the carbon) and then cut them down and bury the lumber.  Which sounds laughably expensive to me.

(Then there's the carbon put out by whatever you use to industrialise this process (unless it's a Mr Fusion!?!) which needs offsetting, that hopefully is no more problematic than the Rocket Equation mathematics.)

...There's a lot of old wooden pit-props in old mines, I suppose you could just cram in even more, floor-to-ceiling, and (sort of) 'refill' what's left of any (uncollapsed) mines. Coal for the next Millenium! (Or one a number of millenia hence.)

Of course, even the intact levels will be squashed somewhat, already, and those seams that were taken out were pre-squeezed by the oroginal coal-forming processes, so (without a lot of 'anti-subsidence'-causing jacking up/geoengineering) you're never going to completely undo the extraction humanity once did. And if someone far enough in the future (amnesiac humanity, or its post-anthropocene successor) ever tries to exploit the neo-coal reserves, for reasons we may perhaps assume to be naive shortsightedness, they'll get a few puzzles that their geologists may have to work out, or eventually call in their version of paleoanthropologists to properly explain/argue over.

But also you have to make sure they don't rot!  Which led to the podcasters joking about using the same hole as a nuclear waste dump.  Wild stuff.

Rotting isn't all bad, if it just seeps[1], although it is true we don't know what problems we're storing up for the future. But it could be better (FCVO 'better') than pumping CCed gas straight back into fuel-gas (methane/etc, not gasoline, for AmeriPol disambiguation!) pockets that we tapped into.

The advantages of gas-pockets is that we now know many of them that obviously were gas-impermeable for a very long time, deep down well below most freak-but-natural erosion events[2], which is why they were there to be tapped. If we can ensure our own extractive puncture isn't going to be a problem to the future se, or the microsubsidence that might have been caused by releasing the intersticial gasses (then 'reinflating' the pores) then it's probably easier to pump gas of our own back in through the pipe incrastructure already set up. But if it fails to hold (during or after refilling) it'll be a comparative rush of gas, exactly of the kind(s) we didn't want in the atmosphere, undoing all the hard work for that particular basket of eggs quite rapidly!  Though (even 'deep') coalmines (or saltmines[3], etc, to confuse the future-geologists even further!) aren't perhaps provably gas-sealed as gas-pockets, there's nothing (if you can prevent or quash ignition, perhaps by raising CO₂ levels down there as well) that can create such a potentially catastrophic outgassing of all you put in.


Buildings, is one big suggestion. More wooden-framed buildings. They have their own hazards (Grenfell, but not just cladding; or as highrises are unlikely with much wooden structure, Tokyo/London/etc low-rise widespread fires in general) but with modern methods and rules should (again, c.f. Grenfell), and without deliberate intent (c.f. Tokyo, but also far-less-totally woody Dresden) be mitigatable.

Concrete is far less flammable, but it and its fellow materials are huge carbon-sources in manufacture (there's work towards carbon-sink, or at least partly-resequestering, versions). There was a recent call by architects, perhaps in the UK, to do more refurbishment of old concrete structures rather than making the old one ('expensively' produced, carbon-wise if not in any other way) into rubble and then building new ones (a new splurge of industrial-strength effort) that might be intrinsically green (more passive 'climate' control, rather than add-on AC running constantly) but be less so if you amortise with the demolition that came beforehand.

These are all ongoing questions. As is how the balance of building new wooden structures on brownfield sites (or even greenfield sites, at best 'only' surrendered from the stranglehold of agricultural monoculturism) going to help in both satisfying much needed housing issues and net-zero aims (adding additional transportation to that mix, probably, unless we encourage greater home-office working - for suitable professions - in the useful shadow of Covid).


Sorry, I originally had just two points (shoving wood in mines, and more (sustainable!) wooden-buildings, as a couple of sequestering methods to compare), but it ran away with me.



[1] Methane is one of the gases that degrades under sunlight, given enough time, making it a good marker for "something going on" that might be life in exoplanetary research - but not as good as copious oxygen, like ours, assuming the similar trick to photosynthesis gets invented and sustained in that world's tree-of-life, too.

[2] It is said the biblical 'burning bush' was inspired by a natural seep of near-surface hydrocarbons find itself venting and naturally ignited, possibly in front of an actual bush so that it was visually indistinguishable to someone sucficiently credulous - at least for long enough to create the story. And, hydrocarbon seeps being important hallucinogens in classic oracular temples, the unburnt stuff coming up under the observer's feet might have added to the prophetic mix, who just happened to be there in the middle of nowhere for the relatively short-lived escape (and partial ignition) of gasses.

[3] Proven at least to be waterproof, or else they'd be brinepits! (As some have indeed become, after unwise human interference with other local bitz of geography/geology.)

[dragdeler]

a

[LordBaal]

Because too little creatures can use both black and green mana, so combining them in a single card is bad?
(Actually that is not true, is just a bad MtG joke)

On economics, here is a very depressing but truthful article that gives insight of how we currently are: https://cnnespanol.cnn.com/2021/09/30/asi-vive-venezuela-pobreza-salario-promedio-combustible-orix/amp/
Edit: the only inaccuracy is the two hours for gasoline...  more like 2 days.

Use google translate. "And don't cry for me, I'm already dead"

As the problem of emiting less, is that its hard to developing conuntries not emit when they are trying to develop, specially when developed countries got developed in the first place by emiting and now demand everyone else not to do it. Also, not pointing fingers but both USA and China as the bigger single emitters should then somehow chip bigger parts to solve this problem.

Perhaps if every country tried to sequester as much as it produces in a selfresponsable way (even if not locally but on abroad inversions) we could see some big improvements but this would require greedless or at least moderated politicians and we migth as well find a unicorn faster than that.

Our only option? Replace leadership with AI  Im sure it go fine and will not try to kill us to solve the problem at the root or anything.

[Dostoevsky]

I don't know how serious it is, but apparently one of the proposals is to grow trees (capturing the carbon) and then cut them down and bury the lumber.  Which sounds laughably expensive to me.

But also you have to make sure they don't rot!  Which led to the podcasters joking about using the same hole as a nuclear waste dump.  Wild stuff.

BECCS is something of a nightmare scenario in my eyes, yeah. It's been used for modeling of carbon-negative activities in the past because it's the one 'proven' tech, but I have serious doubts as to its practicality.

And in many scenarios it wouldn't even be burying the biomass, but burning it and capturing the emissions. The land use requirements are problematic at the least given e.g. global food needs.

[Starver]

Also they say if marshlands dry up that will release a lot co2 but like, cant we put marshes under the forests we plant for carbon sequestration? Sure it would limit what trees can be used but maybe there would be efficient plant combinations?

Marshlands (of various types: salt, highland, etc) are a very good carbon-sink so long as you don't dry them out. Including by going in there and deciding it should now be forested 'Because Trees!'... Reforestation is good, but some places would be hard (if not impossible) to make a net gain of carbon-storage.

Never mind reducing habitats for marsh-dependent flora and fauna, so biodiversity would also be better served by just no longer draining marshes.

Marshes, bogs, wet moorlands, even dry heaths have long been considered 'dead land' and had drainage (or irrigation) channels dug into them to attempt to 'improve' the land, often to no useful effect other than maybe sheep-grazing, and incidentally increasing flooding danger to anywhere downhill whenever there is heavy rainfall that is no longer stored in the natural sponge and baffled by all the twisty little rivulets and cateracts. All in all, actions proven to be not as beneficial as originally imagined.

Almost the same phrase of "These are ongoing questions" as in the end of the last post I made. Beware of well-intentioned landscape engineering without considering the knock-on effects. Even 'restoring' land-use can be done wrong if the damage makes the location now unfit for the original biome (assuming you can even do in human timescales what nature had originally established over centuries or far more). And then you have the problems of buffering against external changes ('migration' of seasons and temperatures geographically poleward and towards the ends of the year) to confound you, but the ability to design for the rising sea-levels/reducing rainfall/etc, and substitute the best 'new deal' landform is a good idea but probably frought with many unseen pitfalls.

On a grand scale, I'd preserve (protect, help to reinvigorate) marshland rather than just use it as an opportunity to plant trees. But I'm not the expert, either.

[nenjin]

Right outside my apartment is a "reclaimed marsh" adjacent to the interstate. Due to what they've done, there's only really a couple native species left out there now. Some beetle that's protected, birds and mosquitoes. Thanks to them fucking with the marshland there's not enough predators to control the mosquito population, so they descend on my apartment complex in literal clouds that got so bad, near the end of summer they had trucks driving around spraying chemicals everywhere to get a handle on them.

[Magmacube_tr]

Right outside my apartment is a "reclaimed marsh" adjacent to the interstate. Due to what they've done, there's only really a couple native species left out there now. Some beetle that's protected, birds and mosquitoes. Thanks to them fucking with the marshland there's not enough predators to control the mosquito population, so they descend on my apartment complex in literal clouds that got so bad, near the end of summer they had trucks driving around spraying chemicals everywhere to get a handle on them.

I am sorry, what?! You guys don't have like, local bat populations to solve that issue? We have 'em.

[nenjin]

Pretty sure the bats don't like to hang out by the interstate in a marsh with no trees. I had plenty of bats at my old place. They used to fly so close to my patio at night I could, despite not being able to see them, feel the wind they'd generate as they passed an arm length from my face. Seen zero evidence of them on this side of town. I stay up to the wee hours of the morning on weekends so, if they were around I think I'd have met them by now.

[Frumple]

Some places do have bat populations, but it's fairly common even where there are they're woefully smaller than necessary to control the mosquito one. Bats just aren't very populous in most of the US, for various reasons, least as far as I'm aware.

[Ziusudra]

That seems overly complex yes, and not at all feasible. Wood rots since the end of the Carboniferous, and it won't stop anytime soon.

Wood still doesn't rot in certain conditions: https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0680-3-1

The technique is low tech, distributed, easy to monitor, safe, and reversible, thus an attractive option for large-scale implementation in a world-wide carbon market.

_{A bit late to this discussion, and didn't read all the replies, sorry if this has been said.}

[McTraveller]

This weekend I learned about some of those systemic issues that help fuel the wealth divide.  There is a famous location in my state that has some houses that are built on what is now state land.  You can't build new houses on that land, but those houses can stay, and they can be sold, etc.  However, those houses don't have to pay property tax; instead they pay a simple $500 a year land rent.

These are multi-million dollar homes; in any other part of the state they'd be pulling in probably $40,000-$60,000 a year each in property taxes*.

So here you are with multi-million dollar vacation homes, paying basically nothing property tax, where you have $60,000 condos in poor areas that pay more per year (about $800/year) in property tax.

Spoiler: * (click to show/hide)

The big range is because in my state, you get a big property tax exemption on your primary residence.  Most of those homes I referred to are summer-only vacation homes, so would have a higher tax rate.