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Trust me, I’m a huge fan of BIG Trees. I’ve spent much of my life photographing them.
I’ve also spent much of my career, trying to protect them. (Along with an Owl or two.)
BUT, when it comes to Macro-Economic principles, there is just not enough of them, to do what future generations will need: Remove 40+ gigatons of CO2 from the air on an annual basis.
There are far too many competing forces, that simply want to cut down far too many trees. Federal, state, and private land-owners all generally say ‘it’s their land’ … and ‘their trees’.
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And besides …
A recent study shows that, while intact forests are playing a large role in absorbing CO2, it's only a fraction of the amount human activity creates.
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The study, published in the journal Biogeosciences, suggests forest growth is becoming more robust as atmospheric carbon concentrations increase, and therefore taking more CO2 out of the air. Nevertheless, the concentration of heat-trapping carbon in the atmosphere continues to intensify as the forests can only capture a fraction of total human-caused emissions, which in 2018 totaled 37.1 billion tonnes.
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While the study suggests global forests are growing more vigorously as a result of higher concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, Gaubert says "many uncertainties" remain about the effects of climate change on global forests and their ability to sequester carbon in the long term.
In a study published January in the journal Nature, researchers found that, rather than absorbing more greenhouse gas emissions, plants and soils may start absorbing less when the climate heats up past a certain point.
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According to an analysis by Global Forest Watch, tropical forest loss currently accounts for 8 percent of the world's annual CO2 emissions.
These limiting factors (noted above), and the “Methane-bomb” factor (see videos), that is being progressively unleashed in arctic regions (Methane is 20x more efficient a Greenhouse gas than CO2) — have made me a reluctant “fan” of geo-engineering solutions, such as Artificial Trees (see: opening graphic).
These Artificial Trees (or “Mechanical Trees”) can be “grown” (installed) nearly anywhere. Even on the cheapest land around. They will supply jobs. They will scrub the Carbon from the Atmosphere, a thousand times faster than Trees. They will “lend a lung” to our decimated and exhausted Forests, and they will help draw down the CO2 that are our forests are currently missing — some day. It’s inevitable.
If — as the Paris Climate Agreement strives to achieve — we can ever truly price-in the future costs of CO2, into our current CO2 emissions. Then such an outlandish geo-engineering solution, can become very popular, very quickly.
Well how does a “$30 per ton” of capture sound, as a make or break price-point?
Enter one visionary, who has spent much of his career, making such Global-Carbon-cleansing a reality ... and economically feasible:
Stopping global warming has long been an environmentalist’s fantasy. Not anymore.
by Jon Gertner, FastCompany — May 2019
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There may be only a few hundred people on the planet who are actively involved in what is called direct air capture, or air capture for short. Those working in the field (and its benefactors, such as Bill Gates and Edgar Bronfman Jr.) seem convinced that a broad deployment of air capture devices is necessary to limit the impacts of increasing levels of atmospheric CO2, which include a warmer climate, rising sea levels, lingering droughts, and threats to agriculture and ocean fisheries. Air capture entrepreneurs do champion the use of clean-energy technologies like wind and solar power, and efforts to capture smokestack emissions of gas and coal power plants. But they tend to believe that such technologies alone cannot get the world to a necessary level of zero-carbon emissions.
Actually, we’ve been relying for ages on machines that pull CO2 from the atmosphere, acting as a counterbalance to what we’ve spewed from cars, airplanes, and power plants. We call these machines trees. And we’ve long had so-called scrubbers to make life bearable on submarines and spaceships by chemically removing excess CO2 in the air. What’s interesting about Lackner and Wright’s technology, however, is that the plastic resin they discovered might be able to absorb enormous quantities of CO2 and help us sequester it underground, affordably. By Lackner’s calculation, each air capture device would be about 1,000 times more effective than a single tree. “There’s no question that it works,” he says. “Whether you can do it practically remains to be seen and proved.”
At the moment, at least three fledgling companies (Global Thermostat in Menlo Park, California; Carbon Engineering in Calgary, Alberta; and Climeworks in Zurich) aim to enter the commercial space within the next 12 to 24 months. Lackner is the pioneer and giant in this field: Wally Broecker, a Columbia scientist who coined the term “global warming” (in a 1975 article in the journal Science), calls Lackner “the most brilliant person I’ve ever dealt with.” But for now, Lackner will focus on creating a think tank that proves to the public the viability of air capture and helps jump-start a large commercial industry.
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But the most likely fate for all the CO2 is to be pumped deep underground. That way, we can forget about it for 1,000 years and avoid the potential catastrophes of a much warmer climate. Lackner, in fact, doesn’t believe air capture will be a viable business until the world’s governments put a price or a penalty on carbon extraction. His vision is this: If a fossil-fuel company wants to take a ton of carbon out of the ground in the form of natural gas or oil, a surcharge on their product would have to pay for a ton to be collected, via air capture, and then sequestered back underground. In other words, those companies would have to pay to play.
We seem miles away, as a society, from supporting such a carbon policy. That doesn’t worry Lackner. “Technologies simmer along before they are feasible,” he tells me. “That simmer can be short or long, but then they get traction, and from there to being huge is a couple of decades.” He goes through a litany of examples, each proving his case: cars, jets, television, personal computers, laptops, the Internet. “It takes a couple decades,” he repeats.
Of course, getting feasible means getting affordable—something that a panel of eminent American scientists and engineers believed was highly unlikely for air capture machines. They concluded that carbon might be captured and stored for anywhere from $600 per ton to upwards of $1,000 per ton. Lackner has rankled some colleagues with his steadfast belief that air capture can be done more cheaply. “I have been on record as saying that ultimately I think you can do this for $30 per ton,” Lackner says. He offers more examples, this time of fundamental products whose prices have plummeted over a reasonable time: solar power, artificial light, wind power.
Farms of Carbon-capture Trees, like farms of Solar and Wind, deserve their place in a well-utilized “public” landscape, in my federally-exhausted opinion. If this tech helps to reduce the chaos and misery of future generations, it would be well-worth the cost, of any meager scientific investment now.
Well-worth a demonstration project or two, too.
Someone has to clean up the fall-out of the Industrial revolution. It might as well be some super-clever
materials engineers. Afterall, there is a plethora of precedent for this:
Disruptive Technologies — changing the world. (Wouldn’t it be nice if those “changes” were finally positive for a change?)
Ford, Edison,
Telsa,
Marconi, Baird and Farnsworth have invented our way into “new realities” before, etc. It is only a matter of time and ingenuity — and a whole lot of good timing and good will — before the next BIG Thing will take the world by storm again.
The forces of sanity will ultimately demand it.
Macro-economics is kind of designed that way. Amazon and Netflix anyone …?
Until something lands on the path of “least resistance” — it usually doesn’t happen en-mass, and result in the social change were all looking for. But eventually, something does land ...
When it is “easier” to capture carbon, than to release it — It will catch on, like wild-fire. (and not of the
Paradise variety.)
The costs of doing nothing are very real. And they will only go up, until something starts to counter balance that Technology-caused trajectory.
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To my critics:
Only 8% of the Earth covered with forest, will not be enough to clean up the Carbon mess centuries of comfort-seekers have made.
Although I certainly wouldn’t balk at having more of Nature’s playgrounds around. I’ve spent much of my life trying to make that happen too. But trust me, it’s been an uphill slog.
It seems human-kind can cut forests down, much faster than we can regrow them. Sadly.
Wood is a very popular commodity. And affordable too.
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