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The sun is beautifully illuminating the green tops of tall beech trees in the clearing of the forest, , [+]
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There’s a wonderful nanotechnology carbon-capture solution out there. It comes in a tiny, insanely cheap package. Hundreds of them were scattered across the open field and some were found in moist, mineral-rich soil. They use internally stored energy to send the search threads down and up.
The upward-facing threads form tiny solar panels that capture energy from the Sun. Those going down seek water and minerals necessary for growth. Packages in deep soil exposed to sunlight exert upward and downward pressure, drawing more energy, water and nutrients from the air and soil.
They form rigid, load-bearing structures with complex molecules of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon. They get carbon from the air. Part of it passes through their downward-going fibers and connects to the underground mushroom network. Mushroom networks put it into long-lasting chemical structures.
When they are big enough, they make little packages that come with them and spread them without us having to do anything. The tiny nanotechnology packages that make up these giant, carbon-capture solutions are free to us.
The carbon-capture solution has a great name. We call it tree. That’s why planting more trees is one of a short list of climate solutions that will work.
According to a Swiss-led study published in the journal Science in 2019, there used to be about six trillion of them on Earth. We’ve cut about half of that number. In many places in the world, we keep cutting them unnecessarily.
Trees not only cheaply pull excess carbon from the air, but they also provide many other benefits.
China has planted more than 40 billion trees since 1990 over an area the size of France, and has pledged to plant or protect 70 billion by 2030. Why? for some reasons. In his somewhat less visionary times, he respected subsistence farming and forced many to move to the countryside. To survive, people snatched calories from the land for heat and food to keep their families alive. There is a lot of land in China that was once forested and may now become forested again.
But it is also in aid of their goal of clean air for their citizens. Trees filter pollutants from the air both directly and indirectly. The air in Chinese cities is improving from North American and European levels in the 1950s in just a few decades to the time it took Western countries to clean up their air, thanks to the planting of billions of trees.
Trees provide shelter and habitat to animals, insects and other plants. The roots of the trees keep the soil in place and the slopes intact. An ecosystem with lots of trees, all else being equal, is better off than one without trees.
Trees also provide building materials that can be carbon neutral or carbon negative as we more carefully fell trees with power tools and transport trunks with electric trucks and ships. A twelve- or sixteen-story building with a frame of laminated beams instead of concrete and steel has a much smaller carbon debt.
Plant a trillion trees and about a quarter of the excess carbon dioxide in the air could be reduced, at least temporarily, over the coming decades. China’s example makes clear that as we move calorie-reduction subsistence farmers off the land into urban areas providing significant economic and social opportunities, we have enough land for a lot more trees. About 90 million square kilometers of the world, about ten times the size of the United States, could be reforested or reforested.
can we do it? Definitely. The example of millions of trees planted in China over the past 30 years makes it clear that if we set our minds to it, we can do it. And it’s a lot easier than before. Now we can plant trees with drones. Companies such as Droneseed of the United States and Airseed Technologies of Australia have developed large-scale hexacopters and software optimized to sow Puck’s nutrition-coated seedlings and seeds in exactly the right places to grow.
Slender young human planters could hit the ground and plant one to four thousand saplings a day, drinking water and using as much energy as an athlete running two marathons. Drones can plant dozens of times more trees in the same period their operators draw electricity and drink water in the shade.
Of course, there are many ways this can be done badly. Monocultures of trees face the same challenges as monocultures of crops, being more prone to predation by insects and other pests. The pine borer beetle, which spread northward along the west coast of North America with global warming, did so successfully because we regenerated deforested areas of multi-species natural forests with millions of fast-growing pine trees.
And most of the carbon dioxide that trees take out of the air is returned to them when they die, all else being equal. They are not 100% efficient. As long as they are alive, enough is taken out and some is permanently stored underground to give us a few decades to offset the emissions of our economy. Cutting down a tree for lumber and turning it into long-lasting furniture or building frames keeps that carbon out of the air for decades.
We need to stop cutting down trees to turn them into single use paper and chopsticks. We should cut down on cutting down forests for heat and electricity, instead using wind and solar powered heat pumps and other electrical equipment.
Trees aren’t the only nature-based solution. Prairie grasses are excellent at eating carbon dioxide and pushing carbon into the soil through their metre-long roots, if we leave them alone. Wetlands are carbon sinks and restoring them provides many of the same benefits as restoring forests. Agricultural land is good too, but we have to stop plowing it every year, breaking up the root systems and mushroom filaments that pull carbon into permanent chemical structures underground.
Trees and other nature-based solutions are the only scalable approach to getting back out the excess carbon dioxide we’ve put into our atmosphere over the past three hundred years. That’s why a review of carbon reduction strategies shows that countries that are not dominated by the oil and gas industry are leaning towards a nature-based approach and the rapid phasing out of emissions. Which is why planting a trillion trees, and taking advantage of nature, is an essential component in the short list of climate actions that will work.
As a reminder, here’s an abbreviated list:
- electrify everything
- rebuild renewable generation
- Build a continental-scale electrical grid and market
- Build pumped hydro and other storage
- plant lots of trees
- change farming practices
- Fix concrete, steel and industrial processes
- Aggressively price carbon
- Aggressively shut down coal and gas production
- Stop financing and subsidies for fossil fuels
- Eliminate HFCs in Refrigeration
- ignore distractions
- focus on motivations
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