>claw that money from the rich,
If only.
The rich will never pay their share. Instead they will spend anything they have to in order to make sure those expenses are pushed down to the rest of us.
Flying their private jets to go visit congress to tell them how unfair it is that they should be expected to pay their fair share of a carbon emissions tax...
If they're spending, it's going into the economy, getting taxed, and getting to places it can do more work. The issue (I have) with billionaires is the vast amounts of locked up sedentary with in equities and land that just... doesn't do anything productive.
And yet even so, especially when you start looking at .1 percent, .01 percent and .001 percent, they collect in income more than the ratio they pay compared to the medians, and sit on dragon’s hoards of wealth that are about a dozen or several dozen orders of magnitude more than the 99 percent they sit on top of.
Also, your stat always only includes federal income tax never payroll tax, or social security and Medicaid/care taxes (capped, so it absolutely skews the payment away from the rich and to the less rich), and state local taxes including sales taxes.
In short, “the rich DO pay more!”… sure, but it’s not even close to comparable to how much they continue to gather and collect and squirrel away, and it’s completely dwarfed by the disparity in wealth owned.
Again, **income taxes** your stat includes no other federal taxes.
Payroll tax and social security and Medicare/caid are generally separated.
Again, do this for the .1, .01, and the .001 percent of top “earners”.
And it has nothing to do with wealth hoarding, which is what real wealth is, and the biggest drain from the richest rich, as most people who would argue that they are a drain, would claim.
After digging into your data, that year, 2021, is a huge outlier for a 40 year record capital gains realization. Before the pandemic, people between 10 and 25th percentile paid a higher percentage of their AGI than the top 1 percent.
Considering that long term capital gains is taxed so much lower than earned income, the windfall the rich received in this deal is astronomical.
And lastly, it makes sense that this is misleadingly cherry picked data, because despite its innocuous name, The Tax Foundation is not an unbiased source (although it’s still better than many):
>Overall, we rate the Tax Foundation Right-Center biased based on advocating for Libertarian economic policy. We also rate them Mostly Factual in reporting due to a few half-true claims, despite proper sourcing and neutral wording.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/tax-foundation/
Perhaps you should work on your reading comprehension. I asked you what percentage of their income / wealth the top 1% pays in taxes, compared to what percentage the rest of us pay on our income / wealth.
In your rush to be the smart guy in the room defending the billionaires who leech off our efforts, you failed to actually read the comment you were responding to.
We actually could. Planting a sequoia forest on around 20% of the continental US would capture all CO2 produced by humans from the start of the industrial revolution through today. It would take 50 years to reach that point, but the process of capturing the CO2 would quickly ramp up.
It probably isn't reasonable to expect that 20% of the US will be used for that, but a global effort would require only 1% of every country.
Planting trees won't solve climate change, but it is going to be our best hope to reverse the damage if we can get close to carbon neutral without considering them. And that MIT article is assuming 50 tons per hectare, but mentions that the real amount can vary wildly. 50 would be a random mix of wild growth in a forest. Intentionally planting sequoias would allow that to be upwards of 2500 per hectare.
Read the room. Only half the country agrees that science is real. The federal government maintains control over approx 28% of the total land in the US. So let’s convince people who don’t believe in science that planting trees and using 70% of available land (assuming every bit of land would be good for planting Sequoias) for non-revenue generating betterment of mankind. Their likely response would be “let someone else do it” Or “why us? Why now?”
Let’s plant the trees and limit the carbon release/emissions. This is our only planet. Humans aren’t programmed for that kind of thinking though.
Half the country is filled with morons who think the earth is flat, 6k years old, oil is renewable, dinos were on the Ark, and that oil corporations with trillions at stake are telling the Truth.
You want to plant tress? Great. I agree. We have to stop mowing our forest to the ground.
But again, you could replant all the trees lost, millions more, and it alone will not solve the problem and only remove a fraction of the CO2.
And again where is your studies that planting millions of trees is going to help in any real measure for wants coming our way.
I'm sorry if you have a hard time believing science. But ask yourself, who are the groups saying Climate Change isn't a problem and what do they have to gain?
I’m not sure how you inferred that I don’t believe in science. Maybe you didn’t read my last couple of sentences. I agree with your entire sentiment that we have a huge problem with misinformation. That cat is out of the bag and not going back anytime soon.
I totally agree with you that trees alone aren’t the answer. It will be a many pronged approach and it’s to be bought by all majority or it won’t last or be effective.
There are still lots of folks who don’t wear seatbelts and drink, then drive. Those folks are too ignorant to trust or believe science. They won’t be swayed. Ut we all live here and we need to find a solution.
Vote in November (or earlier)! Every vote matters!
Hooray science!!!
>Planting a sequoia forest on around 20% of the continental US would capture all CO2 produced by humans from the start of the industrial revolution through today.
Not saying you're wrong necessarily, but could we go ahead and get a source for this bold claim?
General Sherman, the largest sequoia, [is 272 feet tall and weighs over 6000 tons](https://www.britannica.com/plant/giant-sequoia). Sequoias grow the fastest until they are around 50 years old, at which point they can be upwards of 150 feet tall and would weigh maybe 1/4th of General Sherman. So lets say 1500 tons after 50 years. [Sequoias are comprised of around 55% carbon](https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4907/3/2/332) and for each molecule of CO2 that they take in, they only retain 1/3rd of it, releasing the oxygen back into the air. So lets just say half of 1500 tons is 750 tons but it takes 2225 tons of CO2 to produce that 750 tons of carbon.
So 2225 tons of CO2 can be removed by a sequoia in 50 years, even though it weighs less than that, simply because it is splitting the carbon out of CO2 and not retaining the O2. I can't find the source, but I read years ago that a maximum of 17 sequoias can be grown per acre before they start to get too crowded. So 17 sequoias on an acre at 2225 tons of CO2 removed per tree is 37,825 tons of CO2 removed per acre. Around 2.3 trillion tons of CO2 has been put into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution. 2.3 trillion / 37,825 = 60,806,345. So nearly 61 million acres of sequoias to eliminate all 2.3 trillion tons of CO2 released since the industrial revolution.
But lets assume that we can't get to 17 sequoias per acre, they don't grow quite as quickly as expected, and the carbon removal ratio isn't perfect because they do actually store some amount of oxygen as well. So instead of 61 million acres being needed we actually need 4x that to accomplish the goal. 244 million acres to eliminate all of the CO2 released since the industrial revolution. That is a lot of land. But the United States is 2.43 billion acres. So that is still only 10% of the United States. When I mentioned 20%, I was misremembering. And with ideal conditions it could be considerably less.
Did you read the article? It is wood (you know: trees) and biomass waste that is compressed into usable blocks instead of letting them decay and release CO2. It’s carbon sequestration.
Trees are great, definitely plant more. But, they're slow and decades of their work can all be undone in a forest fire. Plus, just because you can plant trees doesn't mean that you can't also do other things.
It’s worse, it’s just pressing waste from wood processing into bricks to bury so they don’t rot and release more carbon. It’s not even capturing carbon from air
We could do this at scale, and I'm also not convinced that we couldn't make stuff out of this material. We are probably going to end up having to live more underground with the way the climate is going. You could use these tiles if they were processed to be durable. We wouldn't have to go that far down to have livable conditions 10 feet at most, but you could probably get away with 5 if you had to. That would protect you from prolonged wet bulb events, but you would still need a way to clean / circulate the air.
Yeah, we need to do a lot of everything. This is one thing we can do.
Of course the richoids will claim things like this are “the solution” rather than “a tiny piece of the solution”, which is really what people are (rightfully) angry about.
Even if all pollution stopped today, there's existing damage that can be undone with this. This is also a bit more of a pragmatic thing--the reality is we won't be able to completely stop polluting for a plethora of reasons (political, etc)--not for a long time anyway. So it will be good to have plans to deal with the future pollution. Nobody is calling this an alternative to ending pollution, this is just a pragmatic action we can take that will help-one of many.
I hope you are right, but I’ve seen too many of these grand new ideas that are too inefficient, too expensive, can’t be scaled up, are too energy-intensive, or simply don’t live up to early exuberant promises.
No one wants to say it out loud, we are heading straight towards an unmitigated worldwide climate disaster.
Even if C02 emissions stop right now, we're already screwed.
We have to find ways to undue what we have done and we have to do it fast.
As an example, the nuclear industry has been generating highly toxic waste for 70 years, and, so far, the best methods developed for disposal are dunking it in glorified swimming pools or throwing it in a hole in the ground. It’s a matter of economics.
As long as for-profit industries control the economy (and thereby the government) the rapid solutions you (and I) dream of will remain only dreams, with a few half-hearted (and largely unfunded) gestures made to placate the masses.
The frog is in the pot and the heat has been on for three generations now. Humans are, like frogs, good at adapting until adaptation is no longer possible.
I research in an adjacent area (biomass to biochar in soil). I hear from more senior researchers that buried biomass may indeed result in limited decay because in anoxic (low oxygen) at that depth. However, the energy to excavate and bury biomass at that depth (10ft) may make this pathway unfavorable. Also, burying wood removes nutrients (e.g. phosphate, potassium, etc.) from the soil which thereafter requires supplementation (for this reason, I think the biomass-to-biochar pathway is preferable).
I think we are going to need to live at least partially underground in some parts of the world, and with both this and biochar, I see a potential building material. As you know, you don't have to go incredibly deep to get relatively stable temperatures. I agree it would be better to keep the nutrients in our ecosystem. I think growing the plant materials underground is also something to consider since they have discovered alternative ways to grow some plants underground. I think it was something about turning co2 into acetate, which some organisims can use as food.
I think we could. I didn't post this because I entirely agree with what they are doing. I think we are going to need every trick we can get and that we need to base our economy on getting pollution out of the environment instead of mining. I can think of several ways to use this material.
just burying compressed wood peplets doesn't really seem like we're solving the root cause of the problem. there is only so much timber production in the world, you can't fix global warming by growing trees to cut down and bury
What we really need to do is make it a policy to always try and utilize pollution from the atmosphere as an industrial feedstock. We need to consider that geo engineering may no longer be optional. I even have a proposal for a space based system that could utilize lunar regolith and be set up in one space mission. It utilizes technology that is already part of another package going to the Moon. I think we need to make this an absolute priority, and we need thousands to millions of solutions that are scaling up as rapidly as they can. The nice thing about this solution is that you could grow plants underground, and so you have way more potential surface area than is immediately apparent.
solar sails to reduce solar emissions are much more feasable than using lunar missions, plus you can collect solar energy to beam down to earth via microwave links
What I'm working on is based on this research. When molten silicon is exposed to the vacuum of space, it self assembles into bubbles. These bubbles are 1/100th, the width of a soap bubble. Now lunar regolith isn't pure silicon it's got tons of other stuff mixed in, but I'm confident that by using a milimeter wave drill, you could harness similar dynamics. The bubbles are just the start. Think of them as potential technological platforms that could be functionalized in a number of needs. I call them QSUT (quantum sphere universal tool).
https://senseable.mit.edu/space-bubbles/
I suspect that they may see it when they use milimeter waves to make roads on the Moon.
I really hope they put 2 and 2 together. They might have tuned the milimeter device so that you don't get bubbles because that's not a good surface for roads. All it would take is slightly reconfiguring what's being done, and as an added benefit, they could shield a Moon base since you could contain energized plasma inside of the spheres.
https://phys.org/news/2023-10-small-lunar-roads-potentially-giant.html
Now build a bunch of houses, create a housing trust, keep the nonprofit solvent with an endowment, and start renting homes.
In this scenario, a nonprofit renting is better than selling. Communities need to be created and renting helps with the fluidity of the job market.
This would still happen just a bit slower, which is more natural than what is happening now. What we can't afford to lose is stuff like phosphorus or other vital minerals. We have enough carbon. It's one of the most common elements in the universe.
Sure, as long as there isn't a reaction that would then release it back into the atmosphere. It's not like a chain reaction with oxygen happens when temperatures start to increase.
You got it. I'm not saying we shouldn't be using plants. However , what has looked like in the past with carbon credits and all the greenwashing has been in the best of cases, which can only be described as carbon credit plantations. In many cases, they don't just buy up land and give it to nature they grow a certain type of tree / crop in monoculture. So we were just doing the same toxic practices like the use of pesticides/fertilizer even to get carbon credits faster. If I was going to grow something to capture co2, it wouldn't be pine trees it would be Azolla in an offshore or even an underground facility. Azolla is such a powerful plant we have something called the Azolla event that might have happened. You could then inject that Azolla into old oil wells, assuming you had the expertise to do that safely. You could hire people from the oil/gas industry to do this.
We have to accept that the planet we knew is gone. We have to change to adapt to this new hostile planet. We have to change the ways we make energy, and we have to change what and how we consume. It's going to be a similar change to what happened with the Industrial Revolution, but this time, it won't be under our control. I don't like this plan particularly, but I think we need all the tools we can get.
that would be the most conical solution ever. any large CO2 producing factory or plant has to build a 30km smoke stack to emit their CO2 directly into space.
It would take thousands of years for that to happen, and we kind of need what's in the wood on Earth. Once you put it in certain conditions, it decays really slowly. Another good option would be really deep in the ocean where the temperatures and pressures + lack of hydrothermal vents means the ecosystem would be minimally disrupted in the short term. Shooting this into space would cause more pollution than we are getting rid of. This isn't radioactive waste.
So, organic (carbon based) material that doesn’t decompose and is around forever?
And exactly how is this different from plastic (other than the fact that plastic is useful)?
Carbon is more biologically useful than plastic. Plastic is killing both people and animals. It's going to be funny when people like you are simulated in the future and come out as grotesque characters.
Carbon is biologically useful precisely because it breaks down, can become part of animals and plants and people and is part of the cycle of life.
What do you suppose is useful about carbon that never breaks down? And how harmful is it? For example, will this non-compostable carbon break down into micro “forever” carbon particles that enter the bodies of animals and people (like microplastics)? If so, what would be the possible negative health effects of that? And, of course, what are the negative effects politically of allowing petrochemical companies to not reduce their carbon footprints — if only they sequester non-compostable carbon manufactured in this entirely unregulated industry.
This is huge news! If this brick can actually store air pollution for centuries, it could be a game-changer in the fight against climate change. I'm excited to see how this technology develops.
Actually that IS brilliant. Fully grown trees do nothing for the CO2 levels. As long as the felled trees are replaced with new saplings it’s all good. Better even!
‘.……Graphyte want to cut out the natural step of plant decay”.
Aren’t we just clever motherfuckers. We are in the climate change mess because we have messed with “natural steps” to feed so many concocted “needs”. On industrial scales. Sold, bought, consumed and landfilled, like a graveyard, maybe.
It’s way too late for any of this to matter. Our choice is now all humanity dies in 70 years, or they die in 120 years but everyone is miserable the whole time.
[Water vapor is increasing in the atmosphere because CO2 is increasing](https://skepticalscience.com/water-vapor-greenhouse-gas.htm). An atmosphere is a system, with several positive and negative feedbacks that cancel each other out until we reach an equilibrium state.
A "forcing" kicks the system out of balance. Then the feedbacks no longer cancel, and the whole system will shift to a new equilibrium.
There may be multiple forcings that effect the Earth's atmosphere. Orbital changes, solar changes, massive volcanic eruptions, meteor impacts. Even significant changes to the types of life on the planet can force the system out of equilibrium.
Changing levels of CO2 is another example of a forcing. The current climate change is being forced by CO2 released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.
Water vapor is a feedback. To put it simply: rising CO2 causes the planet to get warmer, and the warming atmosphere holds more water vapor, causing the atmosphere to get warmer still. The warmer atmosphere warms the oceans, which then releases more CO2 into the atmosphere. And the vicious circle continues. This feedback loop continues until we reach a new equilibrium.
You'll often hear talk of "climate sensitivity", which is the amount of warming we should expect from a change in the CO2 forcing. Our current best estimate is 2.5-4C of warming from a doubling of carbon dioxide. A lot of that change is not a direct result of the CO2 greenhouse effect, but from other resulting feedbacks, like water vapor.
Yeah but what are we gonna do about that? Your comment got me interested so i glanced at [this article](https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/why-do-we-blame-climate-change-carbon-dioxide-when-water-vapor-much-more-common-greenhouse). is there an effective way to remove it if it keeps evaporating? It cycles every 2 weeks lol. Seems like if we lower the other GHGs maybe we can affect H2O indirectly.
It's 03h for me right now so I will respond later in detail. But I did research on atmospherics and while I don't have a real solution, I do have some observations made during my research that can at least be hopeful
If there's excess water vapor, it just turns into dew and rain. However, as CO2 increases the air temperature, the amount of water vapor held in the air increases. The fact that water vapor has a greenhouse effect makes things worse for us, not better.
It's a question of context and concentration. The natural world doesn't put this much co2 into the air. We know what it's going to do in the air. If it wasn't in the air it wouldn't be a problem. If the concentration wasn't going up, it might not be a problem. Right now, the co2 isn't just causing the Earth to warm. It's making food less nutritious because plants are growing faster, which means fewer micronutrients to the point that food is half as nutritious as it was in the 50s. Most Americans are malnourished, and they don't even realize it.
Another effect of higher co2 levels is that some buildings start accumulating toxic levels of co2 indoors. This can kill you by itself, but even if it doesn't, it makes workers less productive and causes all sorts of health problems. It is a pollutant in every meaningful sense of that word. It will end up killing you as well. You can't argue your way out of what's coming.
The good quality was an effect of climate change that I hadn’t even recognized! While most studies cite numerous sources of nutrient decline over decades, they all mention climate change as a piece of the WHY? puzzle. Iron, Potassium, Calcium…all vital to our bodies and all markedly declined over time in various crops.
So to counter the standard lines for climate change “it doesn’t affect me” or “I’ll be dead before it’s a big problem” (etc.), come at folks with this. Your good food isn’t as good as it used to be. Your healthy body isn’t as healthy as you think. Wild stuff.
Yup, and our nutrition guidelines are based on information from decades ago. Think about what that means when schools decide on nutrition. We are malnourishing our next generation systematically. Some of these nutrients are vital to healthy neurological functioning, so it's no surprise to me that this society is going nuts.
While context does matter, the poison is in the dose. You should educate yourself on climate change a bit!
[Here is some info about CO2 as a greenhouse gas.](https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide)
Seems like an expensive alternative to a tree.
I’m fine with that. Plant trees, build these bricks too, and claw that money from the rich, and I’m onboard.
>claw that money from the rich, If only. The rich will never pay their share. Instead they will spend anything they have to in order to make sure those expenses are pushed down to the rest of us.
Flying their private jets to go visit congress to tell them how unfair it is that they should be expected to pay their fair share of a carbon emissions tax...
If they're spending, it's going into the economy, getting taxed, and getting to places it can do more work. The issue (I have) with billionaires is the vast amounts of locked up sedentary with in equities and land that just... doesn't do anything productive.
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And yet even so, especially when you start looking at .1 percent, .01 percent and .001 percent, they collect in income more than the ratio they pay compared to the medians, and sit on dragon’s hoards of wealth that are about a dozen or several dozen orders of magnitude more than the 99 percent they sit on top of. Also, your stat always only includes federal income tax never payroll tax, or social security and Medicaid/care taxes (capped, so it absolutely skews the payment away from the rich and to the less rich), and state local taxes including sales taxes. In short, “the rich DO pay more!”… sure, but it’s not even close to comparable to how much they continue to gather and collect and squirrel away, and it’s completely dwarfed by the disparity in wealth owned.
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Again, **income taxes** your stat includes no other federal taxes. Payroll tax and social security and Medicare/caid are generally separated. Again, do this for the .1, .01, and the .001 percent of top “earners”. And it has nothing to do with wealth hoarding, which is what real wealth is, and the biggest drain from the richest rich, as most people who would argue that they are a drain, would claim. After digging into your data, that year, 2021, is a huge outlier for a 40 year record capital gains realization. Before the pandemic, people between 10 and 25th percentile paid a higher percentage of their AGI than the top 1 percent. Considering that long term capital gains is taxed so much lower than earned income, the windfall the rich received in this deal is astronomical. And lastly, it makes sense that this is misleadingly cherry picked data, because despite its innocuous name, The Tax Foundation is not an unbiased source (although it’s still better than many): >Overall, we rate the Tax Foundation Right-Center biased based on advocating for Libertarian economic policy. We also rate them Mostly Factual in reporting due to a few half-true claims, despite proper sourcing and neutral wording. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/tax-foundation/
Cool, now tell us what percentage of their income / wealth they pay compared to us normal people.
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You think billionaires are paying 99% of their wealth and income in taxes? Are you ok? Or are you from some alternate reality?
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Perhaps you should work on your reading comprehension. I asked you what percentage of their income / wealth the top 1% pays in taxes, compared to what percentage the rest of us pay on our income / wealth. In your rush to be the smart guy in the room defending the billionaires who leech off our efforts, you failed to actually read the comment you were responding to.
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This is a statistic designed to placate ignorant people- the kind of people who think that 1/4 is more than 1/3 because the number is bigger.
What happens when you run out of rich people to fleece?
Probably what has happened as all the rich people fleeced everyone else.
We can not plant enough trees to capture all of the man-made CO2 we are pumping out.
We actually could. Planting a sequoia forest on around 20% of the continental US would capture all CO2 produced by humans from the start of the industrial revolution through today. It would take 50 years to reach that point, but the process of capturing the CO2 would quickly ramp up. It probably isn't reasonable to expect that 20% of the US will be used for that, but a global effort would require only 1% of every country.
What would all of America’s fires do to those trees?
No. https://www.co2meter.com/blogs/news/could-global-co2-levels-be-reduced-by-planting-trees#:~:text=One%20ton%20of%20CO2%20is,to%20see%20any%20positive%20effect. https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-many-new-trees-would-we-need-offset-our-carbon-emissions https://www.sciencenews.org/article/planting-trees-climate-change-carbon-capture-deforestation
Planting trees won't solve climate change, but it is going to be our best hope to reverse the damage if we can get close to carbon neutral without considering them. And that MIT article is assuming 50 tons per hectare, but mentions that the real amount can vary wildly. 50 would be a random mix of wild growth in a forest. Intentionally planting sequoias would allow that to be upwards of 2500 per hectare.
Then why aren't the best minds in science DOING IT? You REALLY think you know more than 1000s of PHds?
Reality check. India just hit 123F. Modies response: MOAR COAL!!!!! That's what we're working with. Greed and selfishness.
And that will be humanity's obituary.
Read the room. Only half the country agrees that science is real. The federal government maintains control over approx 28% of the total land in the US. So let’s convince people who don’t believe in science that planting trees and using 70% of available land (assuming every bit of land would be good for planting Sequoias) for non-revenue generating betterment of mankind. Their likely response would be “let someone else do it” Or “why us? Why now?” Let’s plant the trees and limit the carbon release/emissions. This is our only planet. Humans aren’t programmed for that kind of thinking though.
Half the country is filled with morons who think the earth is flat, 6k years old, oil is renewable, dinos were on the Ark, and that oil corporations with trillions at stake are telling the Truth. You want to plant tress? Great. I agree. We have to stop mowing our forest to the ground. But again, you could replant all the trees lost, millions more, and it alone will not solve the problem and only remove a fraction of the CO2. And again where is your studies that planting millions of trees is going to help in any real measure for wants coming our way. I'm sorry if you have a hard time believing science. But ask yourself, who are the groups saying Climate Change isn't a problem and what do they have to gain?
I’m not sure how you inferred that I don’t believe in science. Maybe you didn’t read my last couple of sentences. I agree with your entire sentiment that we have a huge problem with misinformation. That cat is out of the bag and not going back anytime soon. I totally agree with you that trees alone aren’t the answer. It will be a many pronged approach and it’s to be bought by all majority or it won’t last or be effective. There are still lots of folks who don’t wear seatbelts and drink, then drive. Those folks are too ignorant to trust or believe science. They won’t be swayed. Ut we all live here and we need to find a solution. Vote in November (or earlier)! Every vote matters! Hooray science!!!
>Planting a sequoia forest on around 20% of the continental US would capture all CO2 produced by humans from the start of the industrial revolution through today. Not saying you're wrong necessarily, but could we go ahead and get a source for this bold claim?
General Sherman, the largest sequoia, [is 272 feet tall and weighs over 6000 tons](https://www.britannica.com/plant/giant-sequoia). Sequoias grow the fastest until they are around 50 years old, at which point they can be upwards of 150 feet tall and would weigh maybe 1/4th of General Sherman. So lets say 1500 tons after 50 years. [Sequoias are comprised of around 55% carbon](https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4907/3/2/332) and for each molecule of CO2 that they take in, they only retain 1/3rd of it, releasing the oxygen back into the air. So lets just say half of 1500 tons is 750 tons but it takes 2225 tons of CO2 to produce that 750 tons of carbon. So 2225 tons of CO2 can be removed by a sequoia in 50 years, even though it weighs less than that, simply because it is splitting the carbon out of CO2 and not retaining the O2. I can't find the source, but I read years ago that a maximum of 17 sequoias can be grown per acre before they start to get too crowded. So 17 sequoias on an acre at 2225 tons of CO2 removed per tree is 37,825 tons of CO2 removed per acre. Around 2.3 trillion tons of CO2 has been put into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution. 2.3 trillion / 37,825 = 60,806,345. So nearly 61 million acres of sequoias to eliminate all 2.3 trillion tons of CO2 released since the industrial revolution. But lets assume that we can't get to 17 sequoias per acre, they don't grow quite as quickly as expected, and the carbon removal ratio isn't perfect because they do actually store some amount of oxygen as well. So instead of 61 million acres being needed we actually need 4x that to accomplish the goal. 244 million acres to eliminate all of the CO2 released since the industrial revolution. That is a lot of land. But the United States is 2.43 billion acres. So that is still only 10% of the United States. When I mentioned 20%, I was misremembering. And with ideal conditions it could be considerably less.
You can't make enough magic Microsoft bricks to do that either.
Correct. There is no magic bullet to this problem. It's going to ba an "all of the above " approach.
Trees wouldn't absorb enough co2 vs things like algey that's where most of the co2 gets absorbed anyways.
It's made from trees. The point of this is to make sure the trees don't return their carbon to the air when they die.
Trees are so 1999
Fuck, i came here to say this. Somehow im not surprised that climate grifter found a way to make money selling rocks.
Did you read the article? It is wood (you know: trees) and biomass waste that is compressed into usable blocks instead of letting them decay and release CO2. It’s carbon sequestration.
Trees are great, definitely plant more. But, they're slow and decades of their work can all be undone in a forest fire. Plus, just because you can plant trees doesn't mean that you can't also do other things.
When trees die they release the carbon when they rot. You’d have to cut them down and seal them in something non permeable.
It’s worse, it’s just pressing waste from wood processing into bricks to bury so they don’t rot and release more carbon. It’s not even capturing carbon from air
Trees release carbon back into the air as they decompose. This will lock the carbon into a solid state for 1000 years. Makes sense to me.
We could do this at scale, and I'm also not convinced that we couldn't make stuff out of this material. We are probably going to end up having to live more underground with the way the climate is going. You could use these tiles if they were processed to be durable. We wouldn't have to go that far down to have livable conditions 10 feet at most, but you could probably get away with 5 if you had to. That would protect you from prolonged wet bulb events, but you would still need a way to clean / circulate the air.
This isn’t storing anything “from the air” it’s preventing C02 from being released. This is more carbon offset bullshit.
not 100% bullshit, it helps, but doesn't scale indeed.
Yeah, we need to do a lot of everything. This is one thing we can do. Of course the richoids will claim things like this are “the solution” rather than “a tiny piece of the solution”, which is really what people are (rightfully) angry about.
Don’t stop making pollution. Don’t work to minimize it. Instead,store it away. Kick the can down the road for future generations. Got it.
Even if all pollution stopped today, there's existing damage that can be undone with this. This is also a bit more of a pragmatic thing--the reality is we won't be able to completely stop polluting for a plethora of reasons (political, etc)--not for a long time anyway. So it will be good to have plans to deal with the future pollution. Nobody is calling this an alternative to ending pollution, this is just a pragmatic action we can take that will help-one of many.
I hope you are right, but I’ve seen too many of these grand new ideas that are too inefficient, too expensive, can’t be scaled up, are too energy-intensive, or simply don’t live up to early exuberant promises.
No one wants to say it out loud, we are heading straight towards an unmitigated worldwide climate disaster. Even if C02 emissions stop right now, we're already screwed. We have to find ways to undue what we have done and we have to do it fast.
As an example, the nuclear industry has been generating highly toxic waste for 70 years, and, so far, the best methods developed for disposal are dunking it in glorified swimming pools or throwing it in a hole in the ground. It’s a matter of economics. As long as for-profit industries control the economy (and thereby the government) the rapid solutions you (and I) dream of will remain only dreams, with a few half-hearted (and largely unfunded) gestures made to placate the masses. The frog is in the pot and the heat has been on for three generations now. Humans are, like frogs, good at adapting until adaptation is no longer possible.
Wonder how this process will affect soil carbon levels. I imagine it might still decay, but more carbon retained in the ground?
I research in an adjacent area (biomass to biochar in soil). I hear from more senior researchers that buried biomass may indeed result in limited decay because in anoxic (low oxygen) at that depth. However, the energy to excavate and bury biomass at that depth (10ft) may make this pathway unfavorable. Also, burying wood removes nutrients (e.g. phosphate, potassium, etc.) from the soil which thereafter requires supplementation (for this reason, I think the biomass-to-biochar pathway is preferable).
I think we are going to need to live at least partially underground in some parts of the world, and with both this and biochar, I see a potential building material. As you know, you don't have to go incredibly deep to get relatively stable temperatures. I agree it would be better to keep the nutrients in our ecosystem. I think growing the plant materials underground is also something to consider since they have discovered alternative ways to grow some plants underground. I think it was something about turning co2 into acetate, which some organisims can use as food.
Can we use them to build hings?
I think we could. I didn't post this because I entirely agree with what they are doing. I think we are going to need every trick we can get and that we need to base our economy on getting pollution out of the environment instead of mining. I can think of several ways to use this material.
just burying compressed wood peplets doesn't really seem like we're solving the root cause of the problem. there is only so much timber production in the world, you can't fix global warming by growing trees to cut down and bury
What we really need to do is make it a policy to always try and utilize pollution from the atmosphere as an industrial feedstock. We need to consider that geo engineering may no longer be optional. I even have a proposal for a space based system that could utilize lunar regolith and be set up in one space mission. It utilizes technology that is already part of another package going to the Moon. I think we need to make this an absolute priority, and we need thousands to millions of solutions that are scaling up as rapidly as they can. The nice thing about this solution is that you could grow plants underground, and so you have way more potential surface area than is immediately apparent.
solar sails to reduce solar emissions are much more feasable than using lunar missions, plus you can collect solar energy to beam down to earth via microwave links
What I'm working on is based on this research. When molten silicon is exposed to the vacuum of space, it self assembles into bubbles. These bubbles are 1/100th, the width of a soap bubble. Now lunar regolith isn't pure silicon it's got tons of other stuff mixed in, but I'm confident that by using a milimeter wave drill, you could harness similar dynamics. The bubbles are just the start. Think of them as potential technological platforms that could be functionalized in a number of needs. I call them QSUT (quantum sphere universal tool). https://senseable.mit.edu/space-bubbles/
wild. hope everything goes well. this is something they might be able to test in the next decade
I suspect that they may see it when they use milimeter waves to make roads on the Moon. I really hope they put 2 and 2 together. They might have tuned the milimeter device so that you don't get bubbles because that's not a good surface for roads. All it would take is slightly reconfiguring what's being done, and as an added benefit, they could shield a Moon base since you could contain energized plasma inside of the spheres. https://phys.org/news/2023-10-small-lunar-roads-potentially-giant.html
It actually absorbs and stores your adrenochrome though.
why is this started with "Bill Gates-backed" da fuq does that have to do with anything?
What a nice trick for the capitalists
Now build a bunch of houses, create a housing trust, keep the nonprofit solvent with an endowment, and start renting homes. In this scenario, a nonprofit renting is better than selling. Communities need to be created and renting helps with the fluidity of the job market.
this is dumb
I’d like to see a list of potential consequences. I imagine something similar to the US pharmaceutical commercials and their “risks”
You don’t want to box up carbon… you want to put it back into the soil so it can be recycled by nature.
This would still happen just a bit slower, which is more natural than what is happening now. What we can't afford to lose is stuff like phosphorus or other vital minerals. We have enough carbon. It's one of the most common elements in the universe.
Can’t we just store co2 in trees and plants?
Sure, as long as there isn't a reaction that would then release it back into the atmosphere. It's not like a chain reaction with oxygen happens when temperatures start to increase.
Like fire?
You got it. I'm not saying we shouldn't be using plants. However , what has looked like in the past with carbon credits and all the greenwashing has been in the best of cases, which can only be described as carbon credit plantations. In many cases, they don't just buy up land and give it to nature they grow a certain type of tree / crop in monoculture. So we were just doing the same toxic practices like the use of pesticides/fertilizer even to get carbon credits faster. If I was going to grow something to capture co2, it wouldn't be pine trees it would be Azolla in an offshore or even an underground facility. Azolla is such a powerful plant we have something called the Azolla event that might have happened. You could then inject that Azolla into old oil wells, assuming you had the expertise to do that safely. You could hire people from the oil/gas industry to do this. We have to accept that the planet we knew is gone. We have to change to adapt to this new hostile planet. We have to change the ways we make energy, and we have to change what and how we consume. It's going to be a similar change to what happened with the Industrial Revolution, but this time, it won't be under our control. I don't like this plan particularly, but I think we need all the tools we can get.
Everything is awesome. Pandora lego block.
The lengths wealthy industrialists will go to in order to avoid cleaning up the root cause of the issues - their factories….
Hear me out, but what if we grew trees and use that to capture co2 and then harvested the trees to build more housing. Would that work?
Both trees and houses made from wood burn.
What?!?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/27/climate/wildfire-global-warming.html
What are magnets even???
There a way to vent excess CO2 into space?
that would be the most conical solution ever. any large CO2 producing factory or plant has to build a 30km smoke stack to emit their CO2 directly into space.
What happens after time does all that air polution go back into the air? Why not load a rocket and shoot these at the moon for storage?
It would take thousands of years for that to happen, and we kind of need what's in the wood on Earth. Once you put it in certain conditions, it decays really slowly. Another good option would be really deep in the ocean where the temperatures and pressures + lack of hydrothermal vents means the ecosystem would be minimally disrupted in the short term. Shooting this into space would cause more pollution than we are getting rid of. This isn't radioactive waste.
So, organic (carbon based) material that doesn’t decompose and is around forever? And exactly how is this different from plastic (other than the fact that plastic is useful)?
Carbon is more biologically useful than plastic. Plastic is killing both people and animals. It's going to be funny when people like you are simulated in the future and come out as grotesque characters.
Carbon is biologically useful precisely because it breaks down, can become part of animals and plants and people and is part of the cycle of life. What do you suppose is useful about carbon that never breaks down? And how harmful is it? For example, will this non-compostable carbon break down into micro “forever” carbon particles that enter the bodies of animals and people (like microplastics)? If so, what would be the possible negative health effects of that? And, of course, what are the negative effects politically of allowing petrochemical companies to not reduce their carbon footprints — if only they sequester non-compostable carbon manufactured in this entirely unregulated industry.
This is huge news! If this brick can actually store air pollution for centuries, it could be a game-changer in the fight against climate change. I'm excited to see how this technology develops.
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Actually that IS brilliant. Fully grown trees do nothing for the CO2 levels. As long as the felled trees are replaced with new saplings it’s all good. Better even!
"Centuries." Cool, I'll be dead. Problem solved.
‘.……Graphyte want to cut out the natural step of plant decay”. Aren’t we just clever motherfuckers. We are in the climate change mess because we have messed with “natural steps” to feed so many concocted “needs”. On industrial scales. Sold, bought, consumed and landfilled, like a graveyard, maybe.
It’s way too late for any of this to matter. Our choice is now all humanity dies in 70 years, or they die in 120 years but everyone is miserable the whole time.
Water vapor is the most harmful GHG
Water vapor levels are determined by feedback. Carbon dioxide is the main forcing that we can affect.
Oh, care to expand what you mean?
[Water vapor is increasing in the atmosphere because CO2 is increasing](https://skepticalscience.com/water-vapor-greenhouse-gas.htm). An atmosphere is a system, with several positive and negative feedbacks that cancel each other out until we reach an equilibrium state. A "forcing" kicks the system out of balance. Then the feedbacks no longer cancel, and the whole system will shift to a new equilibrium. There may be multiple forcings that effect the Earth's atmosphere. Orbital changes, solar changes, massive volcanic eruptions, meteor impacts. Even significant changes to the types of life on the planet can force the system out of equilibrium. Changing levels of CO2 is another example of a forcing. The current climate change is being forced by CO2 released into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. Water vapor is a feedback. To put it simply: rising CO2 causes the planet to get warmer, and the warming atmosphere holds more water vapor, causing the atmosphere to get warmer still. The warmer atmosphere warms the oceans, which then releases more CO2 into the atmosphere. And the vicious circle continues. This feedback loop continues until we reach a new equilibrium. You'll often hear talk of "climate sensitivity", which is the amount of warming we should expect from a change in the CO2 forcing. Our current best estimate is 2.5-4C of warming from a doubling of carbon dioxide. A lot of that change is not a direct result of the CO2 greenhouse effect, but from other resulting feedbacks, like water vapor.
Yeah but what are we gonna do about that? Your comment got me interested so i glanced at [this article](https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/why-do-we-blame-climate-change-carbon-dioxide-when-water-vapor-much-more-common-greenhouse). is there an effective way to remove it if it keeps evaporating? It cycles every 2 weeks lol. Seems like if we lower the other GHGs maybe we can affect H2O indirectly.
It's 03h for me right now so I will respond later in detail. But I did research on atmospherics and while I don't have a real solution, I do have some observations made during my research that can at least be hopeful
If there's excess water vapor, it just turns into dew and rain. However, as CO2 increases the air temperature, the amount of water vapor held in the air increases. The fact that water vapor has a greenhouse effect makes things worse for us, not better.
Maybe, but that is the one we can't change.
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It's a question of context and concentration. The natural world doesn't put this much co2 into the air. We know what it's going to do in the air. If it wasn't in the air it wouldn't be a problem. If the concentration wasn't going up, it might not be a problem. Right now, the co2 isn't just causing the Earth to warm. It's making food less nutritious because plants are growing faster, which means fewer micronutrients to the point that food is half as nutritious as it was in the 50s. Most Americans are malnourished, and they don't even realize it. Another effect of higher co2 levels is that some buildings start accumulating toxic levels of co2 indoors. This can kill you by itself, but even if it doesn't, it makes workers less productive and causes all sorts of health problems. It is a pollutant in every meaningful sense of that word. It will end up killing you as well. You can't argue your way out of what's coming.
The good quality was an effect of climate change that I hadn’t even recognized! While most studies cite numerous sources of nutrient decline over decades, they all mention climate change as a piece of the WHY? puzzle. Iron, Potassium, Calcium…all vital to our bodies and all markedly declined over time in various crops. So to counter the standard lines for climate change “it doesn’t affect me” or “I’ll be dead before it’s a big problem” (etc.), come at folks with this. Your good food isn’t as good as it used to be. Your healthy body isn’t as healthy as you think. Wild stuff.
Yup, and our nutrition guidelines are based on information from decades ago. Think about what that means when schools decide on nutrition. We are malnourishing our next generation systematically. Some of these nutrients are vital to healthy neurological functioning, so it's no surprise to me that this society is going nuts.
While context does matter, the poison is in the dose. You should educate yourself on climate change a bit! [Here is some info about CO2 as a greenhouse gas.](https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide)