The project is on Iceland where energy comes out of the ground for free. You can’t plant trees there (the surface is basalt rock, it’s cold and stormy and sprayed with saltwater). So let them try to suck CO2 if they want.
If a tree would absorb 48 tons of CO2 per year, it would need to grow by 130 tons (assuming wood contains 10% carbon and using the molar masses of C and CO2). An normal funny grown tree weighs only about 10 tons and takes 100 years to mature, giving 10 kg carbon per year.
For comparison: the rule of thumb for a human is 15 mol/d, i.e. we digest 180 g C, inhale 480 g oxygen and exhale 660 g CO2 per day, i.e. 240 kg CO2 per year (or 65 kg C, so we need over 6 trees just to compensate one human).
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None taken but I don’t really think you can dismiss him quite that easily. While some may view his opinions as biased, I think his insights help balance overly optimistic, if not unrealistic views, about EVs propagated in mainstream media. The point I was making was in contrast to the EOR idea. That was illustrated on the link to Cadogan’s site where it was argued that if anyone out there thinks they’re saving the planet with an EV that weighs 2.6 tonnes and its battery weighing in at 600kgs, you have to be kidding yourself. As an example, you point out that there’s not much that the average person can do about that outside of advocacy. To that I would say that personal choices in energy consumption probably do contribute to broader policy changes. And that is indeed what Cadogan is advocating for (e.g., using solar power, reducing energy use). He drove around in an EV for a year apparently, and loved it.
Much of the rest of your post is fairly pragmatic and I can pretty much agree with your main points. I’m sceptical though because switching to greener energy comes with a ton of technical and money problems, like sky-high costs, unreliable supply, and getting the energy where it needs to go. Solar panels in the desert are great, but how do you get the energy to the coast hundreds of kilometres away. The world is filled with great ideas that have failed, think Segway and the Concorde to name a few. Who knows maybe things like geothermal and ocean power will work. We all want it to. But good ideas have to be accepted by the public, make economic sense and have the infrastructure to make them viable.
We have a BMW i3 - built and designed in kinder, greener days. Carbon fibre body - expensive - but lighter to make the battery more effective. 1,195 kg (2,635 lb)
Disappointed that the newer models are tanks and lost their green credentials.
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Something like you’ve got there is more like it I’d say, as you mention though they’re expensive and that unfortunately locks a lot of people out of the market. I haven’t looked into it too deeply, but from what I can tell Toyota seems to have managed to strike a fairly good balance in terms of cost and efficiency with their hybrid vehicles.
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The other thing that trees provide, or, at least the right trees for the right places, is habitat for all sort of critters.
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I heard a broadcast, probably on BBC, about how the great numbers of whales, before the extensive killing for their oil, circulated the oceans biomass by feeding at depth in the oceans then coming to the surface to void. This fertilizer provided a food source for crustaceans, which in turn fed the fish and whales. Some of the fish were salmon which would annually migrate up the rivers and die, further circulating the deep ocean nutrients and fertilizing the land and rivers and providing another cycle of life. I find this quite an amazing story. And a great source of carbon capture. Humanity now has the knowledge but not the wisdom.
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And huge solar farms are becoming another source of elimination of the natural environment.
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If the solar farms are managed for biodiversity, it can provide new habitat. Depends where the priorities lie.
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Hoo. Yeah. There’s a bit of a difference between 48 lbs a year and 48 tons a year, isn’t there? That changes the math a bit.
There’s some work going on, even here in Ohio I think, about trying to figure out how to grow crops in between solar cells, turning solar farms in solar farms.
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Hopefully whales will become one of those conservation success stories that happen from time to time.
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Allowing forest to regrow where it is supposed to be can be valuable for reducing CO2 in the atmosphere but i am very skeptical of tree planting efforts. They rarely plant genetically appropriate locally native species of appropriate diversity in the correct habitat. In many places forest will come back on its own if allowed to and sometimes invasive species control is needed (perhaps also physically removing invasive species and somehow sequestering the biomass could somehow add to removal of carbon as well). Also, appropriately managed grasslands with native plants and appropriate native animals can sequester a lot of carbon. Even deserts which most of the climate tech bros seem to consider useless wasteland sequester a lot of carbon in the soil. And desert vegetation thrives where nothing else can.
The big answer that gets missed a lot is restoring and maybe eventually creating peatlands as well as floodplain forests. Peatlands, and to a lesser but still significant extent floodplain forests, don’t just hold the carbon in trees that may re-release it when they burn or decay. Peatlands bury the carbon on a geologic scale and if not disturbed, may remove it for longer than our species will exist even in the best case scenarios. Peat formation is more or less how coal got underground in the first place (i think oil came from shallow seas? which may play a role as well?) Peatland loss around the world especially cold areas has been extensive. We must look for ways to protect peatland from the impacts of climate change so we don’t get more positive feedback loops, while also restoring and eventually creating new peatlands. It’s a lot cheaper than these carbon sequestration plants and they also fulful a bunch of other functions such as flood control, water filtration, and habitat. With the floodplain forests, they dont; hold quite as much carbon as peatland but as trees and such get buried in floods (becoming more severe with climate change in most places), they sequester carbon as well. And of special note are forested peatlands like black spruce swamps that sequester carbon both above and below ground.
I am not proposing we try to turn upland areas, desert, grassland, etc into wetland, but to the extent we can, we need to be restoring as much wetland as we can with focus on carbon-sequestering forms.
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i was part of a small study on this and the answer is very much ‘it depends’. solar panels can exist amidst pollinator habitat, certain types of livestock like free range chickens, park/recreation space, and other uses like that. They don’t go well with intact fragile desert ecosystems with cryptogamic crust and such, nor in wetlands. Rooftops and parking lots are , of course, the best of all. The biggest issue is there’s often no way to control or monitor how the areas around the panels are being managed and it’s often easier to mow it to death and fence it from wildlife and people than to engage in more creative uses
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I am very much in favour of capturing renewable energy, there, where it will be used. In the urban areas where people live and work. Why trash the desert for a distant city - simply because it ‘makes money’ - but at what environmental cost and what effect on the ‘no one lives there anyway!’
Sami and reindeer battling wind power in the far North.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/11/sami-activist-protests-in-front-of-norwegian-parliament-over-wind-turbines
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Wind farm with wildflowers!
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/42807248
But they are our wildflowers. In California sadly.
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yeah invasive species weren’t exactly what i had in mind, heh. the main invasive species we had in the solar sites i looked at was reed canary grass which is a weird confusing mess (native and invasive genotypes) but is a dense grass that forms a monoculture and doesn’t provide much if any pollinator value. So when that takes over the solar farms it’s really worse than a managed hayfield that at least has more species diversity
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This article highlights the rate of deforestation in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, which releases 2.9 gigatons of carbon annually—more than the emissions from all the world’s cars, trucks, trains, and airplanes combined.The article also discusses how certain tree planting initiatives can sometimes backfire, causing more harm than good.
An example of monocultures, not supporting diverse ecosystems https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cndkF7bX3M
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