Originally published at: "I think that I shall not see.." | Boing Boing
…
19 Likes
Well, we’re planting them, but we’re also cutting down too many as it is.
26 Likes
“Well then, how do we make money on them?” “Oh. uhm, I don’t know…” ooo, ooo! i know! i know! when big enough chop them down, and sell them to make stuff, but plant even more in their place.
Excellent comic as always!
13 Likes
A tree farm is not a forest, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t have a role in carbon capture. I would be curious to see a study of carbon capture per acre for trees at various ages, as well as compared to other crops.
9 Likes
I’m for every climate change solution: solar, wind, geothermal, planting trees, carbon capture contraptions, climate engineering, new and old nuclear, everything. Except for Manchin’s “natural gas is clean energy” policy. That’s dumb.
16 Likes
9 Likes
Just a reminder that Scott Adams is a reich wing Nazi asshole, so he probably didn’t get the core joke of this comic. He probably meant this to make fun of people trying to fix global warming, not the companies that are causing it…
17 Likes
Scott Adams:
13 Likes
30 Likes
The older a tree gets, the more mass it adds annually, until it reaches its mature size.
If trees from a farm are used for construction materials or other consumer goods like paper or cardboard that are recycled, or disposed in a landfill, the carbon is sequestered. If they’re used for firewood, it’s released.
An optimum carbon sequestering tree farm would harvest the trees near their peak of maturity. Since that can be a hundred years or more, that’s not exactly profitable for the farmers. Any tree farm is helping. It’s just that they can’t capture the output of a billion internal combustion engines.
Food crops, or other organic material that is composted, will release carbon as part of the respiration of the animals that eat it, including the bacteria responsible for its decay (or the decay of the waste.) There’s little net gain in sequestering it.
6 Likes
Trees are very good but grasses and bushes may sequester more carbon more quickly and seagrasses can sequester up to 15 times more carbon than terrestrial plants while some, like eelgrass, can produce a perennial grain (now being tested in Spain).
Geotherapy Not Geoengineering, Please - and here are the best resources I know on the subject:
http://solarray.blogspot.com/2021/04/geotherapy-not-geoengineering-please.html
6 Likes
Oh, that’s good. Where did you find it?
1 Like
Somewhere on the 'net, a couple of years ago.
1 Like
It’s actually remarkable how little his insanity creeps into his comics. Most of the time they’re mostly reasonable on issues like diversity and global warming, even women’s issues that he’s pretty hostile toward irl. If I only knew Adams via Dilbert I would think he’s center-left politically
Of course I haven’t read a very large percentage of Dilberts in many years so there may be some zingers. But it’s clear he’s not taking the Ben Garrison route.
5 Likes
The title of the comic is right, but the BB headline is a misquote which doesn’t scan and instantly bugged me.
5 Likes
I believe a 2019 study actually upended this idea. Sure, a single mature tree will sequester way more than a single young tree - but in a given acre, young trees perform the best.
However, all of your other points are valid. As soon as we burn/compost the lumber, all of the CO2 is released. Meanwhile, trees that fall to the forest floor (even with decomposition) sequester 45% of the carbon.
So, I guess the optimal solution would be to cut down and replant, but limit the removal.
1 Like
That’s not exactly the takeaway I got from it. They are comparing old growth forests to reforested forests. An old growth forest isn’t ever harvested, and the ability to absorb CO2 is important, but remains steady. Im saying to allow the trees to actively grow to maturity, log them for construction, then repeat. You’d get the maximum absorption of new growth, and the maximum sequestration.
Of course this would also result in the maximum removal of nutrients, so nothing is a great compromise. But it addresses the immediate peril.
Sorry, guess I was confused when you defined maturity with “that can be a hundred years or more”.
Here, in the Pacific Northwest, trees are allowed to grow for 60-90 years. They are then, as you mention, harvested for construction materials and the acres replanted. This cycle holds true for the national forest across the US.
Bottom line is: it isn’t enough. We need to either stop pulling carbon out of the ground (oil, coal, natural gas) - or create massive afforestation where the trees are not harvested.
The core joke of this comic is that trees are not only better for the planet than anything scientists can come up with, but they would never get funded because they can’t be commercialized. The core joke of Scott Adams bullshit is someone created something to compete with a tree somehow and… I don’t know, it’s neither the same thing nor did it have a point.
That’s because he steals his ideas from other people posting online. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t understand half of his own strips, and the other half he only does because he knows that his brand is bland inoffensive office humor and not mouth frothing right wing insanity.
5 Likes
