Carbon Machines
by Ron Dembo, Zerofootprint on 02.15.07
Though he did not drop into the press conference by parachute, airline mogul and consummate showman Richard Branson made an impression last week when he offered a $25 million prize to an inventor canny enough to devise a machine capable of stripping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
It’s easy to see why we’d want such a device—CO2 is the chief greenhouse gas, and we show little sign that we’re about to stop dumping it into the skies. Worldwide, we emit 24 billion tonnes of the gas each year, and though a few countries, like Britain and Germany, have managed to slow down emissions, the planet’s foremost polluters, China and the US, to say nothing of the vast bulk of the developed nations, continue to pour more and more CO2 into the atmosphere every year.
The Kyoto process has shown how difficult it is going to be to reach a political consensus internationally, as nearly everyone uses someone else as an excuse to keep polluting.
And even if we did manage to reach an international agreement tomorrow, and if we also miraculously managed to enforce it, and cut emissions altogether, the planet would continue to heat up. "There will be CO2 left in the atmosphere, continuing to influence the climate, more than 1000 years after humans stop emitting it," says Susan Solomon, an atmospheric chemist with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado.
So if we’re not altogether likely to stop putting CO2 into the atmosphere, it’s easy to see why we might want to invent a way to take it out. Luckily, though I did not invent it, I have one of these carbon machines in my back yard. And while I have no intention to claim the $25 million, I am happy to share my machine with others, though you may have a couple of these things yourself. I call them “trees.”
We know they work, as they are already storing 638 billion tonnes of carbon—that’s more than is currently in the atmosphere, heating up the planet. Not only that, they “breathe” out oxygen as part of the process of photosynthesis. In fact, every tonne of sequestered carbon means two tonnes of oxygen released into the atmosphere. Moreover, these carbon machines provide habitats for flora and fauna, protect watersheds and release water into the atmosphere to help regulate rainfall patterns.
Companies as diverse as Ikea, Dell, and Reckitt Benckiser use trees to mitigate their carbon footprints, and the Kyoto Protocol encourages forestation as part of its Clean Development Mechanism. So let’s start planting.
And let’s stop chopping these carbon machines down. Deforestation accounts for almost a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. In other words, we’re destroying the things that capture and store carbon, and we’re spewing out more of the stuff as we do it. We need not only to get more trees in the ground—we need to protect the ones we already have. Click here and here to learn more about trees as a strategy for fighting climate change.
We know perfectly well that planting trees is not the magic bullet for the planet’s problems. But neither is there going to be a miraculous technological fix of the kind Branson may be envisioning. Getting our CO2 emissions, both past and present, under control is going to require sweeping changes and some tough decisions. But we’ve got inexpensive, environmentally friendly, beautiful carbon machines with all kinds of ancillary benefits at our disposal right now. Let’s plant them.
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Seed the deep ocean waters with iron sulfate. Solve our dwindling fish populations and our CO2 problems simultaneously.
Remember that while trees emit oxigen and store carbondioxide, they also consume exactly as much oxigen and emit exactly as much CO2 as they consume. So it is a temporary solution; there's only "so much" CO2 that can be stored in trees, and it is not really a CO2 sink - it's mostly a temporary solution (while not bad, I admit). We could definately use the real machine :o)
"Seed the deep ocean waters with iron sulfate. Solve our dwindling fish populations and our CO2 problems simultaneously."
What are the potential side effects of that?
"they also consume exactly as much oxigen and emit exactly as much CO2 as they consume."
Are you sure about that? Where does all the oxygen in the atmosphere comes from, then?
I would think that the oxygen balance would at least be slightly positive..
I think the article states you get 2 tonnes of oxygen released for every 1 tonne that is sequestered.
But as Ewout said it is only a temporary solution, if the trees die naturally then the CO2 is returned. So if we embarked on a massive reforestation plan right now, it would only lock up some of the current CO2 for a few decades, I think??!?
If that was the case, would the only useful option be to wait a few years, harvest those trees and use them in construction and products, with the aim of making the constructions and products last 200 years+? Surely that would lock up the current CO2 for a few centuries while we figure out what to do about the rest of it??
As you can tell I'm not a lumberjack!
Prairie grass is apparently great at sequestering carbon. Many of the world's natural prairies have been destroyed.. Working on those could probably help a bit.
I don't know my carbon life cycle that much, but wouldn't, after the tree dies, the carbon would decompose into the soil? I'm sure a bit is release but definitely not all. I mean, what's compost?
Carbon dioxide is also stored in healthy soils. When degraded land (due to farming or overgrazing) is returned to wilderness, the soil will become richer and capable of storing more C02 over time.
The opposite is also true. Forest destruction and farming weakens the soil. It is estimated that about 7% of CO2 in the atmosphere is from carbon that has been lost from soil.
Where do we find land to return to wilderness? How about the land currently used to grow heavily-subsidized corn and soy to fatten animals and make soft drinks?
"What are the potential side-effects of seedign with iron sulfate"
Well, you could have possible runaway plankton growth (that we could curb with pollutants!) and there's the potential that if it got near coastlines it would blot-out the light from coral. Blah blah blah. The fish'll live. Plankton is tasty.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.11/ecohacking.html
From the link I posted:
one thousand-pound iron payload ... produced the biomass equivalent of 100 full-grown redwoods ... pulled 2,500 tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Sure, it's a spot-fix, and naysayers will cry "well, that just means big business can keep polluting the atomosphere because we can keep fixing it"; honestly at this point, I don't give a rats a-- about the naysayers. FIX IT.
I agree with much of what was written in the main post and much of the statements in the comments. Most of the planet used to be covered in forests of one type or other. There are very few old-growth forests left. Vast amounts of land have been altered from their naturally forested state to make way for agriculture, highways, towns and cities, and development of some type or other. Not to mention land that has been cleared for no reason other than to exploit the wood and which has not been reforested. I am not going to start advocating the elimination of cities and towns. Or getting rid of agricultural land because we need food and there are lots of us. And I believe shifting more and more food production to organic will require more land than what is used now. But I also believe that society, for a number of reasons, needs to eat less meat. And meat production requires preposterous quantities of land (and water and energy, etc.). But even if we did not move away from the current levels of meat consumption, there is no lack of land that needs to be reforested. Whereever I look here in central Spain, I see land that can be reforested. Abandoned farm land. Burnt down forests. Landscapes cleared long ago which are unused and which have not reforested naturally. Derelict properties. There is no lack of land to be reforested on this planet. The quantities of land that could be reforested are staggering and spread throughout the world.
As for the comment that trees do not absorb carbon, they do. When I burn dead wood in my masonry stove, I am burning carbon. Fire is an interaction between oxygen and carbon. Not between oxygen and water. Or oxygen and nitrogen. Carbon. Live trees are basically carbon and water. Dead dried out trees are basically just carbon. It is true that once trees are fully grown, their carbon capture is relatively small. But that can not be said of young trees. I am not suggesting by this that we should go and cut down all fully grown trees and plant new ones to strip CO2 from the air. Trees have a multitude of functions that help regulate natural processes and even help regulate the temperature. But there is plenty of open land that can be reforested. And as we reforest, as mentioned, the trees are not the only actors in storing carbon. Reforested land develops rich soil. Leaves fall and cover the ground, decomposing into the soil. Animal and plant life returns and they too add more carbon into the soil through different processes - not to mention that this additional plant and animal life also stores carbon when alive. You reforest land and bring it back to life and this natural system will suck carbon back to the ground. What do people think coal, oil and gas are? These are the products of natural ecosystems from millenia ago. These are the carbon products from live forests and plant ecosystems from long ago. As for the statements that trees, and corresponding forests, can't hold carbon for more than a few decades, the statement is simply wrong. Most trees live more than a few decades. The pine trees in my area, pine pinonero, take some 80 years to grow to full maturity and can live hundreds of years. Some neighbor recently bought two palm trees from some other neighbor that were over 100 years old. I have neighbors that have olive trees several hundreds of years old. I'm not quite sure what kind of trees some people are thinking of that only live a few decades. The fruit trees I have planted a few years ago will probably be there long after my great grandkids are dead. Furthermore, as mentioned, a forest ecosystem develops a process that slowly adds decomposing organic matter to the ground, much of it carbon, plus other components such as methane. Even if there were some forest type where the trees only lived a few decades, as long as the forest system lived on, the soil would continue adding carbon. If we waited long enough, all that carbon being added to the soil would eventually be carbon, oil and gas deposits in the ground. Forests ARE effective carbon dioxide absorbers.
Furthermore, sustainably harvested forests can use much of the wood - the carbon - in construction of furniture, kitchen utensils, buildings, fences, infrastructure, etc. which further makes the carbon in the wood remain in the wood for long periods of time. The problem is that most forests today are NOT sustainably harvested and forests are disappearing on aggregate in the world. We are using too much wood for too many things. Wood products can be a store for carbon, but not at the expense of destroying forests - which are more useful to mankind alive than dead under our butts or cleaning them.
Lastly, even though I think there are enormous quantities of land that can be reforested, in my gut I think they will not be enough and will not work fast enough. I believe reforestation is a very big part of the solution - maybe the core - but other options will need to be explored. Actually, the core 'solution' to the carbon dioxide problem is to stop pumping so much into the air. This is what we need to do. To offset some of what we shouldn't be pumping into the air, we can reforest. But then some other supplementary technologies will need to help to take some carbon dioxide from the air. I don't think we have time to let forests do their slow motion carbon retrieval. Something else will also have to help out. But it should be clear that we need to stop burning so much fossil fuel, and we need to reforest as much as possible. These together are the real long-term solution. People who don't understand this don't understand the balances of nature.
Really, healthy, living soil doesn't store that much carbon, and your assumption about coal, oil and gas is a good one to illustrate my point:
those things come from the carbon sinks: carbon that is taken into the lithosphere; by sinking to the ocean floor, being locked up in marshes or other 'storing' mechanisms. The whole point of reaching the end of our resources is about the fact that all of these natural carbon storing processes are way to slow to keep up with anything we do. If they were not then we wouldn't really have a problem with fossil fuels (they wouldn't be fossil though) because they could be absorbed as fast as they are produced. Dead trees are decomposed into soil by bacteria that emit carbon dioxide of (even worse) methane. As long as you don't lock it up somewhere (the aformentioned marshes f.e.), it will completely decompose/find it's way into either new trees (no gain) or CO2 and some other basic 'natural products' (no gain). This is actually just thermodynamics applied... What is in the soil is marginal compared to what was in the trees that this soil was made out of.
But I'll make my other statement again too: I'm definately pro-forest, it has a lot of functions, one of them is taking carbon dioxide out of the air (I never said it didn't by the way). I'm just saying this isn't the machine Branson asked for - it is way too slow for that (and even then there's the theoretical limit to what you can capture by creating more forests, I don't know any numbers about that though).