A developer wanted to build a facility to capture carbon. Locals saw an environmental menace.
Too late. We’re all climate experiments now.
A developer wanted to build a facility to capture carbon. Locals saw an environmental menace.
I have a cool idea for a facility to capture carbon in a non-menacing way. What we do is get a big chunk of land and plant a bunch of trees on it, then - oh, shit, I just invented a forest.
That’s the usual take, and we certainly shouldn’t have removed so much of those forests to begin with. The scale of carbon removal that will do is not enough to really solve much, after all we’re quickly burning ancient plant-sourced hydrocarbons made from thousands or more years of collection, so one forest isn’t going to balance that equation. And planting trees is more complex than many think, for it to survive and thrive it has to be diverse and not a single species. We should reforest, but for the purpose of recovering what we destroyed in biodiversity, not for any carbon capture effect.
If you’re in the midwest traditional prairie grasslands are the best carbon sinks ever. Their roots go down 6-12’, fire doesn’t kill them (so zero carbon is released) and they essentially live forever.
fire doesn’t kill them (so zero carbon is released)
Carbon is still released when organic matter burns, even if it doesn’t completely destroy the root system.
they essentially live forever
Except the vast areas that European settlers destroyed.
Trees only temporarily capture carbon, and they don’t do a super great job at it. In the US, there are more trees now than when the settlers landed on Plymouth rock, so they’re already not mitigating what humans are pumping out.
they’re already not mitigating what humans are pumping out
They very much are mitigating human-caused damage, just not completely.
This New York town doesn’t want to smell like burned ass.
Unless of course I’m misunderstanding “Biosolids”.
No your understanding perfectly correct.
The biochar is heated in a vacuum. Meaning, there shouldn’t be any smell produced because there’s no air exchange.
Still gotta get carted in, and housed before the char, and tbh I still wouldn’t trust it even if those weren’t the case. Not tryna be a NIMBY but put that kinda stuff 10 miles outta town.
FYI, Biochar is excellent for adding to a garden, as long as you charge it with compost first.
Carbon capture is a scam. The townspeople are right.
This sentence is a clear indication these climate models are not accurate enough to be making serious decisions on:
A 2018 report from a panel of United Nations scientists estimated the world will need to remove between 100 billion and 1 trillion metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere this century to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit)
This is a 10x range in their model outputs.
Look at the actual data. Not all models are equally valid, and in ensemble forecasts from a single model, you need to do a summation of the ensemble members to come up with a firm pseudo-deterministic estimate.
