Let them eat chipboard
September 21, 2021 1:45 PM Subscribe
But the carbon in the wood was in the atmosphere a few years ago, i.e. it’s net neutral — quite different from burning fossil fuels.
posted by phliar at 2:00 PM on September 21, 2021 [54 favorites]
posted by phliar at 2:00 PM on September 21, 2021 [54 favorites]
No prestige TV show is worth this.
posted by Going To Maine at 2:05 PM on September 21, 2021 [75 favorites]
posted by Going To Maine at 2:05 PM on September 21, 2021 [75 favorites]
Well, that shows how little I know, phliar. Thank you for that.
posted by y2karl at 2:06 PM on September 21, 2021
posted by y2karl at 2:06 PM on September 21, 2021
the real story here is that carbon release from human fossil fuel use has nearly matched that of all decaying wood in the world.
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 2:10 PM on September 21, 2021 [61 favorites]
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 2:10 PM on September 21, 2021 [61 favorites]
This sounds like they've figured out a (probably large) part of the planet's baseline unaltered carbon cycle.
Other than the bits about impact of climate change and decline of insect populations on the rate of decay this does not seem to diminish the significance and impact of humanity's excess carbon output into the atmosphere.
Presumably it will help improve climate models though.
posted by Hairy Lobster at 2:14 PM on September 21, 2021 [3 favorites]
Other than the bits about impact of climate change and decline of insect populations on the rate of decay this does not seem to diminish the significance and impact of humanity's excess carbon output into the atmosphere.
Presumably it will help improve climate models though.
posted by Hairy Lobster at 2:14 PM on September 21, 2021 [3 favorites]
...this does not seem to diminish the significance and impact of humanity's excess carbon output into the atmosphere.
This is a given for me.
posted by y2karl at 2:27 PM on September 21, 2021 [2 favorites]
This is a given for me.
posted by y2karl at 2:27 PM on September 21, 2021 [2 favorites]
It's not carbon neutral when you're clearing forests faster than they're planted. Burning the cleared wood exacerbates the problem.
It's interesting to consider than human-managed forestry has the potential to be better for climate than just leaving the trees to 'get on with it', though. Not as good for biodiversity of course.
And the more plant material we can return to the soil, the better for the soil, with carbon capture hitching along as a welcome bonus.
We have an awful lot of tools for fighting climate change - the hard part is using them appropriately, or indeed using them at all.
posted by pipeski at 2:29 PM on September 21, 2021
It's interesting to consider than human-managed forestry has the potential to be better for climate than just leaving the trees to 'get on with it', though. Not as good for biodiversity of course.
And the more plant material we can return to the soil, the better for the soil, with carbon capture hitching along as a welcome bonus.
We have an awful lot of tools for fighting climate change - the hard part is using them appropriately, or indeed using them at all.
posted by pipeski at 2:29 PM on September 21, 2021
I think the point is if we shouldn't be afraid to lose the oldest forests. If we logged the deadwood, turned it into timber which locks the carbon in, and then reforest the areas with younger trees on our way out, we'd be able to stop the release of a lot of carbon and even reduce it a bit more.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 2:29 PM on September 21, 2021 [6 favorites]
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 2:29 PM on September 21, 2021 [6 favorites]
Yep, plants pull carbon from the carbon dioxide in the air and use sunlight via photosynthesis to create biomass—including wood. Every tree you've ever seen was synthesized out of thin air. It's obviously more complicated than that, but even the wooden structural parts of your home, your tables and chairs, were made of air. The byproduct of this process—the "waste"— is (in part) oxygen.
Nature is astounding. Blows my mind when I think about things like this. I love plants.
posted by SoberHighland at 2:32 PM on September 21, 2021 [14 favorites]
Nature is astounding. Blows my mind when I think about things like this. I love plants.
posted by SoberHighland at 2:32 PM on September 21, 2021 [14 favorites]
No prestige TV show is worth this.
We need to stop acting like a bunch of hoopleheads.
posted by nubs at 2:52 PM on September 21, 2021 [10 favorites]
We need to stop acting like a bunch of hoopleheads.
posted by nubs at 2:52 PM on September 21, 2021 [10 favorites]
Related to this previous thread on whether the soil can "store" carbon: https://www.metafilter.com/192173/looking-for-recalcitrant-molecules
posted by rivenwanderer at 2:54 PM on September 21, 2021
posted by rivenwanderer at 2:54 PM on September 21, 2021
y2karl: "This is a given for me."
Oh, yeah, sorry, didn't mean to imply anything. Sorry if it read that way!
posted by Hairy Lobster at 3:09 PM on September 21, 2021
Oh, yeah, sorry, didn't mean to imply anything. Sorry if it read that way!
posted by Hairy Lobster at 3:09 PM on September 21, 2021
Didn't think so and no offense was taken. Just going on the record.
posted by y2karl at 3:20 PM on September 21, 2021 [3 favorites]
posted by y2karl at 3:20 PM on September 21, 2021 [3 favorites]
the real story here is that carbon release from human fossil fuel use has nearly matched that of all decaying wood in the world.
According this,
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/654287
Dukes also calculated that the amount of fossil fuel burned in a single year – 1997 was used in the study – totals 97 million billion pounds of carbon, which is equivalent to more than 400 times "all the plant matter that grows in the world in a year," including vast amounts of microscopic plant life in the oceans.
We need to use less energy.
posted by alex_skazat at 3:34 PM on September 21, 2021 [3 favorites]
According this,
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/654287
Dukes also calculated that the amount of fossil fuel burned in a single year – 1997 was used in the study – totals 97 million billion pounds of carbon, which is equivalent to more than 400 times "all the plant matter that grows in the world in a year," including vast amounts of microscopic plant life in the oceans.
We need to use less energy.
posted by alex_skazat at 3:34 PM on September 21, 2021 [3 favorites]
Methane has a GWP of 30, compared to carbon dioxide's GWP of 1.
posted by ambrosen at 4:56 PM on September 21, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by ambrosen at 4:56 PM on September 21, 2021 [2 favorites]
So let me get this straight... scientists have determined the carbon 'footprint' of decomposing trees. Trees have been dying for millions of years. "Diseased Trees May Be a Significant Source of Methane that Causes Climate Change". The emissions from the trees have always been there (and dying/rotting/decomposing). However, "The research team studied wood from more than 140 tree species to determine the influence of climate on the rate of decomposition."
Let us be clear about this. The trees are not the cause of climate change, they release methane which has an impact on climate. The reduction of biodiversity caused by humankind is a contributing factor along with all the other things we do to destroy our environment with emissions etc (a very broad 'etc' there).
All I see is it looks like the trees are an innocent party in this whole affair and are being set up as a diversionary tactic where people can go 'See! The billions of humans doing their best to tear the planet apart with their consumption of the latest must have [insert name of media player/TV/phone/electric vehicle/food here]. They were here first.
Stop tree shaming right now! The Ents are restless and think humans are barking mad, going out on a limb to blame them is just plane [sic] wrong. Leaf them alone and look at the real root of the problem!
It is climate change which is impacting a NATURAL process.
posted by IndelibleUnderpants at 5:14 PM on September 21, 2021 [4 favorites]
Let us be clear about this. The trees are not the cause of climate change, they release methane which has an impact on climate. The reduction of biodiversity caused by humankind is a contributing factor along with all the other things we do to destroy our environment with emissions etc (a very broad 'etc' there).
All I see is it looks like the trees are an innocent party in this whole affair and are being set up as a diversionary tactic where people can go 'See! The billions of humans doing their best to tear the planet apart with their consumption of the latest must have [insert name of media player/TV/phone/electric vehicle/food here]. They were here first.
Stop tree shaming right now! The Ents are restless and think humans are barking mad, going out on a limb to blame them is just plane [sic] wrong. Leaf them alone and look at the real root of the problem!
It is climate change which is impacting a NATURAL process.
posted by IndelibleUnderpants at 5:14 PM on September 21, 2021 [4 favorites]
barking mad
I saw what you did there.
posted by flabdablet at 6:00 PM on September 21, 2021 [2 favorites]
I saw what you did there.
posted by flabdablet at 6:00 PM on September 21, 2021 [2 favorites]
"I think the point is if we shouldn't be afraid to lose the oldest forests. If we logged the deadwood, turned it into timber which locks the carbon in, and then reforest the areas with younger trees on our way out, we'd be able to stop the release of a lot of carbon and even reduce it a bit more."
This is ecocide. The decay of trees is a keystone event that supports the growth of new trees. You take that wood out, you lose all the nutrients that are released during that decomposition, you kill off whole food webs that start with borer grubs and wood lice and fungus eaters, and that's even before you get through the environmental impact of physically getting in there and taking away the deadwood.
We need to stop burning fossil fuels. Even burning timber is just re-releasing matter that was in the air a decade (or less!) prior. Every other suggestion is just fundamentally useless until we stop releasing the shit in the first place.
posted by Jilder at 8:52 PM on September 21, 2021 [15 favorites]
This is ecocide. The decay of trees is a keystone event that supports the growth of new trees. You take that wood out, you lose all the nutrients that are released during that decomposition, you kill off whole food webs that start with borer grubs and wood lice and fungus eaters, and that's even before you get through the environmental impact of physically getting in there and taking away the deadwood.
We need to stop burning fossil fuels. Even burning timber is just re-releasing matter that was in the air a decade (or less!) prior. Every other suggestion is just fundamentally useless until we stop releasing the shit in the first place.
posted by Jilder at 8:52 PM on September 21, 2021 [15 favorites]
The decay of trees is a keystone event that supports the growth of new trees. You take that wood out, you lose all the nutrients that are released during that decomposition,
I really can't find that infographic now, but it showed one possible path from getting to bare land to forest, and each step had certain nutrients it needed, and one of the last steps was getting fungal decomposition of deadwood to release nutrients into the soil to support the final stage of forest. There was the note that we typically accelerate this in our gardens by directly using wood-chip based mulch.
Locking in carbon by using timber is plausible (just like if you harvest some honey from a beehive it doesn't kill them, but harvest too much and it puts the colony under stress). There's plenty of wood that's unsuitable for building that could be left to decay.
posted by xdvesper at 10:26 PM on September 21, 2021 [1 favorite]
I really can't find that infographic now, but it showed one possible path from getting to bare land to forest, and each step had certain nutrients it needed, and one of the last steps was getting fungal decomposition of deadwood to release nutrients into the soil to support the final stage of forest. There was the note that we typically accelerate this in our gardens by directly using wood-chip based mulch.
Locking in carbon by using timber is plausible (just like if you harvest some honey from a beehive it doesn't kill them, but harvest too much and it puts the colony under stress). There's plenty of wood that's unsuitable for building that could be left to decay.
posted by xdvesper at 10:26 PM on September 21, 2021 [1 favorite]
In Australia it was common for families to go gather deadwood from the forest (before it was mostly banned) and use it for heating during winter. In theory it's carbon neutral heating, better than using gas / electricity for heating, and it also reduces fuel load on the forest floor reducing the likelihood or severity of bush fires. And, like, the article says, the CO2 just gets released into the atmosphere anyway, so it might as well do something useful like heat your house and reduce your reliance on grid gas or electricity. But people did it mainly because they were cheap and used their kids for free labor =P
posted by xdvesper at 10:32 PM on September 21, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by xdvesper at 10:32 PM on September 21, 2021 [2 favorites]
I think the point is if we shouldn't be afraid to lose the oldest forests. If we logged the deadwood, turned it into timber which locks the carbon in, and then reforest the areas with younger trees on our way out, we'd be able to stop the release of a lot of carbon and even reduce it a bit more.
We have to destroy the environment to save the environment? The forests are key ecologies, they can't only be considered in terms of carbon but have to be considered in terms of what lives in them, grows in them, procreates in them, eats in them. The same will apply to the deadwood as well as the live trees and other flora.
posted by biffa at 12:30 AM on September 22, 2021 [11 favorites]
We have to destroy the environment to save the environment? The forests are key ecologies, they can't only be considered in terms of carbon but have to be considered in terms of what lives in them, grows in them, procreates in them, eats in them. The same will apply to the deadwood as well as the live trees and other flora.
posted by biffa at 12:30 AM on September 22, 2021 [11 favorites]
One additional point to consider is the linked effects of climate change exacerbating declines in forest health. Global trade and climate stressors are contributing to a greater prevalence and impact of damaging pests and pathogens in forests worldwide (see emerald ash borer, spotted lanternfly, mountain pine beetle, etc.). This ramps up mortality in forests and turns healthy trees into deadwood, where they then release carbon and further feed the cycle. To me, this sounds like a "yes/and" opportunity to look at a broader systemic view that includes many factors. We absolutely need to reduce human carbon emissions, but we should also improve forest resilience and health and explore options to sequester usable carbon via solid wood products when salvage is an opportunity.
posted by hessie at 6:30 AM on September 22, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by hessie at 6:30 AM on September 22, 2021 [4 favorites]
George Monbiot: Planting 10 saplings does not replace a twisted old oak. ‘Slow ecology’ is the only way to preserve and restore ancient habitats.
posted by Kiwi at 6:47 AM on September 22, 2021 [3 favorites]
posted by Kiwi at 6:47 AM on September 22, 2021 [3 favorites]
Trees sequester carbon, die, release carbon. I get that it's a lot of carbon, but it doesn't feel like news. Forests feel like a net good. Forests in the US west have been greatly harmed by the mountain pine beetle epidemic, which is exacerbated by climate warming; all those dead trees probably do add a lot of carbon. Should we try to focus on using deadwood as fuel, supplanting fossil fuel if the carbon is just going to be released anyway? It seems unlikely; this would be difficult to scale. In Maine, firewood may not be moved more than 25 miles, as it may spread insect pests. Wood for timber and paper pulp is probably moved farther, I don't know those rules, but common sense/ the cost of trucking wood is why the paper mills are near the forests.
I'm curious who funded this research. Reagan blamed trees for pollution, is this more weird propaganda? I'm so sick of living in Lying Times.
posted by theora55 at 11:26 AM on September 22, 2021 [1 favorite]
I'm curious who funded this research. Reagan blamed trees for pollution, is this more weird propaganda? I'm so sick of living in Lying Times.
posted by theora55 at 11:26 AM on September 22, 2021 [1 favorite]
I am not here to blame the trees (Lorax forbid) but how is burning wood and releasing the carbon sequestered there back into the air any more carbon neutral than doing the same with coal?
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:07 PM on September 22, 2021
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:07 PM on September 22, 2021
Plant biomass is a carbon storage reservoir that forms part of the fast carbon cycle.
Over a timescale best understood in hundreds of years, the overall effect of plant lifecycles is to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration over time. This reflects a fundamental negative feedback: the more CO2 there is in the atmosphere, the faster the plants will grow.
What happens to individual plants after they die isn't a major influence on how well that works. The macro measure to keep an eye on here is the total planetary surface area available for plant growth. The smaller we manage to make that, the less well the plants can regulate atmospheric CO2.
De-sequestering fossil fuels at the rate we're doing it amounts to fucking with the slow carbon cycle.
To keep a sense of scale, it helps to bear in mind that the fast carbon cycle moves about ten to a hundred times as much carbon as we inject every year, while the slow carbon cycle not including our mining activities moves about a tenth to a hundredth as much.
So what we do with trees, soils and so forth doesn't actually matter very much; by and large they're unaffected by our activity (apart from our habit of straight-up destroying them). What we need to do is stop digging up fossil carbon ten to a hundred times as fast as the planet can re-fossilize it. As long as we're not doing that, we're basically just tinkering around the edges.
posted by flabdablet at 11:05 PM on September 22, 2021 [4 favorites]
Over a timescale best understood in hundreds of years, the overall effect of plant lifecycles is to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration over time. This reflects a fundamental negative feedback: the more CO2 there is in the atmosphere, the faster the plants will grow.
What happens to individual plants after they die isn't a major influence on how well that works. The macro measure to keep an eye on here is the total planetary surface area available for plant growth. The smaller we manage to make that, the less well the plants can regulate atmospheric CO2.
De-sequestering fossil fuels at the rate we're doing it amounts to fucking with the slow carbon cycle.
To keep a sense of scale, it helps to bear in mind that the fast carbon cycle moves about ten to a hundred times as much carbon as we inject every year, while the slow carbon cycle not including our mining activities moves about a tenth to a hundredth as much.
So what we do with trees, soils and so forth doesn't actually matter very much; by and large they're unaffected by our activity (apart from our habit of straight-up destroying them). What we need to do is stop digging up fossil carbon ten to a hundred times as fast as the planet can re-fossilize it. As long as we're not doing that, we're basically just tinkering around the edges.
posted by flabdablet at 11:05 PM on September 22, 2021 [4 favorites]
From the page I linked above (emphasis mine):
posted by flabdablet at 11:18 PM on September 22, 2021 [4 favorites]
Today, changes in the carbon cycle are happening because of people. We perturb the carbon cycle by burning fossil fuels and clearing land.It's the mining. We need to stop the mining.
When we clear forests, we remove a dense growth of plants that had stored carbon in wood, stems, and leaves—biomass. By removing a forest, we eliminate plants that would otherwise take carbon out of the atmosphere as they grow. We tend to replace the dense growth with crops or pasture, which store less carbon. We also expose soil that vents carbon from decayed plant matter into the atmosphere. Humans are currently emitting just under a billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere per year through land use changes.
Without human interference, the carbon in fossil fuels would leak slowly into the atmosphere through volcanic activity over millions of years in the slow carbon cycle. By burning coal, oil, and natural gas, we accelerate the process, releasing vast amounts of carbon (carbon that took millions of years to accumulate) into the atmosphere every year. By doing so, we move the carbon from the slow cycle to the fast cycle. In 2009, humans released about 8.4 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel.
posted by flabdablet at 11:18 PM on September 22, 2021 [4 favorites]
In other words, we don't "do the same" with coal. What we're doing with coal (and oil, and gas, and limestone) does roughly ten times as much damage.
posted by flabdablet at 11:21 PM on September 22, 2021 [3 favorites]
posted by flabdablet at 11:21 PM on September 22, 2021 [3 favorites]
If we logged the deadwood, turned it into timber which locks the carbon in …
This is folly. Very little of the deadwood in a forest is useful as timber/lumber, and it’s difficult to get out of the forest without harming the living trees. Much of what might be processed into lumber ends up as scrap and sawdust, and is soon burned or rotting somewhere anyhow, and the products and structures we make are often (usually?) quickly outmoded and in landfills soon too. Making things from wood is probably good for the environment insofar as it’s a substitute for more destructive materials and processes, but the things themselves are not meaningful carbon sinks over timescales that matter.
posted by jon1270 at 4:37 AM on September 23, 2021 [1 favorite]
This is folly. Very little of the deadwood in a forest is useful as timber/lumber, and it’s difficult to get out of the forest without harming the living trees. Much of what might be processed into lumber ends up as scrap and sawdust, and is soon burned or rotting somewhere anyhow, and the products and structures we make are often (usually?) quickly outmoded and in landfills soon too. Making things from wood is probably good for the environment insofar as it’s a substitute for more destructive materials and processes, but the things themselves are not meaningful carbon sinks over timescales that matter.
posted by jon1270 at 4:37 AM on September 23, 2021 [1 favorite]
The other thing to keep in mind is that where we are putting all that fossil carbon we're exfiltrating from the slow carbon cycle is into the atmosphere, right where it makes the biggest difference to global climate, and that the majority of what we've put into the atmosphere has been put there in the last half century. So not only are we moving carbon from slow-cycle reservoirs into fast-cycle reservoirs, we're putting it straight into the most damaging of those reservoirs at a rate way way faster than even the fast cycle's multi-hundred-year response timescale.
If we just stop doing that then the fast cycle will move stuff out of the atmospheric reservoir and into the others, including plant biomass. There's plenty of capacity in the non-atmospheric fast cycle reservoirs and transfer processes to get atmospheric CO2 concentrations much closer to preindustrial levels than they are today if we just stop topping them up. The fast cycle routinely moves ten to a hundred times as much carbon around as we do.
All of the recent fossil-fuel-industry-funded publicity about the need to do carbon capture and storage, including direct atmospheric carbon capture, is deckchairs-on-the-Titanic horseshit at this point. There is no way we're ever going to spend as much time, money or resources on that as we have on basing all of industry on fossil carbon, which is the scale we'd have to apply CCS at in order to make more than a rounding error's difference to the existing planetary fast cycle. CCS is an idea that's being put about to distract people of good will, yet again, from keeping our focus on what actually needs to happen; which is, of course, stop extracting fossil carbon immediately if not sooner.
And that is why I regularly find myself utterly consumed with impotent rage when the political leadership of the world's biggest coal exporter witters on yet again about Australia's relatively tiny contribution to global emissions and how what we do here really doesn't make much of a difference. What a pack of lying fuckers.
Emissions are a complete red herring. We should not be concentrating on emissions at all. Not now. We should be concentrating on where the carbon compounds we use are coming from and moving as fast as possible toward ensuring that zero percent of that is from slow-cycle reservoirs. Having done that, the rest will largely take care of itself.
posted by flabdablet at 6:26 AM on September 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
If we just stop doing that then the fast cycle will move stuff out of the atmospheric reservoir and into the others, including plant biomass. There's plenty of capacity in the non-atmospheric fast cycle reservoirs and transfer processes to get atmospheric CO2 concentrations much closer to preindustrial levels than they are today if we just stop topping them up. The fast cycle routinely moves ten to a hundred times as much carbon around as we do.
All of the recent fossil-fuel-industry-funded publicity about the need to do carbon capture and storage, including direct atmospheric carbon capture, is deckchairs-on-the-Titanic horseshit at this point. There is no way we're ever going to spend as much time, money or resources on that as we have on basing all of industry on fossil carbon, which is the scale we'd have to apply CCS at in order to make more than a rounding error's difference to the existing planetary fast cycle. CCS is an idea that's being put about to distract people of good will, yet again, from keeping our focus on what actually needs to happen; which is, of course, stop extracting fossil carbon immediately if not sooner.
And that is why I regularly find myself utterly consumed with impotent rage when the political leadership of the world's biggest coal exporter witters on yet again about Australia's relatively tiny contribution to global emissions and how what we do here really doesn't make much of a difference. What a pack of lying fuckers.
Emissions are a complete red herring. We should not be concentrating on emissions at all. Not now. We should be concentrating on where the carbon compounds we use are coming from and moving as fast as possible toward ensuring that zero percent of that is from slow-cycle reservoirs. Having done that, the rest will largely take care of itself.
posted by flabdablet at 6:26 AM on September 24, 2021 [1 favorite]
And we could concentrate on methane sequestration and get 40 times the bang for our buck.
posted by y2karl at 12:36 PM on October 1, 2021
posted by y2karl at 12:36 PM on October 1, 2021
Sequester it? No, no, no! We need to de-sequester it even faster than before!
posted by flabdablet at 2:23 PM on October 1, 2021
posted by flabdablet at 2:23 PM on October 1, 2021
I really appreciate the explanations!
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:50 PM on October 1, 2021
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:50 PM on October 1, 2021
From the link above:
UNEP: Methane emissions are driving climate change. Here’s how to reduce them.
To Put the Brakes on Global Warming, Slash Methane Emissions First:
....stop extracting fossil carbon immediately if not sooner.
posted by y2karl at 10:21 PM on October 1, 2021
Reducing methane in the atmosphere by 40% could reduce warming 0.4 ˚C by 2050, according to a new paperConsidering that more and more methane, a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than CO2, is being released from thawing permafrost in greater and greater amounts, arguing that we need to extract and burn more and more of it is a baffling assertion.
UNEP: Methane emissions are driving climate change. Here’s how to reduce them.
To Put the Brakes on Global Warming, Slash Methane Emissions First:
When determining how potent a greenhouse gas is, there are two main considerations: How efficient the molecule is at trapping heat, and how long it can survive in the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases like CO2 and CH4 are both very effective at containing heat; they are actually what help make Earth habitable by preventing warmth from escaping into space. But methane is better at it. “You have a carbon attached to two oxygen atoms in a CO2 molecule, but a carbon attached to four hydrogen atoms in a methane molecule,” says NYU environmental scientist Matthew Hayek, who studies methane. “And so there are more ways that the bonds between those atoms can vibrate when it receives, or absorbs, infrared radiation, and hence re-emits infrared radiation.”As someone wrote above:
....stop extracting fossil carbon immediately if not sooner.
posted by y2karl at 10:21 PM on October 1, 2021
arguing that we need to extract and burn more and more of it is a baffling assertion
Not baffling at all once you understand where that assertion has always come from.
posted by flabdablet at 11:32 PM on October 1, 2021
Not baffling at all once you understand where that assertion has always come from.
posted by flabdablet at 11:32 PM on October 1, 2021
Also, Australian policy is not about burning the methane we extract. Oh no. What we need to do instead is export it, just like we do with all that coal.
That way it counts against some other country's emissions, which is great for us because we can use it to prop up our standard line of infuriating, mendacious bullshit about being a really small country so nothing we do is going to make a difference until the rest of the world gets serious about emissions reduction... though given the completely disturbing rate at which the rest of the world has been getting serious about emissions reduction we're going to need to shift that talking point a little.
I know, let's blame China!
posted by flabdablet at 12:18 AM on October 2, 2021
That way it counts against some other country's emissions, which is great for us because we can use it to prop up our standard line of infuriating, mendacious bullshit about being a really small country so nothing we do is going to make a difference until the rest of the world gets serious about emissions reduction... though given the completely disturbing rate at which the rest of the world has been getting serious about emissions reduction we're going to need to shift that talking point a little.
I know, let's blame China!
posted by flabdablet at 12:18 AM on October 2, 2021
Climbing over each other like well diggers in a cave in. I missed your point on first pass. I will try to pay more attention in the future. I know bupkis regarding the topic, about which I am usually too terrified to think, let alone the details. And now, back under the covers.
posted by y2karl at 12:08 PM on October 2, 2021
posted by y2karl at 12:08 PM on October 2, 2021
DW: How powerful is methane as a greenhouse gas?Why We Should Be Worried about Methane
Rob Jackson: Well, since industrial activity began, methane has contributed about a quarter of all the warming that we've seen and it's far more potent, molecule for molecule or kilogram for kilogram than carbon dioxide is on a 20-year time frame. It's 80 or 90 times more potent. And even over a century, it's about 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. So CO2 is still the dominant greenhouse gas we look at. But methane is second and provides a lot of opportunities to make a difference right now because it's so powerful...
In terms of agricultural methane emissions, why are these strategies not being implemented already?
It isn't happening most places because it isn't required and because it's not the focus of our farmers and ranchers and meat producers. They're in the business of producing calories, producing food. So they don't know as much about managing greenhouse gas emissions as they know about raising cattle and raising rice and growing other crops. So I think this is a place where policy is needed. We can require them to manage their manure differently. We can provide incentives for feed additives and other things that will reduce emissions from the burping cows. And then for rice farmers, we need to show them that they can reduce emissions, but not hamper or reduce yield. And that's what people around the world are most concerned about when they're growing crops, they want to maximize yield. So we have to show in the research community that you can do this – reduce methane emissions, but not harm their yields much, if at all.
We don't have a lot of time to reduce emissions. I mean, in the last 15 or so years, we've added an extra 50 million tons of methane each year to the atmosphere. And that's like putting 350 million more cars on the world's roads or doubling the greenhouse gas emissions from France and Germany together. This cannot continue.
posted by y2karl at 12:21 AM on October 6, 2021 [1 favorite]
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