> If we had cheap clean limitless power, what would we use it for? Someone asked this question in a presentation, and the cheap clean limitless power advocates didn’t have a canned answer ready to go. They eventually proposed things like improved public transit, supersonic flight, carbon capture, AI compute, geoengineering to prevent hurricanes, and city-wide air filters (really).
Seriously? No one mentioned the obvious? The thing that would immeasurably improve quality of life for whole civilizations, if only it weren't so energy-costly?
De. Sal. I. Na. Tion.
If you can make water purification cheap and abundant, at least a dozen major problems just vanish in a puff of vapor.
If you want to use solar power to remove CO2 from the air and fix it in a more solid form, you don't need high technology or cheap power to do that. Just plant a tree! Or a few thousand trees.
On a related note, the biggest contributors to the "urban heat island" effect are asphalt (turning cities almost literally into Black Bodies) and the lack of vegetation. Adding a few shade trees can reduce the scorching temperatures of a hot summer sun by more than 40 degrees F.
"Efficiency" necessarily takes expense into account. I think this is one of those situations where trying to get everything at once is the wrong strategy. Imagine if we damaged our ability to fight global warming because in order to get one billion pieces of fruit. We should let private industry create as much wood and fruit as there's demand for (which they're currently doing, in orchards and timber farms), but also pay for carbon removal at some socially meaningful rate (which would incentivize private industry to capture carbon directly, and then the industry could choose between trees and machines, and if I'm right and machines are more efficient even when counting the extra profit from fruit, they would choose the machines).
Perhaps. I guess some of it is just my own pro-fruit and pro-shade biases peeking through.
When my wife and I bought a house a while back, one of the first things we did, before the previous owners had even moved out, was go to a local nursery and buy a young fruit tree. We waited until they were gone to actually take delivery and plant it in the yard, of course, but that's how important it is to me.
This only works long term if you then cut down and bury the trees deep under the earth, otherwise the carbon is released when the tree dies and decays. Of course, cutting down, transporting, and digging mines to bury the trees is going to take a lot of work with heavy machinery that probably runs on fossil fuels, and will require a massive amount of land dedicated to the task since trees grow slowly relative to our rate of emissions. If your high tech carbon machine can make something like graphite bricks, that would be much easier to deal with logistically, and possibly even useful for some purpose, and is relatively stable so even if it ends up in a landfill won't just turn back into atmospheric carbon. I'll also note we already farm trees for wood and paper, most of than ends up in a landfill and decays at some point or gets burned, re-releasing all the carbon.
That all depends on just how long of a long term you're talking about. Building long-duration objects like houses and furniture out of wood does a pretty good job of carbon-sequestration for a decent length of time.
And trees lower surrounding temperatures. Nothing like photosynthesis to absorb energy! Just walk from barefoot from a grass lawn over to an astroturf lawn, and you'll feel the difference! The grass lawn remains coolish in the afternoon heat, while the astroturf will burn your feet.
Actually, how good and how expensive are purpose-built carbon-removal machines right now? (As Bob Frank says, there are other factors to take into account, but I'd like to get the right order of magnitude.) Compare them to, I don't know, a particularly efficient tree (or bush or weed or what have you).
To get back to the pre industrial revolution levels of CO2 we'd need to remove 1e15 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, so that's about a quadrillion dollars. To be fair your number is probably for mass of carbon rather than mass of carbon dioxide so let's call it 300 trillion dollars.
It sounds like an untenable solution, in that you can throw an unfeasibly large slice of global GDP at the problem and still fail to make a meaningful dent in it.
Grinding up CO2-absorbing rock, and dumping it in some warm part of the ocean to speed things along, could be done with current tech at a cost two orders of magnitude lower: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/olivine-weathering/
They might be eventually, but they are not cheaper yet. We're going to need both, for a lot of reasons (industrial point source capture, higher output per acre, ability to site capture where we need the carbon for utilization, and on the other side of course we still need wood and fruit).
Unfortunately, a lot of what gets sold as “reforestation” is actually trying to force a forest to exist on land that people didn’t find useful, and which can’t support trees without lots and lots of inputs and attention.
Certainly when it goes by the name of “tree planting”, which has a nice ribbon cutting, and then no one pays attention when the trees all die.
I do volunteer work with a wildlife trust (I know its not very effective altruism) and its sad how true this is. Just this week I was at a session where we were mostly undoing the harm done by a well meaning landowner trying to reforest land poorly. Boring charities like that which just do tree planting and maintenance as part of their regular operations rather than "adopt a tree bring your kids to plant a forest!!" seem to be the only ones who actually do tree planting effectively. My trust manages about a 95% survival rate with the only maintenance after the planting being removing the tree guards.
99% of that problem is planting the wrong trees in the wrong soil. Most EU for example has a fetish-like fixation on growing vast spans of pine, on soils that do not support pine at all, and for variety, force poplar, linden and decorative apple-trees in the middle of a city where they instantly get sick and die.
Meanwhile, the ecosystem of continental Europe is mostly geared towards various types of oak.
It's not that they're less efficient. It's that there isn't room for the needed amount of trees. (We can't even keep the ones we still have.)
I've got no idea whether they're less efficient, or even how you would measure efficiency in that context. Personally I find just having trees around is a net benefit. So by that measure trees are extremely efficient.
We is humanity. And I'm not sure the US is reforesting at all. I see lots of forests of dead and dying pine trees. Canada isn't the only country that's experiencing a increase in forest fires. (OTOH, it's been about a decade since I rode along 5 and saw all the dead and dying pine(?) trees. (I assume they're pine, because they're some sort of conifer, pine trees are common in the region, and I'd just been reading about the pine beetle infestation. But the exact species is irrelevant to the point. The area was still called "forest", but about half the trees looked dead or dying.)
I once calculated that the entire world’s net carbon emissions could be neutralized by planting paulownia trees in an area the size of Ukraine and burying all the resultant wood. This would be considerably less expensive than the dozens of trillions people want to spend on other methods, and not require hypothetical future tech.
It would be even simpler to plant the correct species of trees in the correct environment and let it do its thing. Sure, paulownia is the most efficient carbon grabber, but its not the easiest to grow on any type of soil. The beat solution is just to replant the logged areas with the types of trees that used to grow there before humans cut them down.
Direct air capture costs $500/ton now, and the EPA SSC at a 5% discount rate is $12/ton. It doesn’t make any sense to use discount rates lower than nominal gdp growth, because 1. any public good that increases productivity by a fixed amount forever would have infinite value. 2. Other investments can easily beat the rate of nominal gdp growth.
perhaps, but an average tree absorbs approximately 22 kilograms of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year, so a copse of trees can make up for one car. If you add all the other economic, social, psychological and environmental benefits of trees, there is no excuse why we are not spamming saplings and seeds at every available surface.
I am not a botanist/ecologist, is it true that there is tons of land where trees would naturally flourish without further human intervention if seeds were planted, and the problem is just that no tree seeds have ever gotten there through normal ecological processes?
That seems like a stunning L for evolution and ecological equilibriums, but maybe it's trivially true?
Also - since bamboo grows so fast, is it a more efficient way to capture carbon than slower trees/plants?
I think for many purposes, bamboo counts as a “tree”, because it is a tall woody plant. Basically every plant family separately re-invented the “tree” body plan, and bamboo is the grass family’s version.
A lot of tree planting initiatives fail for the reason you mention - they figure “trees are good, we aren’t using land, let’s plant some trees here” and don’t stop to think about why there aren’t currently trees on this land if we aren’t using it.
There is a more relevant plan though of finding land where humans cut down forest to turn it into agriculture or coal mines or whatever, and get people to stop using it for agriculture or coal mines and let the trees come back. Planting seedlings sometimes accelerates the process a bit compared to just letting the trees seed it (particularly if there are apex trees that used to live in the region but now only exist far away).
The number one region where replanting is needed are urban areas. Trees wont naturally replant on carefully maintained asphalt no matter how long you wait.
Yeah urban trees are great. They also have the advantage that they are often actively maintained, so they can survive even if the local climate wouldn’t support them. They aren’t that significant for carbon reduction though, since there’s so little urban land and the possible tree density is limited. They are good for human benefits though.
Hmmm, just had a thought: bamboo is carbon negative whereas concrete is carbon positive. So have a building material consisting of mostly bamboo with concrete pouted in between it.
There's an enormous amount of land that used to be old-growth forest and has been cleared by humans over the millenia. IDK how suited it necessarily is for trees *now* - in a lot of cases we've probably made the soil less fertile - but in principle it's no knock on evolution that trees aren't growing in fields we deliberately cleared of trees.
With that said, land is ultimately finite, and there's an awful lot of fossil fuels in the Earth's crust. Also, we're using some of that land for stuff.
Another area that is ripe for replanting are man made cattle ranches. I don't know what happens to feed grass growth under a canopy of trees, but there's probably some mutually exclusive dynamics going on (else, why clear the land in the first place?).
Generally a closed forest canopy doesn't allow enough sunlight for grasses to grow. And if the forest floor is carpeted thickly enough in herbaceous material like grass or ferns, it impedes the regeneration of tree seedlings.
the main issue is the water table, not the soil itself. As long as the land is the right level of moist, you can replant the trees that used to grow there since the last Ice Age, and they will beat the odds eventually.
The main problem with reforestation is the fetish-like desire to plant the kind of trees we want, not the kind that can survive there, and drying/watering the land to achieve that. Europe takes the cake here, we destroyed countless square miles of perfectly fine, soggy-soiled oak forests and now try and fail to replant them with pines. We buried miles of alder and willow-rich swamps in sandy soils to force more pine there, which promptly rots at the roots from too much groundwater.
There's factors like soil ph, soil nitrogen content, slope, drainage, and sunlight. Different trees have different preferences, and might do poorly in a non-optimal environment. I can imagine a situation where a change in the local geography means that trees suited for environment A can't get across a stretch of environment B to an uncolonized patch of environment A.
That said, birds and deer and other similar animals often "carry" seeds around, maybe even depositing them with a bit of fertilizer. But then, animals like deer also eat young trees. So the animal factor works both ways.
Trees are actually generally not an effective carbon fixation method in the present environment. They used to be, in the carboniferous period, before microbes evolved which could decompose wood. But now, dead trees generally release their carbon back into the atmosphere over the course of their decomposition. Reforestation is carbon-negative, but forested land is carbon-neutral since it's in an equilibrium where it's releasing as much carbon through decomposition as it's taking in through photosynthesis. Although, you can sequester the carbon longer term if you cut the tree down and treat it in a way that makes it resistant to decomposition.
But over a long time frame, carbon sequestration is not usually a meaningful benefit of planting trees.
The point is that trees only sequester the carbon temporarily before releasing it back into the atmosphere. Forests are carbon neutral because they're in an equilibrium between trees sequestering carbon and releasing it. If we want to sequester carbon, trees don't offer a very long-term solution, unless we cut them down and store the wood under conditions that offer long-term protection from decay. Whatever other benefits trees provide, other methods come out far ahead in terms of effective carbon sequestration.
You have to bury the trees and make sure they don't decompose. But you're probably going to have to bury whatever hydrocarbons you get from carbon capture anyway, so I'm not sure how big a difference it will make in the end.
People did the calculations on that, and basically, trees don't remove enough carbon.
I ran some rough numbers. And the amount of forest we need to return CO2 to per-industrial levels worked out to be 2x earths land area. (Rough numbers.)
wonder, if there is a cheap, environmentally friendly, and technologically durable alternative to asphalt that would be white (or light gray/beige/pink/light blue whatever) instead of near black? Or maybe its just a matter of adding some white agent to existing asphalt to make it lighter in colour?
The first thing that comes to mind is concrete. It's light gray in color, abundantly available, and just as good as asphalt at most of the things that asphalt does. Unfortunately, it has well-known problems with cracking under thermal variance that asphalt does not have, making asphalt the clear winner in terms of durability. I've read about a few different groups working on solutions to this, but nothing that's commercially viable quite yet AFAIK.
I mean, the correct answer to "What do we do with clean, limitless power?" is "Literally everything". Everything that isn't a physical plot of land becomes cheaper and/or more accessible.
If the question is narrowed to "What do we do with clean, limitless power that we don't already do a lot of?", then space flight, routine terrestrial flight, desalination, and massive reshaping of the Earth's crust are good options.
Fair enough. But a lot of those would require other advances in addition to cheap energy. Desalination really wouldn't. The only major other thing that would be required is to ship the purified water around in bulk, and we already know how to efficiently ship liquids in bulk; we do it with petroleum all the time.
Remember that we can apply purification technologies to wastewater as well as salt water.
1/3 or so of water today is used for thermoelectric power generation. That goes away in a nearly-all-solar world. Residential consumption usually goes through wastewater treatment facilities, and with current technologies implemented at scale we could get 80-90+%recovery (a lot of these systems can also be implemented in a home if you want!). Farming is the more difficult case. Can't really recapture transpiration water unless you're farming indoors... which gets a lot easier with super cheap energy. But even without that, a mostly-solar-power world can cut fresh water demand by nearly 2/3 long before you start having to worry about shipping water from coasts to farmland.
This is true, but that's mostly cutting freshwater demand from places where freshwater is already abundant enough for farming. But places like Australia, huge swathes of the Middle East, etc. would become vastly more habitable with access to cheap desalinization, much more easily than we could divert water to there from other more arable locations around the world.
Could do halfway-indoors agriculture with inflatable tents, like an enormous transparent air mattress: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/28/domes-are-very-over-rated/ Natural shape doubles as a funnel directing both rainwater from above, and any condensation on the underside, toward some sort of combined irrigation / HVAC machinery at the anchor points.
We know how to ship petroleum for a price of several dollars per barrel. That’s not going to be a viable price for water unless there’s a very special place that has a reason to exist even with really expensive water.
Does it? I would have thought most of the cost was actually building and maintaining the pipelines (and more importantly, tanker ships), not the energy for pumping. In any case, no one has ever transported oil at the scale that water would be transported here. The entire world’s oil consumption is only a bit more than New York city’s water consumption.
Well, I don't think you'd be shipping much desalinated water by tanker ships, you'd produce it at the nearest coastline.
In terms of flow rates, the trans-Alaska pipeline can ship 340,000 cubic metres per day, which is about 4 cubic metres per second. The flow rate of the Thames River (to pick a medium-sized river that most people will be kinda-familiar with) is about 100 m^3/s so you'd need 25 trans-Alaska pipelines to create one Thames. The trans-Alaska pipeline is only 48 inches in diameter (smaller than most TVs) so it's not hard to imagine scaling this up by a factor of 25 at less than 25 times the cost.
How much of that is because the existing desal plants were optimized for energy being expensive? A setup designed for intermittent operation, taking advantage of electricity prices down around "we'll pay you to take it," might be able to get away with far lower capital costs relative to throughput capacity.
> The only major other thing that would be required is to ship the purified water around in bulk, and we already know how to efficiently ship liquids in bulk; we do it with petroleum all the time.
Quantity scales with water are quite a lot bigger than for petroleum,
Humans already move large amounts of water around with dams, canals, pipes ect.
It currently costs a lot to move enormous piles of dirt from one place to another, especially if you want to do it in a precise way. (e.g., not exploding a mountaintop). This is mostly because dirt, rock, and clay are heavy, which means a lot of force is required to move it. With boundless energy, you can generate the force more easily and cheaply, meaning we'd probably do a lot more customizing of medium-to-large swaths of land. Things like building local mountains, valleys, and the like. Like how in Sim City 2000 you could start with a "blank" city and then just create the rivers, oceans, and mountains you wanted. Applications include aesthetic appeal, preservation activities, and for large scale industrial efforts.
I'm sceptical that sufficient cheap energy is the main limitation towards doing things like building mountains and valleys. The engineering challenges regarding f.ex. geotechnical, environmental, hydrogeology, hydrologic issues etc. etc. would be daunting.
Cheap energy means cheap steel, allowing more and taller skyscrapers. Cheap lighting, potable water, ventilation, imported manufactured goods, so the spaces below remain pleasantly habitable. So, yes, to some extent it could.
The greater obstacle is land speculation, solution to which is a land value tax.
And the difficulty of that planning permission is deeply entangled with incentives from land speculation, which I already agreed is the greater obstacle.
abundance of free energy would do wonders solving global poverty, improve literacy and education worldwide, thus making Western Middle Class mostly obsolete, and thus, irrelevant. WMC are a bunch of specialists that we only need until we can automate them away or have developing world's lower middle class do their jobs remotely.
The gold isn't worthwhile, but the uranium might be. It seems right on the edge of practicality. (But what' you'd use it for if electricity were really cheap isn't that clear.)
Uranium would still be critical when optimizing for watts-per-kilogram, mostly meaning space travel. Gold might be worth setting aside a channel for if you're going to be thoroughly sifting and sorting all the rest of the sludge regardless.
Like Bob Frank said, it can be used. The chemical industry will guzzle it up in a lot of cases, certainly for all of the desalination plants that are geographically close to chloralkali plants that need brine as a raw material, and potentially for the ones that are further away as well depending on demand.
a pool a brine is essentially a giant battery - we could do interesting things with it.
But realistically, the amount of brine that would result from this is negligible compared to the size of the ocean. Just tow it a 100 miles off shore and dump it into the Pacific. All the post-salination brine we could ever produce would be like a single grain of salt in a bathtub when thrown into the ocean.
That would be my immediate answer too. There is hardly a more fundamental issue than access to potable water. Even in regions like Central Europe, which have never been in danger of permanent water scarcity, falling groundwater tables have been causing concern in recent years. Climate change and changing rainfall patterns will only compound that problem.
Well the point was more that water is or can be an issue just about anywhere. If it really came to a need for desalination for Central Europe though, it would be solvable in principle, for example through desalination on the coast and transporting the fresh water through pipelines.
Huh. Where did you see that? I'll admit I'm no expert in the field, but what I've heard from people who are is that energy costs are the largest factor by far. If you've got solid data that says otherwise I'd love to see it.
We could have home appliances that never break. Right now, our dishwashers, refrigerators, etc. are designed to be as energy efficient as possible to the detriment of being long-lasting. *This is an excuse I've heard, planned obsolescence being unreasonably financially successful is probably playing a role here too.*
The biggest problem with dishwashers isn't energy; it's that they can't *scrub.* It's the classic "we have to wash the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher" complaint: if you put dishes (or especially cookware) in with non-tiny amounts of food stuck to them, it's more likely to end up baked on in the drying phase than cleaned off.
Adding more power won't fix that. More likely would be the outcome (admittedly exaggerated for comedic effect) memorably demonstrated in the pilot episode of Home Improvement, when Tim soups up the dishwasher with More Power™ and it ends up exploding.
Eventually you'd have to. At some point it has to be easier to recycle landfills to get at various metals than to dig up increasingly less profitable mines, right?
Seems to me the question of what we'd do with cheap or near/limitless power is similar to someone in 1970 or 1980 wondering what consumers would do with a personal computer.
I agree that fresh water is likely one of the commodities which will become much cheaper if the price of energy goes to zero.
An other example would be aluminum, where 34% of the costs are electricity costs, and another 37% of the costs are for the raw materials (alumina, etc), which would likely also drop if the prices for electricity and metals would drop.
For some plants, it might become economically feasible to grow them under optimal artificial light 24x7 (the way cannabis is sometimes grown in areas where it is illegal), thereby decreasing prices of raw food.
> If we had cheap clean limitless power, what would we use it for? Someone asked this question in a presentation, and the cheap clean limitless power advocates didn’t have a canned answer ready to go. They eventually proposed things like improved public transit, supersonic flight, carbon capture, AI compute, geoengineering to prevent hurricanes, and city-wide air filters (really).
Seriously? No one mentioned the obvious? The thing that would immeasurably improve quality of life for whole civilizations, if only it weren't so energy-costly?
De. Sal. I. Na. Tion.
If you can make water purification cheap and abundant, at least a dozen major problems just vanish in a puff of vapor.
Maybe someone mentioned this and I forgot, I took pretty bad notes.
There's also the immediate use of removing carbon from the atmosphere to reverse global warming.
Scott mentions it in passing for producing carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuel, but I'm talking about net removal of carbon.
Also, we need to bury those new hydrocarbons in case post-collapse civilizations need fossil fuels like we did!
If you want to use solar power to remove CO2 from the air and fix it in a more solid form, you don't need high technology or cheap power to do that. Just plant a tree! Or a few thousand trees.
On a related note, the biggest contributors to the "urban heat island" effect are asphalt (turning cities almost literally into Black Bodies) and the lack of vegetation. Adding a few shade trees can reduce the scorching temperatures of a hot summer sun by more than 40 degrees F.
I think trees are much less efficient than purpose-built carbon-removal machines.
Perhaps. But they're also much less expensive, and provide ancillary benefits such as shade, fruit, and wood.
"Efficiency" necessarily takes expense into account. I think this is one of those situations where trying to get everything at once is the wrong strategy. Imagine if we damaged our ability to fight global warming because in order to get one billion pieces of fruit. We should let private industry create as much wood and fruit as there's demand for (which they're currently doing, in orchards and timber farms), but also pay for carbon removal at some socially meaningful rate (which would incentivize private industry to capture carbon directly, and then the industry could choose between trees and machines, and if I'm right and machines are more efficient even when counting the extra profit from fruit, they would choose the machines).
Perhaps. I guess some of it is just my own pro-fruit and pro-shade biases peeking through.
When my wife and I bought a house a while back, one of the first things we did, before the previous owners had even moved out, was go to a local nursery and buy a young fruit tree. We waited until they were gone to actually take delivery and plant it in the yard, of course, but that's how important it is to me.
This only works long term if you then cut down and bury the trees deep under the earth, otherwise the carbon is released when the tree dies and decays. Of course, cutting down, transporting, and digging mines to bury the trees is going to take a lot of work with heavy machinery that probably runs on fossil fuels, and will require a massive amount of land dedicated to the task since trees grow slowly relative to our rate of emissions. If your high tech carbon machine can make something like graphite bricks, that would be much easier to deal with logistically, and possibly even useful for some purpose, and is relatively stable so even if it ends up in a landfill won't just turn back into atmospheric carbon. I'll also note we already farm trees for wood and paper, most of than ends up in a landfill and decays at some point or gets burned, re-releasing all the carbon.
That all depends on just how long of a long term you're talking about. Building long-duration objects like houses and furniture out of wood does a pretty good job of carbon-sequestration for a decent length of time.
And trees lower surrounding temperatures. Nothing like photosynthesis to absorb energy! Just walk from barefoot from a grass lawn over to an astroturf lawn, and you'll feel the difference! The grass lawn remains coolish in the afternoon heat, while the astroturf will burn your feet.
Yeah, that's what I mean by the benefits of shade. (See above, re: urban heat islands)
Photosynthesis is REALLY inefficient. What you are feeling is mostly evaporative cooling. Ie plant sweat.
Actually, how good and how expensive are purpose-built carbon-removal machines right now? (As Bob Frank says, there are other factors to take into account, but I'd like to get the right order of magnitude.) Compare them to, I don't know, a particularly efficient tree (or bush or weed or what have you).
Here's an article citing ~$1000/ton for the climaworks plant: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/08/climate/direct-air-capture-plant-iceland-climate-intl/index.html
To get back to the pre industrial revolution levels of CO2 we'd need to remove 1e15 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, so that's about a quadrillion dollars. To be fair your number is probably for mass of carbon rather than mass of carbon dioxide so let's call it 300 trillion dollars.
It sounds like an untenable solution, in that you can throw an unfeasibly large slice of global GDP at the problem and still fail to make a meaningful dent in it.
Grinding up CO2-absorbing rock, and dumping it in some warm part of the ocean to speed things along, could be done with current tech at a cost two orders of magnitude lower: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/olivine-weathering/
They might be eventually, but they are not cheaper yet. We're going to need both, for a lot of reasons (industrial point source capture, higher output per acre, ability to site capture where we need the carbon for utilization, and on the other side of course we still need wood and fruit).
Reforestation is an politically easier sell, though.
Unfortunately, a lot of what gets sold as “reforestation” is actually trying to force a forest to exist on land that people didn’t find useful, and which can’t support trees without lots and lots of inputs and attention.
Certainly when it goes by the name of “tree planting”, which has a nice ribbon cutting, and then no one pays attention when the trees all die.
I do volunteer work with a wildlife trust (I know its not very effective altruism) and its sad how true this is. Just this week I was at a session where we were mostly undoing the harm done by a well meaning landowner trying to reforest land poorly. Boring charities like that which just do tree planting and maintenance as part of their regular operations rather than "adopt a tree bring your kids to plant a forest!!" seem to be the only ones who actually do tree planting effectively. My trust manages about a 95% survival rate with the only maintenance after the planting being removing the tree guards.
99% of that problem is planting the wrong trees in the wrong soil. Most EU for example has a fetish-like fixation on growing vast spans of pine, on soils that do not support pine at all, and for variety, force poplar, linden and decorative apple-trees in the middle of a city where they instantly get sick and die.
Meanwhile, the ecosystem of continental Europe is mostly geared towards various types of oak.
It's not that they're less efficient. It's that there isn't room for the needed amount of trees. (We can't even keep the ones we still have.)
I've got no idea whether they're less efficient, or even how you would measure efficiency in that context. Personally I find just having trees around is a net benefit. So by that measure trees are extremely efficient.
Who is we? The U.S. is reforesting rapidly
We is humanity. And I'm not sure the US is reforesting at all. I see lots of forests of dead and dying pine trees. Canada isn't the only country that's experiencing a increase in forest fires. (OTOH, it's been about a decade since I rode along 5 and saw all the dead and dying pine(?) trees. (I assume they're pine, because they're some sort of conifer, pine trees are common in the region, and I'd just been reading about the pine beetle infestation. But the exact species is irrelevant to the point. The area was still called "forest", but about half the trees looked dead or dying.)
I once calculated that the entire world’s net carbon emissions could be neutralized by planting paulownia trees in an area the size of Ukraine and burying all the resultant wood. This would be considerably less expensive than the dozens of trillions people want to spend on other methods, and not require hypothetical future tech.
It would be even simpler to plant the correct species of trees in the correct environment and let it do its thing. Sure, paulownia is the most efficient carbon grabber, but its not the easiest to grow on any type of soil. The beat solution is just to replant the logged areas with the types of trees that used to grow there before humans cut them down.
Direct air capture costs $500/ton now, and the EPA SSC at a 5% discount rate is $12/ton. It doesn’t make any sense to use discount rates lower than nominal gdp growth, because 1. any public good that increases productivity by a fixed amount forever would have infinite value. 2. Other investments can easily beat the rate of nominal gdp growth.
perhaps, but an average tree absorbs approximately 22 kilograms of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year, so a copse of trees can make up for one car. If you add all the other economic, social, psychological and environmental benefits of trees, there is no excuse why we are not spamming saplings and seeds at every available surface.
I am not a botanist/ecologist, is it true that there is tons of land where trees would naturally flourish without further human intervention if seeds were planted, and the problem is just that no tree seeds have ever gotten there through normal ecological processes?
That seems like a stunning L for evolution and ecological equilibriums, but maybe it's trivially true?
Also - since bamboo grows so fast, is it a more efficient way to capture carbon than slower trees/plants?
I think for many purposes, bamboo counts as a “tree”, because it is a tall woody plant. Basically every plant family separately re-invented the “tree” body plan, and bamboo is the grass family’s version.
A lot of tree planting initiatives fail for the reason you mention - they figure “trees are good, we aren’t using land, let’s plant some trees here” and don’t stop to think about why there aren’t currently trees on this land if we aren’t using it.
There is a more relevant plan though of finding land where humans cut down forest to turn it into agriculture or coal mines or whatever, and get people to stop using it for agriculture or coal mines and let the trees come back. Planting seedlings sometimes accelerates the process a bit compared to just letting the trees seed it (particularly if there are apex trees that used to live in the region but now only exist far away).
The number one region where replanting is needed are urban areas. Trees wont naturally replant on carefully maintained asphalt no matter how long you wait.
Yeah urban trees are great. They also have the advantage that they are often actively maintained, so they can survive even if the local climate wouldn’t support them. They aren’t that significant for carbon reduction though, since there’s so little urban land and the possible tree density is limited. They are good for human benefits though.
Hmmm, just had a thought: bamboo is carbon negative whereas concrete is carbon positive. So have a building material consisting of mostly bamboo with concrete pouted in between it.
Convenient compilation of prior research on related subjects: https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/stellarcolony.php#bamboo
I think you've just reinvented wattle-and-daub.
There's an enormous amount of land that used to be old-growth forest and has been cleared by humans over the millenia. IDK how suited it necessarily is for trees *now* - in a lot of cases we've probably made the soil less fertile - but in principle it's no knock on evolution that trees aren't growing in fields we deliberately cleared of trees.
With that said, land is ultimately finite, and there's an awful lot of fossil fuels in the Earth's crust. Also, we're using some of that land for stuff.
Another area that is ripe for replanting are man made cattle ranches. I don't know what happens to feed grass growth under a canopy of trees, but there's probably some mutually exclusive dynamics going on (else, why clear the land in the first place?).
Generally a closed forest canopy doesn't allow enough sunlight for grasses to grow. And if the forest floor is carpeted thickly enough in herbaceous material like grass or ferns, it impedes the regeneration of tree seedlings.
the main issue is the water table, not the soil itself. As long as the land is the right level of moist, you can replant the trees that used to grow there since the last Ice Age, and they will beat the odds eventually.
The main problem with reforestation is the fetish-like desire to plant the kind of trees we want, not the kind that can survive there, and drying/watering the land to achieve that. Europe takes the cake here, we destroyed countless square miles of perfectly fine, soggy-soiled oak forests and now try and fail to replant them with pines. We buried miles of alder and willow-rich swamps in sandy soils to force more pine there, which promptly rots at the roots from too much groundwater.
Bamboo is considered an invasive pest by many people, because it grows so quickly in places where they don't want it.
There is a fair bit of land that was covered in forests. Then humans chopped all the forest down and didn't replant it.
A lot of that land is covered in farms, but not all of it.
There's factors like soil ph, soil nitrogen content, slope, drainage, and sunlight. Different trees have different preferences, and might do poorly in a non-optimal environment. I can imagine a situation where a change in the local geography means that trees suited for environment A can't get across a stretch of environment B to an uncolonized patch of environment A.
That said, birds and deer and other similar animals often "carry" seeds around, maybe even depositing them with a bit of fertilizer. But then, animals like deer also eat young trees. So the animal factor works both ways.
The problem with trees is that they take a lot of space. There are limits to how much more of the planet we can permanently cover in forests.
Trees are actually generally not an effective carbon fixation method in the present environment. They used to be, in the carboniferous period, before microbes evolved which could decompose wood. But now, dead trees generally release their carbon back into the atmosphere over the course of their decomposition. Reforestation is carbon-negative, but forested land is carbon-neutral since it's in an equilibrium where it's releasing as much carbon through decomposition as it's taking in through photosynthesis. Although, you can sequester the carbon longer term if you cut the tree down and treat it in a way that makes it resistant to decomposition.
But over a long time frame, carbon sequestration is not usually a meaningful benefit of planting trees.
But surely the trees are not being planted in existing forests?
The point is that trees only sequester the carbon temporarily before releasing it back into the atmosphere. Forests are carbon neutral because they're in an equilibrium between trees sequestering carbon and releasing it. If we want to sequester carbon, trees don't offer a very long-term solution, unless we cut them down and store the wood under conditions that offer long-term protection from decay. Whatever other benefits trees provide, other methods come out far ahead in terms of effective carbon sequestration.
But surely, new forests are not carbon neutral compared to a past where there was no forest?
Are you assuming that any tree you plant dies without reproducing?
You have to bury the trees and make sure they don't decompose. But you're probably going to have to bury whatever hydrocarbons you get from carbon capture anyway, so I'm not sure how big a difference it will make in the end.
Or actually use the wood and then replant the trees; repeat. Are my bookcases decomposing faster than wood would in a mine?
What are your grandkids going to do with your bookcases when they inherit them, given that they probably won't care to own any books?
That’s about as likely as their not riding bikes, or having pills for dinner.
Throw them away, letting them get buried in landfills. This study says that it mostly doesn't get broken down. I think. I'm not good at reading studies. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0956053X1730942X
People did the calculations on that, and basically, trees don't remove enough carbon.
I ran some rough numbers. And the amount of forest we need to return CO2 to per-industrial levels worked out to be 2x earths land area. (Rough numbers.)
wonder, if there is a cheap, environmentally friendly, and technologically durable alternative to asphalt that would be white (or light gray/beige/pink/light blue whatever) instead of near black? Or maybe its just a matter of adding some white agent to existing asphalt to make it lighter in colour?
The first thing that comes to mind is concrete. It's light gray in color, abundantly available, and just as good as asphalt at most of the things that asphalt does. Unfortunately, it has well-known problems with cracking under thermal variance that asphalt does not have, making asphalt the clear winner in terms of durability. I've read about a few different groups working on solutions to this, but nothing that's commercially viable quite yet AFAIK.
"Carbon capture" is literally in the list that Scott wrote and the person you're responding to quoted.
I mean, the correct answer to "What do we do with clean, limitless power?" is "Literally everything". Everything that isn't a physical plot of land becomes cheaper and/or more accessible.
If the question is narrowed to "What do we do with clean, limitless power that we don't already do a lot of?", then space flight, routine terrestrial flight, desalination, and massive reshaping of the Earth's crust are good options.
Fair enough. But a lot of those would require other advances in addition to cheap energy. Desalination really wouldn't. The only major other thing that would be required is to ship the purified water around in bulk, and we already know how to efficiently ship liquids in bulk; we do it with petroleum all the time.
Remember that we can apply purification technologies to wastewater as well as salt water.
1/3 or so of water today is used for thermoelectric power generation. That goes away in a nearly-all-solar world. Residential consumption usually goes through wastewater treatment facilities, and with current technologies implemented at scale we could get 80-90+%recovery (a lot of these systems can also be implemented in a home if you want!). Farming is the more difficult case. Can't really recapture transpiration water unless you're farming indoors... which gets a lot easier with super cheap energy. But even without that, a mostly-solar-power world can cut fresh water demand by nearly 2/3 long before you start having to worry about shipping water from coasts to farmland.
This is true, but that's mostly cutting freshwater demand from places where freshwater is already abundant enough for farming. But places like Australia, huge swathes of the Middle East, etc. would become vastly more habitable with access to cheap desalinization, much more easily than we could divert water to there from other more arable locations around the world.
100% agreed
I'm imagining a gigantic desalination plant on the Mediterranean, with the outflow diverted to the Qattara Depression.
Could do halfway-indoors agriculture with inflatable tents, like an enormous transparent air mattress: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/28/domes-are-very-over-rated/ Natural shape doubles as a funnel directing both rainwater from above, and any condensation on the underside, toward some sort of combined irrigation / HVAC machinery at the anchor points.
We know how to ship petroleum for a price of several dollars per barrel. That’s not going to be a viable price for water unless there’s a very special place that has a reason to exist even with really expensive water.
If the power to run the pumps on your pipeline is cheap, that cost comes down pretty significantly.
Does it? I would have thought most of the cost was actually building and maintaining the pipelines (and more importantly, tanker ships), not the energy for pumping. In any case, no one has ever transported oil at the scale that water would be transported here. The entire world’s oil consumption is only a bit more than New York city’s water consumption.
Well, I don't think you'd be shipping much desalinated water by tanker ships, you'd produce it at the nearest coastline.
In terms of flow rates, the trans-Alaska pipeline can ship 340,000 cubic metres per day, which is about 4 cubic metres per second. The flow rate of the Thames River (to pick a medium-sized river that most people will be kinda-familiar with) is about 100 m^3/s so you'd need 25 trans-Alaska pipelines to create one Thames. The trans-Alaska pipeline is only 48 inches in diameter (smaller than most TVs) so it's not hard to imagine scaling this up by a factor of 25 at less than 25 times the cost.
Desalination costs are about 1/3 power. We'd need other advances if we want to get more than 50% extra water for the same cost.
How much of that is because the existing desal plants were optimized for energy being expensive? A setup designed for intermittent operation, taking advantage of electricity prices down around "we'll pay you to take it," might be able to get away with far lower capital costs relative to throughput capacity.
I have no idea. And looking for a better source it's a third to half the cost. You're probably right that we could get it cheaper than that.
Possibly useful, though I haven't double-checked it myself: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/10/26/we-can-terraform-the-american-west/
> The only major other thing that would be required is to ship the purified water around in bulk, and we already know how to efficiently ship liquids in bulk; we do it with petroleum all the time.
Quantity scales with water are quite a lot bigger than for petroleum,
Humans already move large amounts of water around with dams, canals, pipes ect.
What do you mean by massive reshaping of Earth's crust?
It currently costs a lot to move enormous piles of dirt from one place to another, especially if you want to do it in a precise way. (e.g., not exploding a mountaintop). This is mostly because dirt, rock, and clay are heavy, which means a lot of force is required to move it. With boundless energy, you can generate the force more easily and cheaply, meaning we'd probably do a lot more customizing of medium-to-large swaths of land. Things like building local mountains, valleys, and the like. Like how in Sim City 2000 you could start with a "blank" city and then just create the rivers, oceans, and mountains you wanted. Applications include aesthetic appeal, preservation activities, and for large scale industrial efforts.
I'm sceptical that sufficient cheap energy is the main limitation towards doing things like building mountains and valleys. The engineering challenges regarding f.ex. geotechnical, environmental, hydrogeology, hydrologic issues etc. etc. would be daunting.
The real answer is "create jobs." Everything else is detail.
We could use the limitless clean energy to rotate wheels in one direction, and then employ a lot of people to rotate them back. Problem solved.
But those jobs won't create yet more jobs. A functioning economy consists of multiple nested recursive systems, replicating themselves outward.
Yes, I know you were being facetious.
Right. It's sort of like asking "what would you do with more money?" I dunno...a bunch of different stuff, most likely.
Sufficient abundant energy and automated labor solve every other scarcity challenge. This is just totally obvious.
True, but the words "and automated labor" are doing a whole lot of work there. (No pun intended.)
It doesn't solve the scarcity of land in fashionable cities, which is the only scarcity problem that the Western middle class cares about.
>which is the only scarcity problem that the Western middle class cares about.
<mildSnark>
Well, there is also the limited number of admissions to prestigious universities. :-)
( (near)-zero sum from "prestigious" )
</mildSnark>
Cheap energy means cheap steel, allowing more and taller skyscrapers. Cheap lighting, potable water, ventilation, imported manufactured goods, so the spaces below remain pleasantly habitable. So, yes, to some extent it could.
The greater obstacle is land speculation, solution to which is a land value tax.
The current limiting factor on tall skyscrapers isn't the cost of the steel, it's the planning permission.
And the difficulty of that planning permission is deeply entangled with incentives from land speculation, which I already agreed is the greater obstacle.
The cost of building is actually significant. Look at skyscraper costs in UAE for example. It's billions of dollars.
And most of that cost isn't steel. There is a lot of labor. And a fair bit on carpeting and plumbing and some on equipment.
Ok. Everything is connected. If steel gets much cheaper, then sky scrapers get a bit cheaper, and so slightly taller. But this isn't a big effect.
abundance of free energy would do wonders solving global poverty, improve literacy and education worldwide, thus making Western Middle Class mostly obsolete, and thus, irrelevant. WMC are a bunch of specialists that we only need until we can automate them away or have developing world's lower middle class do their jobs remotely.
I thought that even with free electricity, there is a big problem of what to do with the leftover brine. It's corrosive, and toxic to ecosystems.
Well, just for starters, a lot of it is directly useful. You can extract salt, other mineral resources, and even small amounts of gold from seawater.
The gold isn't worthwhile, but the uranium might be. It seems right on the edge of practicality. (But what' you'd use it for if electricity were really cheap isn't that clear.)
Uranium would still be critical when optimizing for watts-per-kilogram, mostly meaning space travel. Gold might be worth setting aside a channel for if you're going to be thoroughly sifting and sorting all the rest of the sludge regardless.
Like Bob Frank said, it can be used. The chemical industry will guzzle it up in a lot of cases, certainly for all of the desalination plants that are geographically close to chloralkali plants that need brine as a raw material, and potentially for the ones that are further away as well depending on demand.
a pool a brine is essentially a giant battery - we could do interesting things with it.
But realistically, the amount of brine that would result from this is negligible compared to the size of the ocean. Just tow it a 100 miles off shore and dump it into the Pacific. All the post-salination brine we could ever produce would be like a single grain of salt in a bathtub when thrown into the ocean.
That would be my immediate answer too. There is hardly a more fundamental issue than access to potable water. Even in regions like Central Europe, which have never been in danger of permanent water scarcity, falling groundwater tables have been causing concern in recent years. Climate change and changing rainfall patterns will only compound that problem.
Where would Central Europe get water to desalinate from though?
Well the point was more that water is or can be an issue just about anywhere. If it really came to a need for desalination for Central Europe though, it would be solvable in principle, for example through desalination on the coast and transporting the fresh water through pipelines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipeline#Water
Bring back aqueducts! The future is retro!
Hours since I last thought about the Roman Empire: 0
From what I can find, energy is about a third of the cost of desalination. Getting rid of that cost wouldn't be that big a deal.
Huh. Where did you see that? I'll admit I'm no expert in the field, but what I've heard from people who are is that energy costs are the largest factor by far. If you've got solid data that says otherwise I'd love to see it.
Google. Looks like my first result was this: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/how-much-energy-does-desalinisation
Googling around more I found this better-looking source: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/how-much-energy-does-desalinisation which said it's a third to a half. Do you have any sources at least that good saying otherwise? Or say the same thing. The important thing is to get accurate information.
What are the dozen major problems that desalinization would cause to vanish?
We could have home appliances that never break. Right now, our dishwashers, refrigerators, etc. are designed to be as energy efficient as possible to the detriment of being long-lasting. *This is an excuse I've heard, planned obsolescence being unreasonably financially successful is probably playing a role here too.*
The biggest problem with dishwashers isn't energy; it's that they can't *scrub.* It's the classic "we have to wash the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher" complaint: if you put dishes (or especially cookware) in with non-tiny amounts of food stuck to them, it's more likely to end up baked on in the drying phase than cleaned off.
Adding more power won't fix that. More likely would be the outcome (admittedly exaggerated for comedic effect) memorably demonstrated in the pilot episode of Home Improvement, when Tim soups up the dishwasher with More Power™ and it ends up exploding.
Desalination is already cheap and abundant.
Water Desalination is a big one, but you could also do some pretty insane recycling of materials with super-cheap energy.
Eventually you'd have to. At some point it has to be easier to recycle landfills to get at various metals than to dig up increasingly less profitable mines, right?
Seems to me the question of what we'd do with cheap or near/limitless power is similar to someone in 1970 or 1980 wondering what consumers would do with a personal computer.
I agree that fresh water is likely one of the commodities which will become much cheaper if the price of energy goes to zero.
An other example would be aluminum, where 34% of the costs are electricity costs, and another 37% of the costs are for the raw materials (alumina, etc), which would likely also drop if the prices for electricity and metals would drop.
For some plants, it might become economically feasible to grow them under optimal artificial light 24x7 (the way cannabis is sometimes grown in areas where it is illegal), thereby decreasing prices of raw food.