go green, do it, i dare you

[Aeson]

The short lifed plants are necessarially sequestering carbon. They break down quite quickly.

Any system used for food production will have components that break down quickly ... meaning, they are edible ... which is the point. Annuals are fine in this regard.

The better systems will have that edible component produced alongside durable components which persist for long duration.

Permaculture focuses on producing food from such durable systems, though not all components will be durable.

It only takes a glance at our organic veggie beds and our food forest to quickly realize that the 30 foot tall trees are comprised of more carbon than the 8 inch tall lettuce. But we can still fit lettuce in nooks and crannies, along with other annuals. They just shouldn’t be thr main backbone of the system.

[Aeson]

It says most clearly that atmospheroc carbon removal will be necessary.

It says direct capture is at best a niche player. It shouldn’t be a main component in addressing atmospheric carbon.

Run the numbers. Even if they hit their lowest price per ton you’re talking a cost of $366 trillion just to catch up, and an ongoing cost of around $15 trillion a year.

Plus the inconveniences of thermodynamics and entropy. Burning hydrocarbons to power the capture and sequestration of emitted carbon is absurd. It only makes sense if we’re at 100% renewable energy. We’re nowhere near that.

[Aeson]

Probably because the soil is heavy clay that doesn't respond well to amendments; possibly because temperature and precipitation swings are something else; likely because I'm an idiot.

Tomatoes do great, sugar snap peas do great, sweet potatoes do great, up until the past two years my non-nanking cherries dropped all their leaves midsummer and produce 100g tart cherries per tree on the trees that do produce, three plum trees look healthy but only one bears, then that one aborts everything in june, mulberry trees plant themselves all over the damn place and drop fruit everywhere (too bad i am not overly fond of mulberries), potatoes die halfway through and maybe produce a pound or two of potatoes per plant, gave up on corn years ago, squash does great if I can keep up the daily squash bug checks, overwise die early and often, apple trees are hopeless, oh god I'm rambling aren't I?

Heavy clay is no fun to work with. I like mulberries, we got some cuttings last year and some fruits already. At least you know there are things that are working. Sadly the relatives of mulberries I can think of are tropical.

Do you have any nut trees? Nitrogen fixing legume trees are always a good thing to plant.

[Dinner]

Trees only sequester carbon if they aren’t called permaculture?

I said the short lived plants. Please read.

[Aeson]

I said the short lived plants. Please read.

You don’t understand permaculture, carbon flux, the text I quoted, or what I have said.

I said we need 5 billion hectares of food forest to sequester carbon among other things. You’ve thrown up a strawman of pretending I suggested permaculture. However you are still wrong even about your strawman.

Carbon can be sequestered in or from short lived biomass. What matters is the carbon flux in the system as a whole. But even in specific, short lived plants can be used to sequester carbon independently of a system in which they are grown.

For instance using rice hulls grown over 4 months in a gassifier/stove for your cooking results in biochar which can persist for thousands of years in soil. It also offsets other less renewable energy sources for cooking with. You can even heat your house and/or water with such a system. A wide range of shorter lived plants can be used this way.

Using a composting toilet and composting to keep your waste from becoming anaerobic (avoiding further release of methane which is much more harmful and less easy to recapture than CO2) can help keep carbon and nutrients from what you’ve eaten or from farm wastes in the system. This works whether they are from tree crops, perennials, or annuals. Both actively sequestering carbon and indirectly avoiding unnecessary emissions.

[Broken_Erika]

Go green. Like this guy

[Dinner]

One of us ia certainly way off. I am qupting the experts at the IPCC while you are contradicting them and claiming they are all wrong. I will leave it up to others to decide who is right or wrong.

[Aeson]

One of us ia certainly way off. I am qupting the experts at the IPCC while you are contradicting them and claiming they are all wrong. I will leave it up to others to decide who is right or wrong.

The only thing you've quoted is a carbonbrief.org article which in regards to how much land for BECCS quotes a study and says we'd need up to 5x the size of India for it to do the work.

Negative emissions

The 2015 Paris Agreement set a goal of limiting human-caused warming to “well below” 2C and an ambition of staying below 1.5C. Meeting this ambition will require the use of “negative emissions technologies” to remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

This catch-all term covers a wide range of approaches, including planting trees, restoring peatlands and other “natural climate solutions”. However, model pathways developed by researchers rely most heavily on bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). This is where biomass, such as wood pellets, is burned to generate electricity and the resulting CO2 is captured and stored.

The significant potential role for BECCS raises a number of concerns, with land areas up to five times the size of India devoted to growing the biomass needed in some model pathways.

India is 328.7 million ha, so if their max estimate is right 5x is 1.6435 billion hectares. 1.517 billion ha is the actual number in the study.

In most of the mitigation cases, dynamics of agricultural land for food and feed production are affected by land demanding mitigation options such as bioenergy, avoided deforestation or afforestation. The clear exception is in SSP3 where major implementation barriers for land-based mitigation are assumed to occur and where no climate stabilization levels of RCP 2.6 can be attained. Avoided deforestation restricts agricultural expansion in most of the SSPs, with the exception of SSP3 and the low-income regions of SSP4 (MAF and ASIA) due to weak land use change regulation (Fig SI11 and SI12). The land system can also contribute to climate change mitigation by increasing carbon stocks. This trend is observed particularly in the very ambitious mitigation target of RCP2.6, which relies on land-based carbon dioxide removal options such as afforestation or BECCS. Here, afforestation for carbon sequestration increases global forest areas in 2100, compared to Ref, by 262 mio ha in SSP1 and by 601 mio ha in SSP2 (mainly in MAF and LAM) (see also Fig SI18 and SI19). Bio-energy plays a critical role in nearly all mitigation but also in the baseline scenarios. The SSPs allocate between 121 million ha (SSP1) and 473 million ha (SSP4) in the RCP4.5 and between 245 million ha (SSP1) and 1517 million ha (SSP4) in the RCP 2.6 mitigation scenario to ligno-cellulosic bioenergy crop production in 2100. Both land-based CDR strategies (afforestation and BECCS) happen at the expense of other natural land (SSP4), unprotected forests (SSP3), land for food and feed crops (SSP2, SSP4 and SSP5) and pastureland (SSP2, SSP4 and SSP5). Generally, as a result of land needed for large scale bioenergy production and afforestation programs in the mitigation scenarios, the use of land for food and feed production and pasture is reduced, following considerable agricultural intensification (SSP5) and dietary changes (SSP2) compared to the baseline scenarios.

So yes, they "disagree" with me by saying we only need at MAX ~1/3rd the land area to capture carbon via growing biomass as what I'm suggesting we should use for food forests. (Likely due to me not relying on cutting emissions as much, both to avoid burning so much of the biomass for energy, and the likelihood that the current political trends to avoid actually cutting emissions continue.)

The food forests have many other advantages. Not only addressing atmospheric carbon, but also helping alleviate problems with land degradation, erosion, air pollution, wildlife habitat, waterway/ocean health, groundwater, aquifers, droughts, flooding, unemployment, working conditions, overcrowding, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression. There are no downsides if we choose to do it.

[The Mad Monk]

I have four hazelnut "trees" that have been in the ground for at least seven years; first couple of years they were all eaten to the ground every winter by deer or rabbits (or both) until I hit upon steel cloth fencing, and they haven't been eaten to the ground since; unfortunately, they didn't look exactly healthy up until last year, and they are still small and shrub-like. One actually produced "flowers" this year, but thanks to the peculiarities of hazelnut reproduction those flowers won't actually amount to anything until next year.

Still, they aren't complaining, so neither shall I.