I kind of shit C sequestration in general, because I think a lot of the methods out there are pipe dreams, pushed by some C-suites.

To even have a hope in hell of dealing with climate change we need a full transition to renewables, whatever that looks like (I’m not fussy). It’s like trying to spend your way out of debt otherwise, or at the very best, taking on debt to invest, and hoping that the rate of return outpaces the rate of your loan interest.

Part of the reason I dislike the tree planting method for C offsets for a few reasons:

1. As you indicated, you can lose your progress to fire, which is becoming increasingly common due to climbing temperatures (loan interest goes brrrrrr…)

2. All C storage is temporary in biological systems. While some forms can be really, really recalcitrant (biochar: half lives of 800 years or more), eventually it all gets released. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and is in fact how biological systems work, and must work to have balance, but we need to literally need to remove carbon in perpetuity from the system, as the source was geologically locked away til someone let some monkeys who were far too curious and good at running into the biology lab.

3. When numbers are the target, forest diversity suffers. Oh fab, you planted a gazillion short-lived Aspen. Thanks for that. The deer are gonna love it but a lot of other stuff is gonna wish it had niche space.

I’m totally with you on the deforestation/diversity part, but I think we are asking too much from trees, and for humans to not be lazy, shitty capitalists who can’t see past the end of their collective noses.

I’m not saying I have an answer to C storage; there are some geological storage methods (like storing in tailings) that look super cool, and would remove the C for much longer times, but I’m not holding my breath, for many of the reasons I’ve touched on. Don’t even get me started on CCS plants like Hieldelberg’s pet project.

Where I see C storage coming in, is a way to minimize the impact of future projects, in the way of scrubbers, or direct deposit methods rather than hoping to suck emission right out of the air, after the fact.

You don’t need continual replanting - they have seeds, remember? A later seral stage forest has typically gone through the thinning phase, where the best trees out-compete the others and choke them out. Anything that germinates now needs to compete with the overstory.

As an aside, we can only really effectively use trees for sequestration in areas that were not productive forest before. That is, you can’t clear cut a bunch of shit, disturb the soil, and make an oil sands project and hope to come out ahead in terms of emissions/sequestration lost (without even considering oil production emission). Reclamation can help you get back to where you were, maybe… But to out perform a natural system is a tall order.

I hate cops as a general rule, but this seems a bit of an unfair opinion unless you’ve got evidence for this specific officer.

I mean, I L O V E pizza. This much though?

Yay captialism?

We saw them, too. Those people are insane. Flat out. Even if they were going to the gardens, it’s nuts. Hell, 3 mile house is a rough go too.

We hiked down in 6 hrs and out the next day in 6.5 hrs. We crushed the bottom part, but my trail runner friend pretty much had to carry me for the upper part of the hike out. Not really, but he seemed hardly out of breath every time we stopped and I wanted to slap him.

I’ve done this hike; to the very bottom campground, over night, and then hike back up the next day.

I was about 25, then (2011 ish) . I did nothing but field work (hike through the bush - no trails, dig when you get there) all summer, for 300 hrs a month. As a result, I was really used to walking for a very long time, under shitty conditions. Another co-worker came with me (he was into trail running/marathons). We went in May, started our hike down at 4 am (to beat the heat) and hiked back up about the same time the following day.

Let me tell you, this is on the list of top 5 hardest things I’ve ever done. Maybe even in the top 3.

the last quarter of the hike to the bottom is very challenging, because you get into some sandy/dune parts, and they just take whatever you have left out of you.

Hiking out, the bottom half (to Havasupai Gardens) isn’t bad, but then it’s swtichback city, population: you. I started off doing 5 switch backs at a time, but I wasn’t even to 3-mile house by the time I was dropping down to 1, or maybe 1/2 a switch back at a time, and then needing a break.

I can’t imagine being 40-50 and doing this in the heat we’re experiencing now; it was hot as balls when we did it in May.

You know what your 94 cutlass can do that his cyber truck can’t? Vote!

Wait I have a meme for this (and absolutely no one is surprised):

Molybdenum defficiency, maybe?

My dogwood is eating my hydrangea

Just trying to bring it back to the good old days when children yearned for the mines, and men got blended up in industrial machinery.

Not that I wanted the debate to go the way it did

It probably works for you because the triangle is legit and used heavily in soil science.

Stuff closer to a corner is more closely related to the main particle size (sand, silt or clay). What I don’t like about this meme though is that things like ‘grated parmesan’ should be right next the Parmesan-blahblah-im-too-lazy-to-spell-it

My reaction as a soil scientist:

I should call her

Well fuck.