Climate change and climate justice

Politics
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Two things about this article bothered me. First, what has been lost might never return. The second thing was this part:

Dubey thinks that if people see compelling visuals more often, it could help keep the problem of climate change from fading out of their minds.

So, all those articles with pictures comparing images of glaciers and mountains from the past with ones taken recently (there were stories like this going back to the '90s, when Al Gore was getting more press coverage) just needed to be seen more often? :thinking: If only there was a way to keep them trending on social media for several months and then do a vibes check to see where climate change lands on the list of top voter priorities…

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File under: Cautious Optimism; (no one box)
https://cleantechnica.com/2025/05/15/clean-energy-shifts-chinas-co₂-emissions-from-growth-to-decline/

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The downsizing at Climeworks, the company that built the world’s first direct air capture facilities, comes one week after journalists in Iceland revealed its two flagship plants have captured far less carbon than their advertised capacity. A spokesperson said the timing of the redundancies was unrelated.

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I’m not an expert on Direct Air Capture, but I’ve read a few process patents and other write-ups. As a chemical engineer, I’m very sceptical.

The brutal truth, no matter which way you slice it, is that 400 ppm (0.04%) is plenty of CO2 to cause trouble, but not enough to make extraction easy.

ETA: not enough to make extraction easy in an industrial process. As is pointed out below, there are things that already do this quite well that aren’t industrial and are therefore trickier to bill for.

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We already have a mechanism for widespread and efficient direct air capture. It takes the atmospheric CO₂ and locks it into a stable, useful even, solid matrix. It even frees up oxygen as a byproduct of the process.

They’re called “trees”.

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I hear the newer models run on 100% renewable energy, too.

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Well, yes. But that’s just assuming that the response is “plant a few trees and it will be fine”, because it won’t.

Establishing new natural woodlands will end up basically carbon neutral once they reach maturity (because trees rot and burn), and it acts slowly, and if you just plant trees in the city and don’t look after them of course they will struggle and many will die, and all the other obvious retorts.

So the answer is: plant new natural woods and forests because those are good for animals and good for people’s mental health and good for water filtration, and good for all sorts of reasons that don’t have anything to do with atmospheric carbon. Plant more trees in the cities, and care for them because they’re good for mental health, and they cool the city, and they provide shade and shelter for wildlife, and they filter particulate pollution.

But for reducing atmospheric carbon, you don’t want natural forests, or a bit of green in the city. You want to take that carbon out of the atmosphere, and out of the carbon cycle. Plant plantations. Use what is grown in buildings. Or if there isn’t enough building going on, then literally just bury it. Find an oxygen free place to bury all that wood, and take it out of the carbon cycle that way. Maybe if you do it right, you’re laying down new fossil fuel beds for the species to come after the species after us.

The point being that trees are self-maintaining, self-propagating, really efficient ways of taking carbon out of the air, and without a lot of extra work on top of that, they’re still not nearly enough, especially if we don’t reduce emissions to zero or as near as dammit as well.

If we can’t use trees to do that, then what the hell chance to we have with machines that we’ve invented? Especially given the time frame we have to work with, which can be summarised as “too late”.

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Solutions and Conclusions
Trees are amazing – they can live hundreds, even thousands of years, and can sustain entire ecosystems within their branches. Oaks can support over 2,000 species. When we reduce them to carbon sinks, we miss much of their value.

As you may have already guessed, my preferred solution is natural regeneration. I’m not alone in this – in 2020 Rewilding Britain* produced a report that argued natural regeneration should be the default method for restoring Britain’s woods. In urban and suburban environments, more carefully planned and managed planting is required. I would love to see tree planting as a requirement for new housing developments due to their well-known cooling effect in summers. As heat waves – such as the ones we saw last summer – are set to continue, we need to adapt and one low-cost way to reduce temperatures in built-up areas is to plant trees.

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It’s almost like we have a pretty good idea what needs to be done, but there are entire industries devoted to making sure it never happens, including by distracting everyone with the mythical chimeras of “carbon capture technology” and “clean coal”, and pumping billions of dollars into those phantasms instead of actually doing anything.

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Yeah I give money to organization founded by a [crypto]ecofascist…

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Also, just because I feel like it deserves to be said explicitly – we could stop cutting down things like rainforests and old growth forests that already exist, and it would have a significant impact. So many of the best carbon sinks we already have are getting ruined.

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Here’s this, for example

(I’m pleasantly surprised the article hasn’t already been deleted from a “.gov” site)

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In my tiny (19 ’ x 25’) I have; a mature manitoba maple, another maple sapling of another species, an american basswood sapling, wild raspberry, red current, virginia creeper, common milkweed and way too much goldenrod. None of which I planted. Some will be staying, but some will have to go; the basswood is too close to the house and will be a big tree, and I want to actually plant some wildlife friendly shrubs and plants. So if you leave things alone, rewilding will happen.

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Often with non-local invasives, though.

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True, as is the case with the red currant, which is going to get pulled up.

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Yes yes yes! That is very important. Reforestation and afforestation are useless as a sole strategy. The climate crisis is not going to have a single silver bullet solution.

1 hectare of trees can sequester about 180 tons of CO2](How many new trees would we need to offset our carbon emissions? | MIT Climate Portal). In the US, that roughly works out to “afforest an area the size of New Mexico, and you’ve covered the US emissions for a year.” The attentive reader will note that it won’t take long to run out of suitable areas the size of New Mexico if this is the sole strategy.

However, afforestation in a world with dramatically reduced emissions does give a path out of this.

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