[extropy-chat] Bill Moyers' Comments -GlobalEnvironmentCitizenAward

[spike]

Jon Swanson:

What are the better solutions to the CO2 problem you had in mind?


Mostly growing new forests where now are grassy plains.

Do the calculations, they are not at all difficult.  I
understand CO2 has gone from about 300 parts per million
in the atmosphere to about 360 in this century.  So 60 ppm
is the reduction goal, and if a square meter of atmosphere
weighs about 1e5 newtons, so it has a mass of about 1e4 kg.
The earth's radius is about 6.4e7 meters and the surface
area of a sphere is 4*pi*r^2 so about 5e14 m^2 so an
atmosphere has a mass of about 5e18 kg.  60 ppm means about
3e14 CO2, which is about 1e14 kg of carbon, if we dont get
too worried past 1 digit precision.

Wood is nearly all carbon (assuming one digit precision), so about
1e11 cubic meters of wood must be produced, bundled and
sunk in the sea or squirreled away in Antarctica somewhere.

Of course it is a big wood pile: 10 meters deep by 100
km on a side, but land is cheap down there.  Hell its
nothing but ice, snow and a few penguins, and they don't vote.

Can this be produced?  A 10-15 year old eucalyptus globulus
is about something over meter diameter and fifteen meters tall, 
so for single digit precision we can estimate it at 10 cubic
meters of wood, so we would need 1E10 such logs.  Can we
produce ten billion of these?  I think we can.  Imagine
them on 20 meter centers, so a couple thousand of these
can be produced on each square km, so a couple good sized western 
U.S. states, the obscure ones that aren't good for much
of anything and no one ever heard of anyway (such as Wyoming and
Utah) is close enough to a million square km there, two billion 
trees per generation of 10-15 years, it would only take 
5 generations (50 to 75 years) to generate that 1e14 kg of 
carbon in the form of eucalyptus logs.

And all it would cost us is a couple of red states and a
good sized river, such as the Sacramento or the Columbia,
and we are there.  We have 50 of them, we would never miss
a couple.  And we haven't even started to use up
Australia yet, mate.  Or Africa.  There they are, sitting on
the Sahara desert not doing anything, and a skerjillion
low-wage people needing jobs.  Why do we sit around and
wring our hands over global warming instead of getting 
on with fixing it?  The Kyoto accord doesn't have the
right means of fixing it.

spike