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First Successful Demonstration of CO2 Capture Technology
An anonymous coward writes "Global Research Technologies, LLC (GRT), a technology research and development company, and Klaus Lackner from Columbia University have achieved the
successful demonstration of a bold new technology to capture carbon from the air. The "air extraction" prototype has successfully demonstrated that indeed carbon dioxide (CO2) can be captured from the atmosphere. This is GRT's first step toward a commercially viable air capture device."
Yes, but the paper companies only plant single species fast growing trees. Those can not replace the complex ecosystem in the rain forests.
Wood pulp is mostly soft wood, with spruce, pine and fir being real popular. Hardwood is sometimes used, but much more rarely and then generally birch. In the US at least a large amount of it is grown just for that purpose. There is neither the need nor reason to use old growth. Young, small, even diseased and dying trees do just fine. Thus it is fairly economical to farm them.
Old, large trees of the hardwood variety are much more valuable for construction and thus you see them used there. No point in using an expensive tree for paper when a cheap one does quite well.
That's not to say there's no reason to recycle, but please let's not spread BS about paper production. It is not people sneaking in to the rain forest and cutting down huge, thousand year old trees. It's tree farms in the US growing some scraggly pine and pulping that.
> I think you will find most paper pulp comes from native hardwood forests
Hardwoods for the most part can be sold as lumber and are more valuable in that form than as paper, even in the poorest countries. Making paper out of oak and maple is financially the equivalent to melting down dimes and reforming them in the shape of nickels. I'm not saying it never happens, but it is not the norm. Paper is generally made from fast-growth wood that doesn't make very valuable lumber, typically pine or other conifers.
What's really interesting is that it requires less total financial outlay, and less energy (discounting solar radiation that would otherwise not be harnessed), to maintain fast-growth pine plantations and make paper from those, versus recycling paper. Of all the things that you can recycle, paper is substantially the least worthwhile, both environmentally and economically. (The most worthwhile is probably glass, but just about any metal is quite worth recycling too. Plastics vary.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Hi. I own a pine tree farm outside of Cleveland, Texas, and I am here to reply to your assertions.
Hardwood is a piss-poor way to generate pulpwood, because hardwood grows so slowly. The softwood pines, and some of the new varieties of grasses, are much more efficient. The majority of American industrial woodpulp comes from American and Canadian softwoods (although this is changing; see below). We are also seeing the slow rise of an industry around the pulpy grasses.
Not in America. That means that if there is any brazen hacking going on, or urban sprawl, it is balanced by new plantings elsewhere.
While the pine-trees are indeed bred to be "supertrees", their resistance is aimed at diseases and at early competition (i.e. they are bred to grow a tall canopy as fast as possible in order to beat out woody competition). The bugs don't care -- in fact I will think of your statement next time I'm in my monoculture forest swatting (or running from) the hordes of insects. For that matter, part of my land is wettish river bottomland, completely covered in random wild trees, yet the larger critters and the birds seem to prefer the drier pines.
Still, you are right that a pine forest's understory and associated critters are relatively sparse... but that is not due to monoculture; it is true of any pine forest, even the much-vaunted old-growth redwoods in California. This is because pine needles naturally acidify the soil, and most other plants can't tolerate that. It is the pine's own natural anticompetitive practice.
Either way, pines (and other softwoods) are still the fastest way to sequester large amounts of airborn carbon. Your beloved understory vegetation has a fast grow/die/rot cycle which does not permanently sequester any carbon, and which slows down the trees which do. Perhaps you should disentangle your pro-carbon-sequestration argument from your pro-biodiversity argument, because the fastest and most profitable way to sequester airborne carbon is also the least biodiverse. (And if you compromise on "most profitable", then brace yourself for the world's unwillingness to do it.) The reverse is also true: the most biodiverse place in the world is the rainforest, and rainforests have so much rot that they do not consume any net carbon at all. (If you think they do, I'd love to hear an explanation of where they're storing it.)
True enough. Domestic timber production is the answer... and indeed was the answer here in America. We had a great pulp market until the feds, under pressure from Environmentalists, banned logging in national forestlands. That drove a lot of the domestic mills out of business, and when they died, the bottom fell out of the pulp market. Presently, I will be paid $0 for the pulpwood take from this year's thinning. Now what effect do you suppose that will have on
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