Many pine trees in managed forests, such as the European spruce, take roughly 80 years to reach maturity, being net absorbers of carbon during those years of growth – but once they reach maturity, they shed roughly as much carbon through the decomposition of needles and fallen branches as they absorb. As was the case in Austria in the 1990s, plummeting demand for paper and wood saw huge swathes of managed forests globally fall into disuse. Rather than return to pristine wilderness, these monocrops cover forest floors in acidic pine needles and dead branches. Canada's great forests for example have actually emitted more carbon than they absorb since 2001, thanks to mature trees no longer being actively felled. Arguably, the best form of carbon sequestration is to chop down trees: to restore our sustainable, managed forests, and use the resulting wood as a building material. Managed forests certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) typically plant two to three trees for every tree felled – meaning the more demand there is for wood, the greater the growth in both forest cover and CO2-hungry young trees.
If you allow decomposition then obvioisly net must be zero. If you createa object and destroy it, it pretty much has to release its source material in some form.
If tree stops growing it obviously has to have zero net. Anything absorbing anything has either to store it - grow, or release it in some form. Carbon is element, what are the options? Store it permanently, transform chemically and release, or transform it atomically and change the element but tree is not a nuclear plant.
The forest binds some amount of carbon and oxygen for a time being but then it is released back when it burns or decomposes, etc. It is really insignificant when compared with steady flow of carbon from fossil fuels.
Should demand ever increase, then the felled trees could be reharvested, cured, then used as normal.
Bamboo Mountain could be a tourist attraction. "The Mountain that Saved the Climate!"
There is an argument that agriculture is a better future for this part of the world and there would certainly need to be better options here than wooden buildings. Maybe some sort of carbon polymer concrete mixture?
The carpenter ordered the walls in Austria and they set everything up in three days. The outer walls and the roof were pre-fabricated too and delivered in parts. Really crazy.
The house smells pretty good with all the wood, let's see how the climate will be when we live in it.
I hope you like it because that smell will take a long time to fade and will be your new cologne :)
My parents used to live in a wooden house. Even 10+ years after they built it whenever I'd visit for a few days my suitcase and clothes all smelled of wood afterwards.
Have you left wood exposed in interior? How does it work for cabling and hooks for pictures and furniture? Where is your house? Did costs were lower than with typical technology around your location?
For me a big plus is what you mentioned, that it is very quick, that certainly helps to keep costs and the risk lower.
Walls in the hallway and storage rooms are left exposed as well as one wall in the kids rooms.
The living and sleeping rooms are covered by clayslabs and in-between the electrical cables are placed. Everything is plastered then with clay“stuff“.
We hope that clay will help to control the climate.
The cables are put through the walls to install switches in the hallways.
To remove carbon from atmosphere it must be sequestered. Sequestration means it is no longer available to go back to the atmosphere. It means it can no longer be part of cycle of life, it must be removed and prevented from getting back in the cycle.
The reason we have more carbon in atmosphere is not that we have felled trees but that we have dug out a bunch of carbon (coal, oil, gas) that for a long time was not taking part in the cycle.
What is surprising is that supposedly intelligent people still don't get the basic facts right.
There are two flows of carbon to our atmosphere (and oceans).
One flow is cyclic which means carbon involved in the proces is just changing form constantly but the total amount of it stays relatively constant as it is the same carbon just changing form. The only way this process could alter atmospheric CO2 is if amount of biomass drastically changed. It can't cause infinite rise of atmospheric CO2 as the amount of biomass is finite and relatively small. Even if you burned all biomass and converted it to CO2 it would just dissolve in our oceans causing slight acidification as oceans have capability to dissolve more CO2 than our entire biomass in circulation. There is not enough biomass on Earth to cause long term rise in atmospheric CO2 unless another mechanism is present.
The second flow is steady addition of carbon from outside the cycle, from fossilized stores. This carbon has been unavailable for hundreds of millions of years since times when our atmosphere was very different from todays. Every molecule dug out from sequestered stores ends up in the atmosphere as addition, causing steady rise in CO2. Oceans have only limited ability to buffer long term flows of CO2.
http://www.thegreenestdollar.com/2009/05/cob-houses-building...
Long history of industrial usages (before prohibition)
An excellent material for engineering.
Grows anywhere, fast, a good greenifier.
At the same time, there are also issues of robustness to consider. If you're only building a house that might last for a few decades, you need to consider what happens to the building materials at the end of its useful life. More than that, depending on your environment, you need to consider risks that might cause either a premature end to that useful life or a degradation of performance over time.
For example, here in the UK, we don't get a lot of really bad storms of the kind that central America sees, but we do get storms strong enough to cause major structural damage from time to time, and the rate is expected to increase for a while due to the changing environmental conditions. The kinds of insulated panels used for a lot of timber frame construction today have many good points, but being about as robust as tissue paper in the face of fast-moving debris flying around outside your house in a bad storm is not one of them. There's not much point planning the environmental credentials of a new building over, say, a 50-60 year assumed lifetime if in reality the expected time before being seriously damaged in a bad storm is only half that.
You also have to consider the possibilities for timber elements changing shape over time, which in turn can reduce the overall thermal efficiency of a building, allow damaging pests to get in, increase sound transmission, or even in severe cases reduce fire containment or compromise structural integrity entirely. We have very changeable seasons here: as it happens, we're reaching all-time high temperatures of nearly 40C as I'm writing this, but we also have lows in the same areas that can push towards -10C or even -20C. That's a lot of expansion and contraction, and while again engineered timber has significant advantages over solid planks and the like, you do have to consider these kinds of issues as well.
Again, none of this is to say that using more timber in our construction doesn't have some big advantages. We just need to be a little cautious, because there might also be risks, and so far we have relatively little experience with some of these newer timber-based construction techniques to fully evaluate them.
Ikea furniture is made of wood yet they're terrible for the environment because the wood comes from far away, is usually assembled in China, filled of fire-repellent chemicals (among others) and is not very strong because it's low-quality wood (made from throw-away pieces hacked together with glue). So your piece of furniture brings a lot of pollution and is not gonna last, compared to hand-crafted furniture (out of real wood).
The same goes for housing. People have been building houses out of straw and mud for thousands of years. Where you have wood, you'll build a solid base structure out of it and make big houses. When you don't, you'll just make a smaller one (< 15m²). Made a few myself, and these houses are way better than concrete houses: < 1000€ to build, fresh in summer, warm in winter..
But the ultimate solution is to stop the madness of trying to pile up people in huge metal/concrete towers. I too love the comfort of the city and meeting many people but it is not a sustainable way of life and will never be. We should stop listening to these "Green capitalism" and other profiting vampires, and build our actual autonomy before this industrial civilization collapses.
https://leadingtransformation.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/addre...
Irrigating deserts doesn't really work that well. The main problem is, that undistilled water always contains some ions, i.e. salts (it's got electrolytes!). If the main process for loss of water is evaporation these salts are left behind leading to salinization. You don't really want that.
If you want to fight desertification, then you must combat evaporation first, which you'd do for example with engineering the soil. Only after you've figured out how to make the soil keep the water, then you may start to thing about irrigation.
In an ideal free market, perhaps, yes. In the real world, people will just move/flee from dry areas. As the global temperature rises and more regions of Africa and America become uninhabitable, people will just slowly migrate north (or perhaps partially south America). If you thought that we had a refugee crisis, just wait a couple of decades.
This is true for any monoculture. We need to take into account how plants interact with their environment and fellow plants to preserve the humus (the topsoil layer whose microorganisms are essential to plant life). This is what permaculture is about.
There's not a single plant that we're going to find that we can grow everywhere and it's going to save the environment.
In what way, do you have a source?
I very much doubt this is true.
> In a forest environment, SOM originates mainly from litterfall and litter decomposition. It is well known that the litter quality of eucalypts is low (Woods 1974). Eucalypt leaf litter contains large amounts of phenolics (Bernhard-Reversat et al. 2001) which are antibiotic and anti-feeding agent for invertebrate and vertebrate fauna (Waterman and Mole 1994; Harborne 1997). Eucalypt litter quality leads to low biological activity and results in a low litter decomposition rate in eucalypt plantations.
The result of using eucalypts is definitely mixed at best (https://www.aimspress.com/fileOther/PDF/agriculture/agrfood-...) but at the end GP is probably excessive, eucalypts are inferior to almost any other tree species for soil quality but they're not as bad as agricultural land:
> Our results indicate that soils in eucalyptus stands surrounding Ethiopian Orthodox church forests are more acidic and Eucalyptus may have some additional drawbacks that are not considered in this study. Though increased levels of organic matter should function have lower levels of organic matter and nutrients than soils in adjacent indigenous forest. However, there is also evidence that eucalyptus plantations exhibit higher organic matter and nutrient levels in comparison to nearby agricultural land, and no significant decrease in soil pH.
Wait, how so? Dense urban living is the sustainable alternative, if anything.
How so? Concentrated populations means you have to produce (energy, food etc.) far away from where it's consumed. So you need to extract and produce on a big scale so that model becomes sustainable (if it ever is, which i doubt).
When the concentration is smaller, you can live in harmony with your local environment: produce your food, your energy, your clothes and houses with what's around you, which will always be better for the environment than shipping "eco-friendly" materials across three continents before reaching your supermarket aisle.
Production should be as close as possible to consumption. Concentrating populations means you can't locally produce electricity (because you need so much of it, it's dangerous to produce so you put it away from urban centers) or food (because you need so much of it, and the surrounding land is used for "urban development" and other sweet words for gentrification and privatization of space).
So i used to think some smarter industry regulations and government policy could fix the environment. Then i realized our entire civilization is based on fucking things up and exploiting other people, and those holding the reigns will not stop their bloody mess until they're made the planet uninhabitable. It speaks for itself that billionaires invest their fortunes in traveling to Mars.
We already produce enough food and have enough housing for everyone on this planet. On a global scale, a third of the food produced is thrown away. This reaches almost 50% in industrialized societies like Europe/US. Yet many people struggle to fill their fridge. Here in France (official stats by INSEE) 3 million houses are EMPTY (not secondary houses, UNUSED houses) yet 150 000 people sleep on the streets.
The same goes with the environmental crisis. It's not a crisis because we don't know what to do. It's a crisis because we know what to do to save the planet and it goes directly against our way of life as consumers, and against the interests of our ruling classes and industrial elites.
I saw a documentary on Ikea and the furniture supplier was swedish(?) and made with Swedish wood. All the random tat came from china though.
Ultimately though I suspect you're comparing apples and oranges. I would expect a piece of Ikea furniture to be greener than a built to last, solid wood item. But then I wouldn't expect the Ikea furniture to last as long. At what point the made to last furniture become greener, and if that point is reasonable is the question.
But if the trees are already grown then I think we should use them, and not just leave them to rot.
Grow it, shred it, compact it, bury it.
This is something plants can be remarkably good at!
I don't think you can get around irrigation to bootstrap the process. We could probably begin the process by putting down some irrigated top soil, and laying a bio-degradable, transparent moisture barrier to keep the water from evaporating while the ground cover grows.
Alternatively, I'm sure we could construct a man-made river running through a desert to revitalize it. I'm not a geologist, but I suspect that the existence of an active river is a strong influence on whether a region becomes a rain forest or a desert.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8r3d6RpicOc
I recommend the channel (and website) also, particularly the old stuff.
There are two groups of people who will care about the difference in hardness and silicate content. The first is people doing fine precision woodworking. Those people stick to traditional hardwoods so it's a non issue. The second group is the people who are putting saw blades on angle grinders and stacking dado blades on circular saws or other activities that make work more expedient but tend to result in lots of pearl clutching when discussed in polite company. These people depend in part on the softness of the pine they usually work with in order for their preferred techniques to work and will grumble about having to change their techniques for bamboo or any other harder material.
Everyone else who is not working at the limit of their materials and their tools will just shrug their shoulders and say the only difference they notice is that you gotta push the saw a little harder.
You can cut steel with a run of the mill carbide tipped plywood blade on a circular saw. The HSS family of tool steels used in woodworking applications have no problem cutting aluminum. Woodworking tools are completely capable of cutting anything in the wood and composite spectrum Seriously, bamboo is not going to be any more of an issue than modern wood composites. You might suffer a slight reduction in work speed and blade life but that's par for the course when working in harder material and is basically a non-issue.
The dust it generates and the propensity of the plastics to melt instead of cut is the main concern with compose building materials. Working with them is basically no different than wood.
My experience of older mainland European houses is southern France. All the floor beams are made of ancient gnarly woodworm eaten hard wood, but it only really affects the outer cm of wood.
So I wonder if the problem is partially newer building techniques, thinner cut wood, less dense wood?
We need a week or two at -40C (fun fact, -40C is roughly equal to -40F) to really thin them out. We haven't been getting that cold weather, so large numbers of them make it through the winter, and then ravage the trees.
It's related to the dramatic increase of forest fires in Western Canada, because dead trees dry out, provide little coverage to the area they're in (which lets the area dry further), and then burn very easily. All it takes is a lightening strike or some idiot deciding to violate a burn-ban, and then everything goes up.
I've heard the warm weather has led to a "tick-pocalypse" and resurgence of ticks and mosquitoes, particularly on Ontario and Quebec. I don't know about termites, but wouldn't be surprised if the warm weather is doing a poor job suppressing them.
From all I've seen and read, the ecological impact of suburb and country living is a lot more than urban living.
Thinking localism or pastoral will solve exploitation is not only naive but historically illiterate. Bronze age slavery was dubiously an improvement over genocide.
Humanity never really was in harmony with nature - the reason for nomadism was because they depleted the food resources locally. Hell nature is never in harmony with nature! Every effect you lament has happened before including mass extinctions due to life induced atmospheric changes (anaerobic extinction).
From these papers it looks like deforestation has overall a cooling effect, especially in the arctic.
Of course the above is a generalization, and as all of them false in some way. Ask your local forester what applies to the forest in your area, but don't try to apply it to a forest in the next neighborhood as that might be different.
Instead what I suspect happens is that the charcoal from fires weathers, crumbles and becomes part of the soil. Soil is feed for other organisms.
However here is a study that tries to bring some light to carbon pools on over-mature 167-213 year-old trees: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4907/9/7/435/pdf
I believe the article might have been trying to say is that trees tend to die and decompose (or burn) which makes them carbon emitters.
If I have time tomorrow i'll find the page.
We still need farmers in rural areas who will of course use more than their share of resources, but the number of farmers we need is small and so insignificant. It is the semi-rural suburbs that have enough people to make a difference.
Take for example food. When you're on the countryside, it's not complicated to produce more than 90% of what you eat locally (up to 100% for people willing to give up on some spices, oil and other products not grown locally). What makes it complicated is that local farms were coalesced into big industries based on monoculture (which itself destroys the environment) so the food produced on the countryside doesn't feed people locally but serves as a source for big corporations to make derived products (usually less nutritive and bad for health) which rural and urban people alike will go buy in the supermarket (because there is usually no more alternative).
So i agree the current numbers don't reflect that so much, because of the self-perpetuating circle of heteronomy imposed by capitalism. But living on the countryside relying on local production is way more eco-friendly than any industrial civilization could ever be.
Is it, though? More than half of cultures are used for animal exploitation (which most of the world could do without). It appears we currently have around 2 football fields of cultivable land per person living on earth (though this may change soon with the climate).
We also have to take into account that industrial farming and monocultures kill the humus and dry off the land in the long run (over decades) making it more and more sterile (requiring an ever greater dose of fertilizers to grow anything and making the crops more sensitive to heatwaves).
Many serious agronomists (those not employed by the industry) insist not only that another agriculture is possible, but that it's the only way to prevent food shortages in the coming years (which will happen if we insist on chemical-powered monocultures).
Also, a one-garden-per-person model is not the only way to grow locally. We can of course share the land and the work. It just makes things a lot easier when the population isn't so dense that you can't grow your own food locally anymore (which is only the case with big cities).
My personal use of coal/oil (including indirect use in the products I buy) is insignificant to global warming. However across the population of the world...
Not that I think restoring the planet to some technically natural state is particularly desirable. We need a livable and healthy planet a lot more!
So yes you may want to be a purist about it, I'm not sure it's a luxury we can really afford at this time though.
If climate change is really something that needs OMG now levels of response you can't then dismiss every response on philosophical reasons.
Theres plenty of mechanisms where the individual trees grow, but the forest holds less carbon.
The linked article [1] mentions forest fires and insect infestations.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/canada-forests-carbon...