According to the reference below, massive planting of empress trees could offset the world’s yearly CO2 production. Is this a viable solution? If so, why aren’t we doing it?
Your cite:
Wikipedia:
Who to believe?
Grow hemp, it’s been here as long as Europeans have and it sequesters carbon like a mofo and very quickly too. It takes pollutants and heavy metals out of soil, is an excellent source of food for humans and animals and you also get oil, fiber and building material from it–it makes pretty good shred board. Doesn’t require a lot of water or attention, is pest resistant and overall just a super useful crop. Anyone who tells me a tree can’t be invasive is welcome to fuck themselves with a dildo made of ailanthus and/or eucalyptus.
A couple of things:
First, where are we going to establish all that forest? Much of the arable land suitable for growing Paulownia in North America is already used for agriculture. This is not a tree optimal for dryland growing. There have been mass plantings of Paulownia on land being reclaimed from mining use in the eastern United States. I don’t know how extensive that has been or how it’s worked out in the long run.
The article says “It is a non-invasive, hybrid species”. Color me skeptical on that score unless it’s a sterile hybrid (haven’t found anything specific on “Paulownia Splendor”). Paulownia tomentosa is widely regarded as an invasive exotic whose seedlings spring up all over the place, though my impression is that its “invasion” has been largely confined to waste places and roadsides. Paulownia elongata is supposedly sterile.
Some folks have gotten involved in get-rich-quick schemes planting a bunch of Paulownia, hoping to harvest the wood within a relatively few years (the trees grow rapidly but are somewhat weak-wooded) to sell to Asian markets. I doubt many have made a ton of dough that way.
SmartAleq, any plant that is good at taking heavy metal pollution out of the ground is not an excellent food source. What do you think happens to those pollutants, and where do you think they go when you eat the plant?
Obviously it’s an either/or thing–if you’re trying to clean up a Superfund site then no, that’s not going to be the hemp you use for human food. That will be the hemp you sell off for fiber and construction materials and the oil for industrial use. The hemp you grow on that field in future, on the other hand, will be fine for whatever use you prefer. My point being that hemp is, in addition to being a good food and fiber crop, useful for cleaning up land that’s been polluted so it can be used for more than growing weeds. I suspect you knew that, though.
And reduces heart disease, skin issues,cures cancer,insomnia,arthritis,influenza, diabetes,the clap, mental instability, works as a sunscreen, reduces fever, helps swelling, runny nose, hurt knee, the gout,anxiety, the plague. Wards off hurricanes and thunderstorms, floods, insect infestations,flat tires, bad days at work…
Just get high if you want to, dude. 
I live in Oregon, DUDE, which has legal recreational cannabis and a fairly thriving business in hemp culture (both CBD strains and industrial fiber/seed strains) as well and one of the things we know here is that the difference between cannabis for smoking and hemp is that hemp has less than .3% THC which means you could smoke a fucking barrel of the stuff and not even get a headache. That whole line of blether is so goddamned outdated it ought to be too embarrassing to even bring up in public. Why didn’t you chuck in something about Doritos too?
I know the difference between cannabis for smoking and hemp as well.
My apologies at my sarcastic post.
I know there are literally 5’s of people who extol the supernatural virtues of hemp yet also have zero interest in THC.
Also, goddamned, fucking and doritos.
Where I live, in the southeast, Paulownia is like a weed. Occasionally you see them springing up in unused spaces but they don’t really seem to spread like privet or kudzu.
I had one in an unused corner of the back yard and decided what the hell, I’ll let it grow. It was 30 feet tall in 3 years. They do grow really fast.
If you have a plant that’s good at removing heavy metals from the environment, and grow it in a place with bad heavy metal contamination, it’ll lower the local contamination level, and produce concentrated-heavy-metal biomass. If you grow the same plant in an area with only trace heavy metal levels, then it’ll still concentrate it, into non-trace amounts in the biomass. In other words, if you’re growing that plant for food, you need to make absolutely sure that the soil it’s growing in is super-duper-exceptionally clean of contamination, which most soil isn’t.
Yes, I’m quite sure the level of scrutiny for heavy metals in hemp oil will be much greater than the scrutiny of the effect of glyphosate and neonic pesticides heavily used on basically every food crop in the US–the food crops that make up about 70+% of the average American’s diet. And it will be touted as being SUPER DUPER DANGEROUS whereas Monsanto/Bayer execs will swear they pour Roundup on their Wheaties every morning and bathe in neonics. And of course the hemp will MAGICALLY be toxic if it’s grown on the same soil the soybeans and corn grow on. And I fully expect the average American–that common clay of the New West–will believe every breathless word of it. And?
Thank you, that was gracious. I realize it’s a hot button of mine but I’ve been fighting the uphill battle (both ways! In the SNOW!) over the utility of the hemp plant for literally decades and it just never occurs to anyone that if hemp becomes a major crop in the US it will fuck the holy shit out of good sinsemilla smoking weed. Pollen is a motherfucker–there’s been an ongoing fight in Washington state about not allowing hemp cultivation within four miles of a licensed cannabis grower and that’s still up in the air post 2018 Farm Bill. I mean, the real potential is in growing high CBD strains (that look for all the world like fine smoking weed) and those need to be grown from feminized seed or from clones just like their stonier sisters and are just as susceptible to pollen as any other girl plant. But those you don’t want going to seed because the CBD potential is much lower than from the sticky flowers sans seedy mess.
Ailanthus, aka the “Tree of Heaven”, which was an invasive species in Des Moines, where I grew up. I don’t see much evidence of them where I live now. Melaleuca is also a huge problem in the Everglades; there’s a “Dirty Jobs” episode devoted to its eradication efforts. It’s also illegal to sell cottonwood seedlings in Iowa, because the seeds mess up air conditioners, among other things.
Unless a tree is being planted for harvest, people should use plants native to the area. (Green grass lawns in Phoenix, which was a fad for a while? I don’t think so.)
Why a specific tree? How much carbon would be sinked if all of suburbia just let their yards grow over? If you don’t keep up with yard work, it won’t take long until it turns into a forest again. So, with all the acreage of suburbia, if just a quarter of that was turned back into forest, how much gain would we get against climate change?
Need answer fast, as I can use “Saving the Planet”, as an excuse not to mow when I get home.
I have a goddamned ailanthus that crept its way over from a neighbor’s yard and that sonofabitch keeps coming up in the same two spots around my house every year. Lucky for me they’re pretty brittle and easily torn down but they STINK. I took the one in front down again today and my hands still smell like that mess even after I’ve washed with hot water and three different scented soaps. Gah!
Growing trees, or for that matter any plant, is NOT a solution to the global warming/climate change problem. At best it is a stopgap measure to reduce the effects while a real solution is implemented. The people who claim it’s a solution are mostly looking for an excuse to avoid stopping burning fossil fuels.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t grow more trees. However, it should be noted that a forest not disturbed by humans is, in the long run, basically carbon neutral. Periodically forest fires will burn some of it down. The trees that avoid fire will eventually die and rot, thus releasing their carbon back to the environment.
Sorry, bro, but my Doritos story involves Richard’s Wild Irish Rose, a fine bum wine of my misspent youth. Y’see, freshman year…
Here’s a US Congress report that examines using forestation as a means for offsetting CO2 production:
They land at a need for 100-400 million acres (average: 250). There are 2.43 billion acres in the US, so we would need to add trees to about 10% of the land.
The best tree to add would vary by climate. There’s unlikely to be a single tree (or plant) that is ideal.
It should probably also be noted that “reforestation” is probably happening on its own to some extent. In high CO2 air, plants tend to grow larger. So, even without increase the surface area that is covered in trees, you end up having more CO2 sequestration just as a side-effect of the raised CO2 levels. Given that plants try to take in as much nutrition as they’re able to, we can generally expect that the biomass in any region is taking in nearly as much CO2 as it is able to. You can’t grow an Empress Tree in the middle of Death Valley, regardless of how many Empress Tree seeds you put down.
The level of greenery (i.e. biomass per acre) is pretty strongly correlated to the maximum biomass supportable by that specific region. And, similarly, the amount of CO2 sequestration is fairly strongly correlated to the simple quantity of biomass.
Some trees and plants probably do take in and hold CO2 longer than other ones - “maximum nutrient usage” is a thing that varies by the nutrients that the species cares about - so we probably can adjust a particular biomass to be somewhat more CO2 dense. But you really shouldn’t expect massive gains on the cheap. Minus sheer bulk, you’re not going to get significant results.
Growing plants could be a solution… if we then cut down the plants, sequester them somewhere that they won’t decay for a very long time, and then plant new ones. I don’t know if the necessary scale would be practical, but it’s at least in principle possible.
It’s probably best to start by cutting back our fossil fuel usage, though.