Bill Gates Schemes To Chop Down And Bury Millions Of Trees

[Hippie]

Psychotic malice? Or enviromoonbattery? At this point, there isn’t any difference:

[Creepy moonbat zillionaire Bill] Gates’s organization, Breakthrough Energy, has plowed $6.6 million into the project led by Kodama Systems.

The move will see 70m acres of forests, mostly in the Western United States, cut down.

After the trees have been chopped down, they will be buried.

According to the project organizers, “scientists” say “burying trees can reduce global warming.”

Trees are the climate’s enemy now.

Burying trees won’t improve the weather, but it can make people rich without generating any wealth whatsoever thanks to government intervention in the economy via carbon offsets.

Think what 70 million acres of lumber could do for rising housing prices. But no doubt housing offends the climate too, in addition to being racist.

As we have seen from their war on whales, there is no greater threat to the environment than enviromoonbats.

This isn’t even the most sinister plan supported by Gates, who also wants to address the imaginary crisis of climate fluctuation by reflecting the sun’s life-giving rays back into outer space.

Someone needs to infiltrate the next Davos confab and get the word to Bill Gates, John Kerry, et al. that the climate will be pleased if enough liberals simultaneously lick their elbows. If we can keep our rulers harmlessly occupied, the forests will be safe.

[Fritz the Cat420]

More spam from this group's worst spammer and LIAR. 

[Lobo]

Not hardly, Mark. But I wouldn't expect a MAGA site like "Moonbattery", that still pushes the idiocy (funded by fossil fuels billionaires) that the greenhouse principle and global warming are some kind of "liberal hoaxes", to bother to check out their own stories. Why bother with fact-based facts when "alternative facts" are so much more politically appealing to the MAGA cult members?

In fact (the fact-based kind), it's about burying the huge amount of rotting wood left over after logging -- anyone who has ever seen a forest after logging knows how huge those piles are -- along with thinning out unhealthy, overcrowded, undergrowth-choked, disease-infested, wildfire-prone forests.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/15/1065016/a-stealth-effort-to-bury-wood-for-carbon-removal-has-just-raised-millions/
M.I.T Technology Review

A stealth effort to bury wood for carbon removal has just raised millions

Kodama has raised more than $6 million from Bill Gates’ climate fund and other investors, as it pursues new ways to reduce wildfire risks and lock away carbon in harvested trees.

By 

• James Templearchive page

December 15, 2022

A California startup is pursuing a novel, if simple, plan for ensuring that dead trees keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere for thousands of years: burying their remains underground.

Kodama Systems, a forest management company based in the Sierra Nevada foothills town of Sonora, has been operating in stealth mode since it was founded last summer. But MIT Technology Review can now report the company has raised around $6.6 million from Bill Gates’s climate fund Breakthrough Energy Ventures, as well as Congruent Ventures and other investors.

In addition, the payments company Stripe will reveal on Thursday that it’s provided a $250,000 research grant to the company and its research partner, the Yale Carbon Containment Lab, as part of a broader carbon removal announcement. That grant will support a pilot effort to bury waste biomass harvested from California forests in the Nevada desert and study how well it prevents the release of greenhouse gases that drive climate change. 

It also agreed to purchase about 415 tons of carbon dioxide eventually sequestered by the company for another $250,000, if that proof-of-concept project achieves certain benchmarks.

“Biomass burial has the potential to become a low-cost, high-scale approach for carbon removal, though there is a need for further investigation into its long-term durability,” said Joanna Klitzke, procurement and ecosystem strategy lead for Stripe.

For the last several years, Stripe has pre-purchased tons of carbon dioxide that startups aim to eventually draw out of the air and permanently sequester, in an effort to help build up a carbon removal industry. It has also helped establish a different model for counteracting corporate climate emissions that goes beyond simply purchasing carbon credits from popular offsets projects, such as those that involve planting trees, which have come under growing scrutiny.

A handful of research groups and startups have begun exploring the potential to lock up the carbon in wood, by burying or otherwise storing tree remains in ways that slow down decomposition.

Trees are naturally efficient at sucking down vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the air, but they release the carbon again when they die and rot on the ground. Sequestering trees underground could prevent this. If biomass burial works as well as hoped, it may provide a relatively cheap and easy way to pull down some share of the billions of tons of greenhouse gas that studies find may need to be removed to keep global temperatures in check in the coming decades. 

But until it’s been done on large scales and studied closely, it remains to be seen how much it will cost, how much carbon it could store, and how long and reliably it may keep greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.

Dead wood

Forest experts have long warned that decades of overly aggressive fire suppression policies in the US have produced dense, overgrown forests that significantly increase the risk of major conflagrations when wildfires inevitably occur. Climate change has exacerbated those dangers by creating hotter and drier conditions.  

Following a series of devastating fire years across the West, a number of states are increasingly funding efforts to clear out forests to reduce those dangers. That includes removing undergrowth, cutting down trees, or using controlled burns to break up the landscape and prevent fires from reaching forest crowns. 

States are expected to produce more and more forest waste from these efforts as climate change accelerates in the coming years, says Justin Freiberg, managing director of the Yale Carbon Containment Lab, which has been conducting field trials exploring a number of “wood carbon containment” approaches under different conditions for several years.

But today, the harvested plants and trees are generally piled up in cleared areas and then left to rot or deliberately burned. That allows the carbon stored in them to simply return to the atmosphere, driving further warming. 

Kodama hopes to address both the wildfire dangers and the emissions challenge. The company says it’s developing automated ways of thinning out overcrowded forests that will make the process cheaper and faster (though it’s not yet discussing this part of the business in detail). After stripping off the limbs from trees too small to be sold for timber, they’ll load them into trucks and ship them to a prepared pit.

Small logs and other biomass collected by Kodama.

KODAMA SYSTEMS

The key will be to ensure that what the company refers to as a “wood vault” keeps out oxygen and water that would otherwise accelerate decomposition and prevents greenhouse gases from leaking out.

In the field effort with Yale researchers, expected to begin in the third quarter of next year, the company intends to create a burial mound in the Nevada desert that’s seven yards high, three yards deep, and 58 yards long and across.

They plan to cover the biomass with a geotextile liner and then bury that under soil and a layer of native vegetation selected to absorb moisture. Given the region’s dry conditions, this will create a contained system that prevents “agents of decomposition from acting on the buried wood mass,” ensuring that the carbon stays in place for thousands of years, says Jimmy Voorhis, head of biomass utilization and policy at Kodama. 

Freiberg adds that they’ll also leave wood exposed at the site and create smaller side vaults designed in different ways. The teams will continue to monitor them and compare decomposition rates and any greenhouse-gas leakage for years. The teams expect to be able to extrapolate long-term carbon storage estimates from that data, along with other studies and experiments.

Burial costs

Other startups and research efforts are taking different approaches to the problem. 

The Australian company InterEarth believes that allowing trees to soak up salty groundwater before burying them will effectively pickle the wood, preserving it for extended periods.

The Carbon Lockdown Project, a public benefits corporation founded by University of Maryland professor Ning Zeng, has proposed creating pits that are lined with clay or other materials with low permeability.

In a paper this year, Zeng and a colleague also highlighted a number of other potential approaches, including storing biomass in frozen sites, underwater, or even in above-ground shelters. His earlier work found that harvesting and storing wood could potentially remove several billion tons of carbon dioxide a year at a cost of well below $100 a ton.

But there are still many unknowns.

“We have to recognize that the science of wood harvesting and storage is still evolving,” says Daniel Sanchez, chief scientist for biomass carbon removal and storage at Carbon Direct, which evaluates carbon removal efforts and corporate climate plans. “Most importantly, our understanding of what drives or doesn’t drive decomposition of wood needs to be refined.”

On top of that, residents and environmental groups are often opposed to forest thinning. Sawing down trees and removing them from the steep slopes of dense forests is a laborious and costly process that will be difficult to automate effectively. Hauling around bulky tree remains and digging big holes is also expensive and requires a lot of energy.

The climate emissions produced by removing, transporting, and burying wood will need to be carefully tallied and counted against the total carbon stored.

KODAMA SYSTEMS

Finally, there’s the question of acquiring the necessary waste biomass.

A 2020 study by Lawrence Livermore National Lab found plenty to go around for these sorts of purposes today, estimating that 56 million “bone dry” tons of waste biomass are produced each year just in California from agriculture, logging, fire prevention, and other activities. (Wood is about 50% carbon by mass.)

But demands for it are set to rise as startups like Kodama, Mote Hydrogen, and Charm all seek out these sources for various biomass-related carbon removal efforts and the world races to achieve ambitious climate targets.

There’s some risk that eventually all these efforts could create perverse incentives to remove more trees or agricultural material than necessary for fire prevention or healthy for ecosystems. After all, removing biomass also reduces the levels of nutrients that forests and farms get from rotting plants.

Kodama says it has done economic and carbon assessments for its full process. It’s confident that it can achieve costs below $100 a ton of carbon, and estimates that emissions from the pilot project will only reduce the net amount of carbon ultimately sequestered by about 15%.

Merritt Jenkins, the company’s cofounder and chief executive, says they plan to earn revenue from their forest thinning work, as well as by selling usable timber and carbon credits from its burial projects.

But Yale’s Freiberg stresses that the critical mission of the moment is to use that Stripe grant to help answer these “big scientific questions around burial biomass … and demonstrate that this is indeed a solution worth backing.”

[Lobo]

https://kodama.ai/faqs
2023 Kodama Systems, Inc.

Frequently Asked Questions

What do healthy forests look like?

Healthy forest

Healthy forHealthy forests look quite different across geographies and climates but they share key traits like resilience and species diversity that allow for self-perpetuation (Hadziabdic D, et al., 2021). When thriving, these forests had cleaner floors, patchy mosaics of different-aged trees, open canopy areas, and diverse vegetation communities. (Hessburg, et al, 2016). These characteristics fostered resistance to disturbances like wildfire, disease outbreaks, insect infestations, and drought. What do forests look like today?

Many Western US forests today are overgrown with large stretches of homogeneous, fire-intolerant species. There are also more areas with dead trees from beetle infestations and drought. The forest floor is overstocked with shrubs and young trees that create continuous vegetation to the canopy (Hagmann, et al. 2021). Western forests are vulnerable, unbalanced, and significantly prone to high-intensity wildfires (North, et al 2021).

What caused these current conditions?

Decades of fire suppression has allowed for more vegetation to grow back and debris to accumulate. Furthermore, stressors of climate change have made fuels drier and more prone to burning (Kelsey, Rodd. 2019, Abatzoglou et al. 2016.). Select land management practices, despite good intentions, have also played a part in changing forest composition, pushing forested ecosystems out of balance.

Shouldn’t we just leave forests alone?

Human intervention has created these problems, and there is broad consensus among academics and land managers that it will take human intervention to fix them. Science-driven methodologies can guide holistic stewardship practices that sustain human needs, promote forest resilience, and better adapt forested ecosystems to climate change (Society of American Foresters, 2022).

What does forest restoration entail?

To bring forests back into balance, thin forests and reintroduce low-intensity broadcast burning among other treatments like habitat monitoring and reforestation. Forest thinning reduces tree stand density and competition for resources among trees. This is typically done by hand crews or heavy equipment according to federal and state forest health objectives and forest health objectives. Prescribed fire following forest thinning can further remove excess vegetation on the ground, promoting regeneration and nutrient recycling.

Is forest thinning alone sufficient to mitigate wildfire hazard?

No. Forest thinning is just one, typically the first, step in the suite of restoration treatments intended to restore forested lands to resilience. After successful thinning operations, fire practitioners can use prescribed burning to reintroduce low-to-moderate severity wildfire back into the ecosystem. To better mitigate the risks that wildfires pose to homeowners, communities need to adopt additional solutions like home hardening, defensible space, prevention education and more.

What are the challenges to scaling forest restoration?

In response to the wildfire crisis, The U.S. Forest Service has a 10-year plan to treat up to an additional 50 million acres by 2030. This is an ambitious and necessary goal, but there are two key challenges to scaling this work. The first is a labor pool that simply cannot meet the demand of work. Second, there are few viable uses for woody residues (e.g. leftover small-diameter logs, branches, and slash from thinning projects), which hinders forest restoration project economics. In California alone, key forest sector occupations are projected to decline when we need them to grow (North State Planning and Development Collective, 2021) and 84% of woody biomass material is left in the forests or placed in piles to burn (OPR, 2022).

What does Kodama do?

We’re creating a comprehensive forest restoration service aimed at improving thinning operations and utilizing unmerchantable biomass. Improving operations entails automating machinery, implementing teleoperations, and bolstering remote-site connectivity: getting work done faster and making job sites safer for ground personnel. Our method of utilizing unmerchantable biomass consists of storing carbon-dense woody residues from thinning operations in a way that minimizes decomposition with low-capital investment. These residues would otherwise be pile-burned, which is both costly and a source of CO2 emissions.

What does the carbon storage pilot entail?

Kodama is developing a methodology to extract carbon-dense, woody residues from thinning operations and store them in geological vaults designed to minimize decomposition and remain durable for the long term. This model leverages private investment to serve as a cost-effective, climate-positive alternative to pile-burning. For more details on the technology and project scope, please see our project application to Frontier.

Is forest thinning a source of carbon emissions?

Yes, but forest management practices that implement expanded thinning operations reduce wildfire emissions because it reduces the amount of fuel to be consumed (Long, et al. 2022). Additionally, there are carbon accounting frameworks in development to quantify the "avoided wildfire emissions" associated with forest thinning according to project area boundaries.

What about the impact of operations on wildlife habitats?

Kodama is restoring forests for future generations. We follow best available science and environmental review guidelines to minimize residual damage, operate outside of animal breeding periods, and preserve socioecological value to the land.

Are wildfires really a net source of carbon emissions? Trees grow back after all.

While forests are key carbon sinks in combating climate change, wildfires can emit alarmingly high levels of greenhouse gases (GHG). California wildfire emissions in 2020 were estimated to be two times higher than the state’s total GHG emissions reductions since 2003 (Jerrett et al. 2022). Furthermore, frequent, high-severity wildfires coupled with climate stressors are likely to cause forested landscapes to convert to shrubland and grassland, losing key carbon storage properties (Paudel, et al. 2022).

How can I help?

The wildfire and forest health problem requires all hands on-deck. Private forest and woodland owners can explore resources like the Forest Management Handbook for Small-Parcel Landowners in Sierra Nevada and Southern Cascade Range that can help assess land conditions and develop management plans to treat land. Nonprofits and public benefit organizations can seek out capacity-building partnerships to advance projects. And individuals can get more involved in community wildfire prevention, forest health, and defensible space initiatives organized through entities like Firewise Communities and Fire Safe Councils.

If you want to work on solving these problems with us, please see our Careers Page or get in touch.

On Tuesday, September 5, 2023 at 1:56:37 PM UTC-4 Hippie wrote: