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Tom Chi: How to Address our Carbon Debt to Heal the Planet

Foresight Institute · 3.6K views · 2019-05-24 · 32:44

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Overview

Tom Chi gives the opening talk of a Foresight Institute competition on clean energy and clean air, framing excess CO2 as a carbon debt to repay and discussing large-scale tree planting, including by drone.

On Hacker News

HN commenters call it a fantastic talk and cite it in climate threads for the carbon debt framing and tree-planting cost estimates.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2019–2022

Topics

Climate policy, solutions & debateEnvironment, agriculture & food systems
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climate changereforestationcarbon capturetom chisustainable agriculture

What people said

mehrdadn · 2019-06 · Strong recommendation

Related: GoogleX co-founder Tom Chi gave a fantastic talk on carbon debt (with a rather depressing 238 views at the moment; I hope more people watch...): [VIDEO]

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symplee · 2019-06 · Strong recommendation

Agreed, this is an excellent talk. Main takeaway is to view the problem as debt which has to be paid off. Simply stopping new purchases will not pay off the debt. Above point summarized here, timestamp 22:15 - [VIDEO] We currently have a one trillion ton carbon debt. As a though experiment, for a starting solution to iterate upon, this can be "paid off" with 20 billion trees / year, for 50 years. It would take 9000 drones, 450 staff, $80 mil/year. And a total land area half the size of Brazil. Using current technology. Compare this with alternative approaches being thrown around with price tags of 1 trillion+.

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dataflow · 2022-01 · Reference

Related, for comparison: apparently planting 20B trees/year requires only $80M/year (!) and would pull down a trillion tons of carbon over 50 years (!): [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Foresight Institute, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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