Are Artificial Trees Better Than Real Ones?

treehugger.com:

Fake plants generally don't give off huge environmental benefits--especially when they're the plastic kind that just barely cheer up offices and waiting rooms. But a synthetic tree now in development may be better for the environment than its natural counterparts.

Read the whole story: treehugger.com

Comments

[jweider]

Unfortunately, they don't give off oxygen. A much better solution would be to stop cutting down trees.
If commercial hemp were legalized, many products now created from timber could be manufactured from hemp. Hemp is also renewable much faster than trees so it is less damaging to the environment.
Another good place to start would be the elimination of "Christmas Tree's".
I never could figure out why people would cut down the only trees that producing any oxygen in the middle of winter.

[jsarets]

Stuff like this can work on a small scale in certain closed-loop environments. For example, photosynthetic bioreactors have been proposed for future spacecraft to replace LiOH-based CO2 scrubbers and various oxygen generation/storage systems used on current manned space vessels.

But Earth is too big a spaceship for these kinds of solutions. We can't BUILD enough bioreactor capacity to balance out humanity's affect on the carbon/oxygen cycle. The only systems that can work on this scale have to be GROWN. Basically, we'd have to cultivate cyanobacteria on a very large scale in the oceans and risk losing biodiversity in the process.

It's too late to undo what we've already done without making things worse. We can try carbon sequestration at the point source. We can use biofuels from sustainably cultivated vegetable fiber and/or seed oil crops. But large scale atmospheric sequestration of carbon dioxide is not viable.

[KillTheMessenger]

"But large scale atmospheric sequestration of carbon dioxide is not viable."

Of course it is... just not with the methods mentioned in the article. Biochar, reforestation, fast growing plants for building material can all sequester enormous amounts of CO2. Bamboo, switchgrass and, yes, hemp, can make high quality cellulose materials that are long lasting and they can sequester on the order of 10 tons per hectare per year. Now, we are currently putting 30Gtons of CO2 into the air. If we used the whole agricultural area of the US (about 370 million hectare) to sequester CO2, it would amount to 3.7Gtons of CO2. As you can see, we can, on a global scale, achieve a 30:1 to maybe 10:1 sequestration ratio. So for each year that we continue to emit CO2 on this level, we will take 10-30 years of sequestration. While that sounds pretty bad, it is still much better than the natural cycle which will take thousands of years.

[FormerReaganite]

Let's go for a picnic, eating our artificial food, under the artificial trees, which are filled with artificial birds. We can watch the artificial clouds roll by in the artificial sky, with it's artificial sun shining down it's artificial rays on us.

[JScott]

Well I'm sure we can do it virturally, just put on your VR glasses, goggles or helmet.

[lvogt]

Actually they tried it in LA years ago and the smog dissolved them. Really.

[gbrooks]

That's fantastic, but how do the apples taste and does it make good firewood or paper?

[JScott]

They are just like mens toupees, YOU CAN ALWAYS TELL WHEN THEY ARE FAKE no matter how 'real' they claim to be.

[KillTheMessenger]

This gets the "Most nonsensical article of the day Award". It really earned it.

Klaus Lackner's contributions, while certainly interesting, are the science version of Rube Goldberg machines. The thermodynamically correct place to dispose of carbon dioxide is at the power plant. Once it's diluted in the atmosphere, thermodynamics makes sequestration much more costly. And no amount of scifi writing and imagery gets around the laws of thermodynamics. What puzzles me is that Dr. Lackner, as a physicist, doesn't know better. Well, I am sure he does, he just doesn't seem to be interested in the conventional, and thus viable, solution.