Since burning releases CO2 into the atmosphere, are there alternatives to burning? Maybe it's difficult to do something with the vast amount of dry wood/plants, even if one manages to collect them?
This is a totally valid question that is getting down votes it shouldn't. And the answer is yes, there are alternatives to burning.
Burning will return what the tree pulled out of the atmosphere, so it's already carbon neutral.
Decomposition and fertilization (eg hugelkulture) will also release greenhouse gases. So, again, carbon neutral.
Pyrolysis allows you to produce synthetic gas, biochar, and energy from the wood. Biochar is a useful industrial and agricultural product, and it's pretty much just solid carbon. Hypothetically you could bury it and be carbon negative, but there isn't really anyone doing that at scale.
You could also bury the wood deeply enough that it wouldn't re enter the carbon cycle, but wood is heavy, large, and difficult to move around.
I hope your down voters realize the intent of your question (can we sequester the carbon from forest waste/slash rather than releasing it?) and adjust their votes.
Coal and oil are adding carbon to the atmosphere that was not there within human timeframes. Yes, perhaps on a geologic scale it is neutral, but we generally think about carbon on a human scale.
Thank you for seeing the question for what it is. Genuinely was wondering if there are good alternatives to controlled burns. If not then of course controlled burns are significantly better than wild fires.
One thought that crossed my mind was if a burn after collecting the debris can be used for energy generation with proper emissions filtering/control etc. That would also offset other energy related emissions. But as someone below writes perhaps the collection and transportation of the debris would take more energy than what this would generate.
Burning wood and plant matter in a non destructive way is carbon neutral as that carbon will grow back as trees. It’s part of a natural cycle, like a carbon bank.
The problem is that we’ve been pulling up buried and fossilised trees and burning them, which introduces excessive amounts of CO2 and ruins the natural balance of the carbon bank.
Yes, burning wood is carbon neutral in the long run but clearly emits carbon now (and the earth gets hotter now).
It would be nice to think about maybe collecting undergrowth and turning it to charcoal in something like a kiln and then burying it - reverse coal mining. Of course, we'd want to stop regular coal mining first.
Plants leave roots in the ground and carbon in soil. No till farming practices of grains and corns sequester massive amounts of carbon into the soil. We dont need to do anything special just quit doing things wrong.
I think you underestimate the amount of carbon we dug out of the soil if you believe that no-till farming will sequester even a fraction of that back in reasonable time frames.
The non-burning natural decomposition of wood also releases the carbon into the atmosphere, as CO2, methane, etc. It's a neutral cycle, as plants are recently grown from atmospherically-sourced carbon.
Deforestation and pulling old oil & coal out of the ground and into the atmosphere is what tips the balance.
Reading that the virus is stable in the air for 3h, you would think that the R0 would be closer to measles, i.e. ~18 instead of ~2. Any ideas why this is not the case?
Why? Outside of Palantir being extremely good at positioning itself as a product and services company vs a consulting shop that they truly are (with obvious significant boost to valuation this gives them).
They regularly give Fentanyl to pregnant women during labor. We know some of it crosses the placenta and enters the baby. Does anyone know why this is OK?
The problem with Fentanyl is dosage. It's really concentrated so if the manufacturing or separation into portions isn't well controlled then it's easy to end up with a much higher dose than expected. In a hospital with a known reliable source, you can get the right dose. When it's been cut into fake pain pills, it's easy to overdose.
If you decide to retire early (say 50), before medicare kicks in (at 65), then you are on the hook to buy insurance yourself. That's maybe the difference between US and Europe that the above commenter refers to.
Is there a list of Bay Area local politicians voting record/views on housing? Seems like a good first step in terms of organizing to vote for people that are pro building.
The thought provoking contrast presented in the article is camera derived sparse maps with lane lines, road edges, signs etc. vs lidar derived dense detailed models of the whole environment. Any thoughts around why the former is not enough? If it is enough it would certainly be preferable, since smaller in size and likely easier to maintain.
My guess is that the more detailed, dense map allows the car to precisely localize itself by using its view of the world to match against the map, yielding a location more precise than GPS (and for when gps doesn’t work); eg ICP point cloud matching/alignment/registration. More sparse maps would give you a less confident match, and you’d have to convert what the car is seeing to the sparse form.
However, it also seems like due to galaxies further away having a larger expansion speed, typically they are more redshifted.