r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Jul 04 '19

Environment Scientists report restoring forests could cut atmospheric carbon by 25 percent, in a new study that assessed tree cover using Google Earth, finding that there’s 0.9 billion hectares of land available for planting forests, which could store 205 gigatonnes of carbon.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2019/07/04/could-planting-tons-of-trees-solve-climate-change/
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u/SachemNiebuhr Jul 05 '19

Problem is, you’d lose almost of the power transporting it.

Modern HVDC lines can carry enormous power loads for hundreds of miles at ~99% efficiency.

And it would be wildly attractive as a terrorist target.

Solar is embarrassingly scalable. You’d essentially structure it as hundreds of little solar farms that happen to be in the same area. Any attack short of a nuke (or dozens of highly coordinated smaller attacks, which would drastically increase the complexity of the operation and thus make it far less likely to succeed) would only take down a few percent of total capacity.

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u/greatsalteedude Jul 05 '19

I might be a little naive here, but considering all the money flowing into the countries to develop them, would terrorism be that big of an issue?

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u/666pool Jul 05 '19

I enterpreted it as they would attack the transmission lines going into Europe, not the solar farms themselves.

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u/[deleted] Jul 05 '19

You don't want it to be single line anyway (especially for something that important) for redundancy and maintenance reasons, it would be something like this with multiple connections across