3 ms·
> therefore we can't use plants in any part of a carbon sequestration chain (even one that also involves industrial activity) Not sure where your logic is comi
by lend000 10y ago
> therefore we can't use plants in any part of a carbon sequestration chain (even one that also involves industrial activity)
Not sure where your logic is coming from here. I am not saying we shouldn't use plants, but I am saying that even if we let forests retake "all the land," the stable CO2 level would be a bit higher than pre-industrialization, and it would stay that way for a long time until dead plant matter returned significant amounts of carbon to the deeper parts of the crust.
Therefore, using other methods like the one in the article are necessary if we want to reduce CO2 levels.
- schiffern 10y ago>let forests retake "all the land," I agree, a hands-off approach is insufficient. We would need to actively manage those forests (which is just as unnatural an activity btw), using intelligent design to improve upon the carbon density possible solely from blind natural processes. Big industrial thermodynamic sinks don't scale (and imo never will), simply because they can't economically compete with conventional energy consuming factories. An approach is needed that sequesters carbon while also producing sufficiently valuable goods to society (ie probably not rocks). Food is one possibility, and can avoid carbon futility since in perennial systems the annual food yield is a small percentage of the total carbon stored in the biome.