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> Additionally, it's important that people realize that CO2 production is in tons of CO2 per year. Tree offsets are a one-time deal, since when trees die they r
by shalmanese 10y ago
> Additionally, it's important that people realize that CO2 production is in tons of CO2 per year. Tree offsets are a one-time deal, since when trees die they release CO2, and when new ones are born they absorb that CO2 again. After they've been planted, forests are generally carbon neutral. That's why we can't "just plant trees": we'd have to be continuously planting new trees. The Earth is only 8% arable land, much of which already has stuff on it, or is undesirable for one reason or another. We'd run out of space pretty fast. Trees are good for other reasons: preventing climate change (different from global warming), preserving species diversity, being nice to look at, etc etc.
You misunderstand the purpose of trees. They're basically solar powered, organic carbon sequestration devices that happen to run for free. If we ever run out of space to plant trees, we can just cut some down, reduce it down to charcoal and bury it back into the ground which conveniently leaves a readily accessible fossil fuel source for our ancestors in the case of civilizational collapse.
But we're still a long way away from running out of room to plant trees. We're still desperately trying to plant enough trees to stop the encroaching of the Sahara and there's vague, futuristic plans to try and turn the entire Sahara into a forest. Similarly, China is desperately planting trees to stop the encroachment of the Gobi.
- warent 10y agoGreat perspective. I wasn't aware of the Gobi problem either
- dpark 10y agoReducing trees to charcoal is not cost effective. It releases a ton of carbon dioxide by itself anyway. But it also doesn't make sense that we would plant trees, turn them into charcoal, and then bury that. This is insanely expensive and by the time you've got charcoal, you might as well burn that, too, rather than burying it and then digging up more coal to burn.
- Symmetry 10y agoThe whole reason we had the second stage of the Industrial Revolution is that if you use trees instead of mining then you're limited in energy by the acreage you can devote to trees and that goes down with extra farming as the population increases. To simplify horribly that's why the Ming iron industry with it's chain suspension bridges and so forth collapsed. If you're removing carbon from the air by burying trees then you'll only be able to sustain the energy intensity of civilization in the Britain of 1800, plus what we can get with renewables. What this new form of capture gives us is the ability to get rid of excess carbon without using huge amounts of arable land to do it.
- dragontamer 10y agoI mean, we have nukes / nuclear power plants. There are plenty of high-power ways to make energy without carbon. The question is if enough of the population can accept it.