4 ms·

Not sure about your definition of "short term" here. Where does the carbon in coal come from? The last time I read it's from the plants.

• jandrese 5y ago
  The carbon in coal was previously sequestered underground and not part of the current carbon cycle. By burning all of that coal, oil, and natural gas we un-sequestered all of that carbon. So even if we replanted all of the forests there are still many gigatons of extra carbon in the atmosphere. It's "short term" because the plants will release the carbon back into the atmosphere in a few decades. So to combat climate change we need ways to sequester the carbon that will keep it out of the atmosphere permanently. There are no good solutions for this currently. Maybe at some point someone will figure out a way to economically create massive pure diamonds using CO2 from the atmosphere with renewable energy so we could use them as building materials or something. Thanks to the laws of thermodynamics we'll have to invest something like all of the energy we produced using fossil fuels to fix this problem. We can cheat a bit by going to a stable form instead of making it straight up crude oil again, but it's still an almost unfathomable amount of energy we're going to need. And our politicians still arguing if it is a good idea to stop digging the hole, and fighting tooth and nail against it. There are no jobs on a dead planet.
  • njarboe 5y ago
    Many species of trees live for hundreds of years, not decades.