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A plant is basically a self-healing, self-replicating CO2-capturing machine running off solar power and some chemicals.
by berkes 6y ago
A plant is basically a self-healing, self-replicating CO2-capturing machine running off solar power and some chemicals.
- WJW 6y agoThey also need massive amounts of water when planted at scale and die after anything between 1-100 years (some hardwood trees live longer but capture carbon relatively slowly compared to faster growing plants), after which they release the carbon back into the ecosystem. Energy efficiency of photosynthesis is also really low. Just planting a lot of plants and expecting they will efficiently capture a lot of carbon out of the air is going to lead to disappointment.
- YetAnotherNick 6y agoWe could create mechanical replacement which works with sea water and doesn't require us to wait for a decade to get result and likely more optimized for just one task.
- WJW 6y agoAren't technological plant replacements usually just called solar panels?
- YetAnotherNick 6y agoI was talking about carbon capture using sunlight.
- rini17 6y agoThat's very shallow dismissal. Yes, it's true "just planting a lot of plants" will lead to disappointment. But it's the same as with "just build lots of solar panels/windmills" without any systematic thinking. Natural and sustainably managed biomes don't require irrigation. I know, there are deserts where much biomass won't ever naturally grow, but no solution is suitable everywhere. Trees can and do last longer than 100 years, and even after death they don't puff release co2 immediately. When left undisturbed, large part of carbon is left fixed in the soil.
- enriquto 6y ago> A plant is basically a self-healing, self-replicating CO2-capturing machine running off solar power and some chemicals. Not in itself. When the plant dies, it rots and all the carbon goes back to the atmosphere by the action of fungi and bacteria. Plants can function as the zeroth step in a carbon capture pipeline. The actual capture happens when the plant dies and you bury (or otherwise process) its tissue somewhere so that the carbon cannot go back to the biosphere. Just growing plants and letting them die is purely carbon neutral.
- corty 6y ago> Just growing plants and letting them die is purely carbon neutral. Actually, no. Depending on the plants and circumstances, it can be carbon-(equivalent)-positive because rotting plant material exudes methane, which has a far higher global warming potential than CO₂. So even with simple plant agriculture you can harm the climate, e.g. wet rice production.
- mikro2nd 6y agoOTOH, growing plants, turning them into charcoal and sequestering that can be carbon-negative.
- Beltiras 6y agoIt's carbon-negative even if you don't count the buried carbon due to it being a powerful fertilizing agent.
- enriquto 6y agoI don't understand your remark. The plants that you are going to fertilize are part of a carbon neutral cycle anyway. It doesn't really matter if there is a big or small amount of them. The buried stuff is going to rot after a few years and release the carbon back. I think the idea is to bury it to "geological" depths, forever isolated to the biosphere. In the last century, we have burned millions of years worth of plant-based carbon sequestration. This was carbon that had been out of the biosphere for millions of years. Now our goal is to remove this carbon out of the biosphere again. I'm skeptical that this can be at all achieved by purely biological means. But burying dead plants a few meters deep, readily accessible to rot, is not likely to make any difference. Otherwise, we are going back to pre-cambrian CO2 levels, which were much higher than today.