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There's nothing wrong in growing trees, I love trees. My point was that tree-planting initiatives for carbon capture seem incomplete if they don't address the
by enriquto 5y ago
There's nothing wrong in growing trees, I love trees. My point was that tree-planting initiatives for carbon capture seem incomplete if they don't address the actual capture (the stockage of the dead wood somewhere safe and inaccessible to decomposition). At that point, you realize that you don't need to wait decades for the trees to grow, you can cut them down and store them right away, letting new trees grow in their place.
Even worse, a focus on tree-planting often feels like an inconsequential feel-good movement, that deviates attention away from the real problem: that every year we are unearthing millions of years worth of captured carbon and putting it back into circulation. Growing a forest while we burn thousands of oil tankers every year is like trying to remove water from the sinking titanic with a bucket. It doesn't harm, but it gets stupidly in the way.
- gitanovic 5y agoYou are actually spot on As long as we don't remove fossil fuel usage, planting trees is just something to make us feel better without actually fixing the problem. Also, you can plant as much as you want, it's going to be much less than what's burned by planters in amazon's forest alone, and they are actually burning the wood. The main take-away is that destroying something is always several orders of magnitude easier than building that thing, and as long as we don't stop destroying we won't manage to build at a faster rate, therefore stop deluding yourselves.
- oezi 5y agoI think answers need to be comprehensive and not exclude anything. We need to reduce consumption, we need to reforestation, we need to stop burning the Amazon, we need more wind and solar, we need technological progress, we need better power grids, we need better insulation of buildings, we need to eat less animals and travel less. The relative merits of each measure are up for discussion, but it is more important to act than squabble. Planting trees can and should be part of the solution.
- CuriouslyC 5y agoPlanting trees does do something. There are bigger problems that need to be addressed before tree planting can solve the underlying issue. Thankfully the amazon reclaims farmland at a scary pace if left to its own devices.
- amcoastal 5y agoThe carbon from a dead tree doesn't just go back into the atmosphere. Most of it stays in the soil.
- CuriouslyC 5y agoIt would be wasteful to cut the plants down and truck the felled trees somewhere, just choose long lived varieties and leave them be.