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Planting trees is not really viable to deal with CO2 emissions on any significant scale. Assuming a tree absorbs around 20kg of CO2/year, you'd need to plant 2
by myrmidon 3y ago
Planting trees is not really viable to deal with CO2 emissions on any significant scale.
Assuming a tree absorbs around 20kg of CO2/year, you'd need to plant 250 trees per year (!!) for every single passenger vehicle (~5tons of CO2/year).
And the problem does not stop there-- these numbers only work for the first 20 or so years of tree growth, and afterwards you have to seal you trees (under high pressure to turn them into hydrocarbons? :P) or plant even more trees to compensate for older trees decomposing (releasing CO2).
- peteradio 3y agoKind of sounds amazing if we could pull it off (of course we can't) but imagine a world where there is just too much wood (woodworkers be salivating) and there are massive jungles everywhere we could fit one.
- hutzlibu 3y ago"imagine a world where there is just too much wood (woodworkers be salivating) and there are massive jungles everywhere we could fit one." That's how the world looked like, before humans chopped or burned them down and let cattle, goats and sheep prevented new forests from growing again. Reforesting at least parts of that back, would capture significant amounts of CO2. No matter that a old tree composes at some point, because at the same time another tree growing where the old one stood, will compensate that.
- peteradio 3y agoWhat regions of the world are we talking about? Northern Africa? South America?
- hutzlibu 3y agoAll of them? Except the iciest colds in the north and most arid deserts, forests used to be the norm. edit: of course not every land was covered by forests, prairie also existed natural, but forests were a lot more common, than they are today.
- peteradio 3y agoI guess I was unaware, I'd thought forests in North America were more or less at par with the last few millennia.