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Mother Nature has provided us with this "technology" all along, in the form of plant life. It'd be imagined in science fiction if it didn't already exist! And i
by otterley 3y ago
Mother Nature has provided us with this "technology" all along, in the form of plant life. It'd be imagined in science fiction if it didn't already exist! And it's self-reproducing and only needs water and minerals in the soil to survive. It's miraculous! We just need to stop destroying it, plant more, and let the problem solve itself. There are so many other productive uses of our wealth, like housing people.
- mrzv 3y agoIsn't the plant life carbon neutral? I thought whatever carbon a tree extracts during its lifetime, it releases when it decomposes. Unless we chop it down and store it (and plant a new tree!), the tree doesn't remove much carbon from the atmosphere (long term, on average). Do I misunderstand how this works?
- karthikkolli 3y agoPlants also help increase in rainfall, which reduces CO2 in air by converting it into acid.
- quantified 3y agoBasically all the coal we have burnt was at one point peat bogs. They seem to have been a great success at sequestering carbon for us to eventually release. We've done so, proving your point, but it took a while.
- mrzv 3y agoSo what's the "natural" solution? Create swamps all over the place? How quickly do they remove CO2 per surface area?
- coderenegade 3y agoReforestation, with controlled logging of mature trees to sequester the carbon. Most likely as a building material, given that our current demand for wood is higher than what existing forests can sustainably supply.
- stubish 3y agoA single plant is carbon neutral over its entire growth/decomposition cycle, yes. But the ecosystem as a whole, plants grow faster than they decompose, and it is carbon negative. The excess oxygen production is balanced by animals and fire. So yes, we can make plants more carbon negative by slowing decomposition, and by cutting them down when growth rates slow making room for new plants. Bury the stuff, sink it in the ocean, build wooden things, use it as a component of other manufacturing materials. Just add land and water, which seems to be the problem.
- otterley 3y agoTrees keep growing for a while. Then yes, you chop it down and plant a new one. The amount of CO2 sequestered by a tree annually is well known.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago> I thought whatever carbon a tree extracts during its lifetime, it releases when it decomposes. Trees can live for hundreds of years. Guess what happens when there are more live trees. > Unless we chop it down and store it (and plant a new tree!), the tree doesn't remove much carbon from the atmosphere (long term, on average). But you in fact can do this. Or chop it down and make furniture or buildings out of it, which themselves can last for hundreds of years. And even if you don't know some cost effective way to keep the dead trees from decomposing, that process itself takes decades after the tree has already grown and died, which at minimum buys us a decent amount of time to figure something out.
- panzi 3y agoThat's not how it works, sadly. Oil and coal got created in a time where there where no microbes that could break down trees, so dead trees just built up over millions of years and when buried slowly turned into oil and coal. Nowadays there are microbes that break down dead wood, so besides that it would take an enormous amount of time for plants to suck out enough CO2, it would also not stay out of the atmosphere. Unless you start cutting down trees and storing them in some underground caves in conditions where they don't rot or something. A huge and very slow effort.
- junofan 3y agoCommon myth. Millions of years of tree growth would have taken the earth to ~0 ppm CO2, preventing plant life. There were likely organisms other than white rot fungi that broke down lignin. Most petroleum formation occurred from dead diatom sediments on the sea floor.
- elil17 3y agoThe people working on CO2 capture aren't idiots, they know that plants are a competing technology. People are pursuing CO2 capture because it is orders of times more efficient than plants in terms of space use, water use, etc.
- otterley 3y agoI’ll grant that sequestering CO2 requires land, but water falls from the sky. In terms of value, there’s a lot of economic distortion going on here: technology gets you investor attention, while the unexciting act of buying up land for CO2 sequestration in plant matter won’t get VCs and other investors to hand you money. There’s a profit angle here; that’s the only reason anyone will invest in this stuff.
- sanderjd 3y agoThis kind of cynicism is brain rotting. Different people are trying to figure out different things. Planting a bunch of trees is something other people are working on. It just isn't what the specific people in this article happen to be are working on.
- nvm0n2 3y agoSurely it's naive optimism that's brain rotting. What you call cynicism here looks merely like an accurate assessment of reality.
- Qwertious 3y agoNow actually do the numbers on how many trees we need to plant per year, to offset our climate emissions. It's cheaper to capture carbon, and that's saying something.