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> Long term they can’t be a net carbon producer because that carbon would need to be endlessly produced from nothing As noted in the MIT article: > Since most
by vlovich123 2y ago
> Long term they can’t be a net carbon producer because that carbon would need to be endlessly produced from nothing
As noted in the MIT article:
> Since most natural ecosystems absorb and store carbon, while farmland in active use tends to produce it, this land use change can create more climate-warming pollution
Basically the land is changed from a carbon store to a carbon producer for biomass meaning you're no longer sequestering the carbon which is where you get extra carbon in the ecosystem even if you're not having any carbon in the transportation & production.
- Retric 2y agoOnly in the short term. Farmland and forests are approaching different equilibrium points. There’s a few forests that have stayed that way for millions of years. Go to Daintree in Australia, dig down a deep as roots go, count up the carbon in a given acre, and divide by a 180 million and you get essentially 0/year as the long term sequestration rate. Transitions between forests and farmland basically store or release a fixed quantity per acre though it’s a slow process for deep root systems. In that context sure you can look at farming as releasing carbon because of the recent expansion of farming, but the numbers aren’t a fixed constant.