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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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They rather should've planted a bunch of trees
I agree that planting trees is generally good, but doing so can't sequester the amount of carbon released by humans since the start of the industrial revolution. We need other avenues to do that. If we returned forests back to how they were 100,000 years ago (untouched by modern humans) the new trees that would grow wouldn't be able to soak up the CO2 released. Returning the forests to that state with the current world population isn't feasible either as we need some of that land for agriculture.
I get your sentiment, but we're beyond a 'plant trees' solution.
We've been doing that too. The US has more trees now then it did a hundred years ago.
Still less than before settlers came...
Amen, only angle I can see someone disagreeing with is trees becoming a potential bank of carbon to be fed back into the atmosphere via fuel for wildfires.
I so wish there were better ways to control forest fires.
Forest fires do contribute to CO2 emissions, but naturally occurring forest fires are part of the carbon sequestration cycle. The ash, and charcoal leftover from forest fires trap carbon and provide for nutrients for the next forest.
It's not great to have half a continent burn at once, but regular, controlled fires are a net sink for carbon.
Agreed! I was just mentioning the only negative angle I could see, still a net positive!
But even if they do die, if you always make sure to have enough trees alive, it'll be a net zero.
Also, I'm wondering that no company has started investigating to bury trees into abandoned coal mines yet. Like, take one, give back one for using a few hundred thousand years later.
How would a company make money by dumping trees in holes?
It should be a government effort to do something like this. At least planting trees, no need to cut them for decades anyway. We would need an insane amount of tress for that to work too, basically as many as we burned as oil since the industrial era...
There's this concept of CO2 trading in europe. Basically a very dirty compania buys certificates from cleaner ones (or CO2 negative companies, like that hypothetical tree burying company). These allow dirtycorp. to pollute the air, while giving clean Inc. the ability and the monetary resources to pull CO2 from the air.
Interesting! In Canada we have a carbon tax, which incentivize companies to pollute less, but does not help companies that are carbon-negative. I like the european way better; but as I stated, it requires governments to manage this, as these certificates are a fictous constraint anyway.
~~Or moss. Moss is better~~
~~Source~~
That's not what that article says. At all.
As mentioned in the article, moss is pretty good at pulling particulates out of the air and "cleaning" it in that sense.
But trying to get CO2 out of the air isn't the same. Trees are very effective at this because they have a lot of mass and density and are largely carbon themselves. When we talk about "carbon sequestering", we're generally talking things like trees because that carbon from the air has to go somewhere and having a huge dense chunk of carbon is basically the most efficient natural method.
Moss is good at removing other particles, but trees are generally still better at carbon sequestering and CO2 removal.
Semi related: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/187327/how-plants-carbon-affects-their-response/
TL;DR - if you want to suck up a lot of CO2, you basically want a massive plant. Moss isn't one of them.
My bad, sorry and thanks for correcting me