Haven't carbon offsets always been a scam, though? ~~Like, I'm pretty sure I recall that you can buy forests that already exist to offset new pollution. Or am I misremembering / making that up?~~ I'm not 100% sure what I was remembering wasn't from King of the Hill rather than an article. I still believe carbon offsets have always been a scam, though.
Trees are carbon neutral during their life cycle. They take and store carbon in their leaves, wood and roots while growing, than when they decay they release all that CO2 back out.
So yeah you can grow a forest, store the carbon, and ship it somewhere else to build buildings and now it’s their carbon problem. Paper, any wood products really accomplishes much of the same goal.
The trees really aren’t a “scam” just not as thought out as it was supposed to be. Some trees are better than others for “storing” carbon as well.
No the scam is eg buying a piece of land with a bunch of trees, and then promising to not cut them down. The not cutting down is then calculated as x tonnes of co2 compensation.
That’s the issue though, trees were thought to be carbon positive, A the tree species matters, and when the trees naturally die it comes back out. It’s only temporary storage.
Idk if I would call it a scam or if they just didn’t do enough prior research ahead of time.
You’re being way too thoughtful and nice about it. Commendable, truly - but the people running this scam might just as well buy a box of matches and promise not to ignite them. It’s to evade regulation, not to actually make a change.
In the context of the USA, yeah I guess that’s fair.
Other countries have better checks and balances, most of what I’ve seen on this has been non-USA research, so likely there’s a reason for that.
I don't think it all comes out though? Unless you just burn the wood or allow it to decay.
I reckon that a timber house is going to be carbon positive for quite a while. Unless it burns down or is neglected so bad that it decays. Same for high quality furniture.
You’re not wrong, but eventually it will decay and come out. 1000 years, or demolished for an expansion after 10 years.
Survivorship bias as well, not all timber houses will last the test of time, same with furniture. The point is, it all will eventually come back out, so it’s more of a, not my problem, it’s the futures problem. Or ship it to someone else. Either way, it’s neutral.
In the span of 1000 years, is there anything we can do anyway?
Trees do not necessarily release the same amount of co2 while decaying.
That will all depend on how it's decaying and if it's aerobic or anaerobic
Also, what portion of the decayed tree becomes soil. Sure some CO2 is released back out, but the net increase in soil over the tree's life is where the savings are.
Anaerobic vs aerobic decay is largely about the difference in short-term impacts. Anaerobic decay releases methane which is much more potent than CO2 in the short term, but naturally breaks down into CO2 over a hundred or so years, which is a long time for the generations of humans dealing with climate change, but a blip on the timescales of forests.
That soil is feed for other organisms that make CO2, some plants are better than others, but they almost all wind up being carbon neutral in the end. The only way to get rid of it, would be to cut it down and send it into space. If you could do that without producing more CO2…
The leaves get eaten by bugs that produce CO2, so even if it was somehow carbon positive, bugs and other things would make it a very moot point.m very fast.
Bottom line people have already thought of these things and debunked them, it doesn’t matter, they aren’t carbon positive.
Not overly, it feeds other carbon producing life forms too, bugs, worms, deer.
LMAO at your description of John Oliver 😆
Alas I did not come up with it. I have to give credit where credit is due. Some guy called John Oliver came up with it lol. It's hard to find anyone more self-deprecating and humble with so many different things named after them. Like that koala chlamydia Ward.
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