Planting trees has plenty of benefits, but this popular carbon-removal method alone can’t possibly counteract the planet-warming emissions caused by the world’s largest fossil-fuel companies. To do that, trees would have to cover the entire land mass of North and Central America, according to a study out Thursday.
Many respected climate scientists and institutions say removing carbon emissions — not just reducing them — is essential to tackling climate change. And trees remove carbon simply by “breathing.”
But crunching the numbers, researchers found that the trees’ collective ability to remove carbon through photosynthesis can’t stand up to the potential emissions from the fossil fuel reserves of the 200 largest oil, gas and coal fuel companies — there’s not enough available land on Earth to feasibly accomplish that.
And even if you did do that, where would you store the wood afterwards? You can’t let it decay, that’d just put the carbon back into the atmosphere.
deleted by creator
… don’t cut them down?
You think trees don’t die and fall down on their own?
Sometimes, sure.
And the rest of them just stay frozen upright forever, I suppose.
As long as new trees start at a higher rate than the old ones fall down…
This is not how forests work. They reach a saturation point quickly (in geological terms). What you need for continuous carbon sequestering is peat lands as the carbon gets turned into structures that aren’t really bioavailable and the top layer slowly moves up.
That would require an ever-increasing amount of forested land. A carbon pyramid scheme. As soon as you stop increasing the forest’s area it goes back to an equilibrium of trees decaying equalling trees growing.
You can build homes and all sorts of stuff out of wood. It doesn’t have to be a low-tech backwards building material.
By the time we run out of land we’ll all be long gone, and there will be complementary solutions.
Another problem with storing carbon as cellulose is it uses up all the available water. So the trees would need to be cut down and turned into charcoal to release the H’s and O’s, and then buried.
The world isn’t short of water. I’d be more concerned about phosphorus and other such mineral nutrients, those would get pulled out of the soil and then not returned.
Frankly, I think the best approach to sequestration is to make plastic and bury it. Plastic has a much more controllable chemical structure, you can be sure to only get carbon that way.
How do you convert atmospheric carbon into plastic?