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.
Too bad global warming is rapidly worsening forest fires. Pretty sure these kinds of solutions are already DOA, even if they were being taken seriously. The runaway effects have begun to snowball.
Frankly I’m surprised it’s so little. I thought it wouldn’t be possible with Earth’s landmass period with trees alone.
So you’re sayin’ there’s a chance?!
Better get started, then.
What if we plant a tree on the freshly-dug grave of every billionaire?
If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging!
By all means, feel free to figure out about filling it back in second, but that’s doomed to failure if you skip step 1.
It’s been great if we could slow down the rate at which the digging is increasing, for starters. Even that’d be a thing to see.
Good. hardest part of a solution is figuring out what we need. , now let’s go drop apple tree seeds everywhere.
Not kidding. Couldn’t hurt
Deal.
Next!
I would love to live in a tree house
It’s almost like we only really had one option this entire time!
Can’t they use Russia instead?
Most of Russia is covered by Forests or Peatlands, which are actually far superior in carbon sequestering. All the coal that is burned used to be peat. Same is true for most of Canada, which is in about the same climate zone.
The last thing we need is more meddling with one of the areas that actually helps in carbon sequestering.
I’d hold off until the current management is fired.
All the funds would get stolen to pay for big titties on mistresses and a pleasure yacht.
I doubt Russia is unique
As an European, that works for me.
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.
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… 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?
