this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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Capturing carbon is really amazingly simple: plant trees.
Unfortunately planting trees doesn't get venture capitalists interested.
my understanding is that tree planting isn't considered a magical solution because all that vegetable matter ultimately dies and its sequestered carbon is released by the creatures or microbes that break it down for energy and nutrients.
You can't plant old growth forests.
A huge amount of the carbon sequestration done by trees happens well below the ground and takes hundreds or even thousands of years to get effective. If you cut down an acre of trees, you'll have to plant many acres to get the same effect in any kind of human timescale, and that just won't and likely can't happen. That acre was cleared for a reason and it's unlikely just because an identical acre without trees somewhere else was in the wrong place.
Also worth pointing out that carbon capture and carbon removal/air capture are different things. Carbon capture happens at the smokestack. I know it's confusing terminology, but that's what's being discussed in this article and that is what the term means in industry use.
Thank you. Im not who you were replying to but I was confusing the terminology.
Then we use the wood.
Wood for construction locks up the carbon for decades to centuries.
Leaves become animal fodder and from there become fertilizer.
The more we replace disposable plastic with disposable paper the fewer microplastics we add to the environment.
If wood ends up in a landfill, its carbon gets locked underground for centuries. An anoxic landfill, and it could stay down there until it turns into oil. Dump it in the ocean and it sinks down among the shipwrecks and becomes fish habitat. And the worst poison wood leaches into the environment is the stuff black walnut uses to kill other plants.
Compared to everything else we make crap out of, wood is an ecological miracle.
And if all else fails wood for heat and power is literally carbon neutral.
We have to plant trees constantly, and store the logs and leafy material deep underground