Would love to have someone knowledgeable share why carbon capture is more viable than planting trees. I always thought the idea we need technology to capture carbon is silly, but never bothered enough to research more on it
The way to look at it is: there are two carbon cycles. A long cycle (proto-plankton dies, gets carbonized over millions of years, is pumped up, burned, and ends up in the atmosphere), and a short cycle (tree dies, is burned / rots, and ends up in the atmosphere).
If all we do is burn trees, there is no problem. We're not adding CO2 to the atmosphere that wasn't there before. The problem is that the stuff we pump up was not there before.
So capturing in trees is at best a temporary solution. In 20 / 30 years that tree dies and is burnt or rots, and so the CO2 is released again. At best it may buy us some time while we learn to do with less oil. But it's crazy talk to do a weekend in Thailand and then "offset it with trees". That's like saying "I was broke, but I found $100 on the street, now life can continue as before".
I won't even mention the fact that large parts of the "offset economy" are essentially fraud. People that own a swath of forrest declaring "I was going to cut these 10 km2 of forrest and prevent any new tree on it, but now I won't" just so that they can get carbon credits. Even if it is painfully obvious that they never intended to do that.
Trees need to be cut and stored to actually capture the carbon otherwise there is a risk they burn or die and release the carbon they captured back into the atmosphere
That's only true under certain circumstances. Sometimes the biomass accumulation is permanent.
My house was built in the 60's. The basement recently started flooding. While digging a drain to fix the problem I uncovered evidence that ground level used to be 18 inches lower than it is now. 60 years of deciduous tree action created enough new soil to change how the water flows... Instead of going around my house now it goes through.
Trees are not seen as a solution because they don't represent a market opportunity. You can make millions selling EV's, how are you going to make money with trees?
If we actually wanted to fix this, rather than using it as marketing spin, I figure we'd be working on ways to replace deserts with forests and then on ways to ensure that whatever soil accumulation trick my tree is doing is also happening in those forests. (And golly I wish we would, I've been taking biology classes in this direction and recent political events have me thinking that the I've got some significant headwinds here).
>Trees are not seen as a solution because they don't represent a market opportunity. You can make millions selling EV's, how are you going to make money with trees?
Given that carbon is emitted continuously, and forests only offset a fixed amount of emissions (they stop sequestering carbon once they're fully grown and reach steady-state), you basically constantly need to be planting trees. That creates an obvious market for tree planting companies.
This guy argues that mature forest ecosystems are better carbon sequesters than immature ones or monoculture forests, due to biodiversity, leaf litter, fungi, soil etc:
You can plant trees (or any plant really as long as they grow fast) and then bury it so that the carbon won't get released or at least very slowly. There's an older thread discussing this idea [1].
CCS would dispose the CO2 deep underground, like where natural gas is usually stored or extracted from. Given the cost of developing natural gas storage facilities, my hunch is that CCS is more of way of not having to deal with carbon emissions today.
100%, I was talking specifically about just tree planting. Trees are great capture tech, but horrible storage tech, so tree planting alone is not a good carbon capture solution. Biomass burial is (imo) a great and relatively simple solution at the moment because we have a bunch of empty mines to use. There is also research being done on putting biomass in a chemical bath that turns it's CO2 into some form of storable liquid and then storing that, but I can't find a link for it at the moment.
If there are more trees in 10 years than there are now, and we keep that number relatively steady, won't that mean less CO2 in the atmosphere? Individual trees may die and decompose, but they can be replaced.
As you add more trees (and the globe continues to get hotter), the risk of forest fires increases. In theory you are correct that we could just keep increasing tree amount, but in practice that will be difficult in a lot of the world as it gets hotter. Trees (and algae) are great capture tech, but horrible long term storage tech. There are currently interesting proposals on how to long term store wood and other biomass for sequestration but I'm unsure if any company is doing them at scale yet. Off the top of my head there is burying the biomass in mines, and putting biomass in a chemical bath that turns it's CO2 into some form of storable liquid and then storing that. I can only find a link for one of the two after quick googling.
but as it is, the global net change in terms of forrest is negative. Hell, the amazon is losing 10.000 acres a day. And aside from direct human intervention, there's desertification that's not getting any better.
Interesting, didn’t know it. Did you read the page in question?
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As of 2023, the Great Green Wall was reported as "facing the risk of collapse" due to terrorist threats, absence of political leadership, and insufficient funding. “The Sahel countries have not allocated any spending in their budgets for this project. They are only waiting on funding from abroad, whether from the European Union, the African Union, or others.” said Issa Garba, an environmental activist from Niger, who also described the 2030 guideline as an unattainable goal. Amid the existing stagnation, a growing number of voices have called for scrapping the project.
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When trees die, they’re consumed by fungi, and the carbon is sequestered in humus (soil). That’s totally fine, and in fact is an important reason to ensure that planted forests have a fungal culture so this decomposition process occurs properly.
You’re right about fire releasing carbon. But even after devastating fires, forests don’t burn completely and plenty of plant matter remains. Even ash and soot is still sequestered carbon, not to mention charred wood even if the tree doesn’t survive.
Someone else pointed it out in a different way. Forrest only captures carbon as it grows. A fully grown forest is carbon neutral. Specific type of march land and oceans are the only ecosystems that properly capture and store carbon continuously.
So we need to chop the trees down again and plant new ones. Which is more feasible than technological carbon capture, but still a drop in the bucket of what is needed.
This guy argues that mature forest ecosystems are better carbon sequesters than immature ones or monoculture forests, due to biodiversity, leaf litter, fungi, soil etc:
There's a ton of carbon sequestered in soil, that is released when the ground is torn up (e.g. when clearing an area for replanting) and then only recovers over centuries (which is essentially permanent loss, in the current context)
If you cut down an entire forest to bury it (with hypothetical carbon-neutral machinery), then replant the entire forest, you can still end up emitting more carbon than you store.
Serious advocates consider it to be a research area, not a mature primary climate strategy. Someone in the 1930s would have been equally skeptical of “smog capture”, but it turns out modern catalytic converters are so good that we don’t have to choose between enjoying clear skies and driving around mobile smog machines.
Monocelular algae is on the order of 1% efficient at converting light into biomass. Land crops are a few times less efficient than them, and trees are 1 order of magnitude or 2 less efficient than crops.
I’m no expert, but on a theoretical level: trees—and, more importantly, algae—capture carbon on accident as part of their respiration, which even with risky genetic modification enhancements has a natural limit on volume/biomass-level efficiency.
OTOH, with the right chemical process running at scale (“synthetic carbon capture”, apparently), the sky’s the limit! We might not have the right tech at the moment, but AFAIK there are multiple plausible systems that would work much better than what we have now.
