this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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Woah, it's almost like carbon capture is a non-solution.
It is, but not industrial types of it. You basicly use plants and make sure they do not rot ones they die. Stuff like planting trees and turn them into coal, which you then throw into an old coal mine. The best ones would be algae. The most like way the PETM ended was by having algae grow in the artic, which then died due to frost and sunk to the bottom of the sea to form oil and gas.
Basicly we need to put fossil fuels back under the ground. That could be done on some scale, but unless we stop extracting them first, it is pretty useless. However long term it is a decent option to reduce carbon in the atosphere.
Yeah, I've noticed that the latest fossil fuel propaganda tactic is "No, wait, don't regulate us, industrial carbon capture will totally save us, bro, just wait and see, it's the only real solution to climate change, bro, I swear."
It's mystifying to me that oil companies are actually Saturday morning cartoon villain levels of stupidly evil.
Unless you count planting trees carbon capture. Then it is part of the solution
Even then, not really. See, trees temporarily lock up carbon while they're alive, but once they decompose, all their captured carbon gets released into the atmosphere again (unless the trees are buried or something). Actually, perennial prairie grasses that are allowed to grow and get deep, deep roots (about 8-10 ft deep, as I recall) will sequester carbon into the soil and turn the grassland into a giant carbon sink. Shitty HOA lawn grass and golf course grasses don't do this, because they're kept cut short (read: kept stressed) and well watered and have neither opportunity nor incentive to set deep roots.
"Temporarily lock up carbon while they're alive" So.... only for a few thousand years then....
We can do both. Plant trees, and replace turf grass with native grass and flowers.
Very, very few trees live that long in practice. The average tree lifespan is three to four hundred years, though there are plenty of species that are sub-100 on average. But that's not the point. The point is that you're just cycling the carbon, not really removing it from circulation. The instant there's a devastating forest fire or something causes those trees to die, that carbon is back in play. Even if the trees don't all die at once, you're still going to hit an equilibrium where the number of trees dying of natural causes and releasing carbon balances the number of trees growing and locking up carbon. It's not the worst stop-gap solution (that honor belongs to industrial carbon capture facilities) to buy ourselves some more time, and we SHOULD be planting more trees, but it's not a good solution for permanently reducing our carbon load.
I mean we could use the wood instead of other materials.