this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
60 points (98.4% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
5240 readers
730 users here now
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Woah, it's almost like carbon capture is a non-solution.
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.