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.
Deal.
Next!
I would love to live in a tree house
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.
What if we plant a tree on the freshly-dug grave of every billionaire?
It’s almost like we only really had one option this entire time!
Better get started, then.
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
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
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?!
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.
… 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.
By the time we run out of land we’ll all be long gone, and there will be complementary solutions.
You can build homes and all sorts of stuff out of wood. It doesn’t have to be a low-tech backwards building material.
PV-powered drying and pyrolysis with capture and bottling of the wood gas would maximize the carbon sequestration ability of forest land. The pine species used for lumber and paper production are actually very good at capturing carbon during their growth stage and a lot of that land in the SE US has been sold off as demand for paper dropped off. The biochar produced from that process can also be added to soil, increasing its productivity and carbon sequestration rate.
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?
