I can’t wait until they makes these no cost, low-maintenance, and self-replacing. Oh man, just think of how easy it would be to fix our climate issues!
I can’t wait until they makes these no cost, low-maintenance, and self-replacing. Oh man, just think of how easy it would be to fix our climate issues!
I’ll just leave this here in case people are actually falling for this scam. Planting trees is orders of magnitude cheaper and more effective…
edit: Because this post attracted some nasty disinformation, here’s a paper in nature explaining in a very polite way that carbon capture is BS.
Trees very quickly stop being effective though. As soon as they die, they return all that captured CO2 back into the atmosphere
You’d also joined to plant billions of trees just to keep up with current CO2 emissions, let alone all part emissions
Basically, to convert all CO2 from the atmosphere into oxygen you’ll need to spend the same amount of energy as you got out of it by burning fossil fuels. With losses included, you can triple that. Add to that the energy required to gather the CO2 and the e energy required to safely store it and you can easily quadruple it
So basically take all the energy we’ve generated since the industrial revolution, quadruple that, and that will be the amount of energy we’ll need to spend to remove the CO2 from our atmosphere. If for the next, say, 200 years we stop emitting CO2 and double our output, we spend 50% of the world’s power on CO2 scrubbing, we’d end up with a clean atmosphere. That is being generous
Planting a few trees won’t do anything at all
Planting entire forests the size of larger countries would do little
We opened Pandora’s box and it’ll cost us centuries to close it
You’re right about most of this, but the carbon doesn’t return to the atmosphere “as soon as they die”.
I have a log in the back garden that has been there for twenty years, there’s wood houses a hundred years old
Wooden houses will typically have a waterproof roof and some kind of treatment to prevent them rotting. A log that’s left outside will release all it’s carbon in much less than a century. Human intervention is needed for trees to achieve permanent carbon capture.
That wasn’t always the case, though. After trees evolved lignin, it took a while for fungi to evolve ligninase to digest it, so trees fell over and just got buried under more trees later without rotting, and that’s where a significant fraction of all coal came from.
I think the wildfires speed things up
Big oof.
Entirely different use cases. Planting trees makes a deeper reservoir to store carbon, but it doesn’t take that carbon out of the carbon cycle. There is still more carbon than the carbon cycle evolved to handle. We need to do both, and also stop bringing more carbon from outside the carbon cycle into it.
I remember when people said the same of electric cars and grid scale solar and wind.
But planting trees doesn’t provide transportation or electricity, it does pull CO2 directly from the atmosphere though. In this case you can compare the capture technology to trees planted on the same area of land and see which one is better land use for the same purpose.
Youre not getting it. The people suppprting trees only dont comprehend that the tech will get better. Its not stuck as is. This is/was the issue complained about for those other technologies 30-50 years ago. This WILL get better and it will do it faster than trees can evolve. As well as everyone one of the supporting systems for it. Its luddite logic.
I’m not sure I agree. There’s efficiency gains to be had in the tech, but I think it’s better not to count your chickens before they hatch. In arid climates where trees struggle to grow it makes sense to deploy carbon capture tech, but I think there’s a also a profit motive that muddies the best practices. Nobody gets rich by replanting forests and leaving them alone, but there’s a lot of money to be made in these power hungry facilities.
At the core trees are just a more advanced technology in many ways. They have biological processes that don’t only remove the carbon but build it into useful timber; plus they’re entirely solar powered by default.
There’s also the potential to combine high tech solutions with our existing flora, either through genetic modification or specialized sensor based agriculture. Something isn’t low tech or backwards just because it involves plants, they’ve been scrubbing carbon for millions of years and are valuable tools.
Yes they do get rich by this. When policies are created that allow them to avoid taxes and cleanup because they paid to have trees planted. No trees are a haphazard attempt to maintain existense in a chaotic and wildly changing environment. This is more ‘noble savage’ lines of thought. Just because somethings grows on its own doesnt make it better than something designed and created. And modifying a plant to work inside of technology IS a technological advancement not a natural one. The exact kind of development and evolution i was talking about that is explicitly outside the bounds of natural evolution.