Whilst having trees instead of not having trees is obviously better, it doesn’t actually solve the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
There are two carbon cycles, the short cycle and the long cycle.
The short cycle is a tree is planted, stores carbon whilst it’s alive, then releases that carbon when it dies and decomposes or gets burnt. Trees can live for hundreds of years, but most struggle to live more than 100 - 150 years and much shorter depending on a lot of factors.
The long cycle is stuff like plankton stores carbon whilst it is alive and then gets locked up in the earth. After geologic processes it eventually turns into stuff like oil and natural gas. This takes many thousands of years. Then when this oil/gas is burnt, it releases the carbon into the atmosphere.
What humanity has been doing for the past 100+ years is taking the carbon out of the long cycle and dumping it into the atmosphere at a huge rate.
If we were to plant trees at a frantic rate, they only make a small dent in what we release. This is because the process of creating the oil has compacted the carbon. That’s why it is such a good fuel, it contains a lot of energy. Burning the fuel releases the energy, but also the carbon.
We simply can’t plant enough trees to make a difference. And even if we could it’s a bad idea, because in 50 years or so the first trees start to die and all the carbon that tree stored over its entire lifetime gets released back into the atmosphere.
Using tree plantations to offset carbon is greenwashing and should be illegal imho. Once you take carbon out of the long cycle, there is no putting it back. Offsetting this carbon by planting trees is doing nothing in the long term.
Plus a lot of the trees being used for greenwashing aren’t even new/extra trees, most often them are trees that were already there and mature. So they aren’t going to do a lot to begin with.
The whole greenwashing thing is such BS and it pains me there is this whole industry around it of rich people buying land and selling carbon offsets in a get even richer investment scheme. And they even claim to be doing a good thing for the planet, where these rich folk are usually the most pollutent of them all.
We need to seriously invest in ways to store carbon in an efficient long term way. I have not seen any real proposal for this.
And keep in mind the laws of thermodynamics. There is no free lunch here. Even with 100% efficiency, it will take as much energy to put the carbon back into storage as we got out of it by burning the fuel. With efficiency rates of 30-40% each way its a lot more. This is the bill we (and the generations before us) are leaving our children and the next generations. They will have a real hard time paying it and that is on top of the bill they pay because of climate change itself.
And to think we haven’t even come close to slowing down the rate at which we dump the carbon into the air.
You have a lot of really good points here that I wish more people would think on
A little bit you talk about when the trees start to die and re release the carbon as if there aren’t new trees taking their place.
I understand that more carbon has been extracted than there was in circulation before. But in the same way that you hate rich people trying to get richer by selling offsets and planting trees it’s the same as this inventor and their shitty bricks. In my opinion it’s even less viable than environment restorations even though as we both agree they won’t all the way solve the problem. I do agree that no one’s come up with a real solution and we definitely need some kind of long term mega scale storage
Whilst having trees instead of not having trees is obviously better, it doesn’t actually solve the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
There are two carbon cycles, the short cycle and the long cycle. The short cycle is a tree is planted, stores carbon whilst it’s alive, then releases that carbon when it dies and decomposes or gets burnt. Trees can live for hundreds of years, but most struggle to live more than 100 - 150 years and much shorter depending on a lot of factors. The long cycle is stuff like plankton stores carbon whilst it is alive and then gets locked up in the earth. After geologic processes it eventually turns into stuff like oil and natural gas. This takes many thousands of years. Then when this oil/gas is burnt, it releases the carbon into the atmosphere.
What humanity has been doing for the past 100+ years is taking the carbon out of the long cycle and dumping it into the atmosphere at a huge rate. If we were to plant trees at a frantic rate, they only make a small dent in what we release. This is because the process of creating the oil has compacted the carbon. That’s why it is such a good fuel, it contains a lot of energy. Burning the fuel releases the energy, but also the carbon. We simply can’t plant enough trees to make a difference. And even if we could it’s a bad idea, because in 50 years or so the first trees start to die and all the carbon that tree stored over its entire lifetime gets released back into the atmosphere.
Using tree plantations to offset carbon is greenwashing and should be illegal imho. Once you take carbon out of the long cycle, there is no putting it back. Offsetting this carbon by planting trees is doing nothing in the long term. Plus a lot of the trees being used for greenwashing aren’t even new/extra trees, most often them are trees that were already there and mature. So they aren’t going to do a lot to begin with. The whole greenwashing thing is such BS and it pains me there is this whole industry around it of rich people buying land and selling carbon offsets in a get even richer investment scheme. And they even claim to be doing a good thing for the planet, where these rich folk are usually the most pollutent of them all.
We need to seriously invest in ways to store carbon in an efficient long term way. I have not seen any real proposal for this.
And keep in mind the laws of thermodynamics. There is no free lunch here. Even with 100% efficiency, it will take as much energy to put the carbon back into storage as we got out of it by burning the fuel. With efficiency rates of 30-40% each way its a lot more. This is the bill we (and the generations before us) are leaving our children and the next generations. They will have a real hard time paying it and that is on top of the bill they pay because of climate change itself.
And to think we haven’t even come close to slowing down the rate at which we dump the carbon into the air.
You have a lot of really good points here that I wish more people would think on
A little bit you talk about when the trees start to die and re release the carbon as if there aren’t new trees taking their place.
I understand that more carbon has been extracted than there was in circulation before. But in the same way that you hate rich people trying to get richer by selling offsets and planting trees it’s the same as this inventor and their shitty bricks. In my opinion it’s even less viable than environment restorations even though as we both agree they won’t all the way solve the problem. I do agree that no one’s come up with a real solution and we definitely need some kind of long term mega scale storage
so we fell the treed and bury them in old mines