61–70 of 153 posts
Yes you need to build ecosystems not just plant trees. Monoculture tree stands are often mostly empty of other life. You need to plant a variety of native species keeping track of keystone species and year round food production so that your forest supports other life.
So having read the article summary, then the research paper, then reading the article summary again... it seems that the summary isn't at all an accurate summary of the research paper, but rather a narrow focus on the suboptimal cases where tree growing isn't super effective at sequestering carbon. It sort of completely ignores the cases where they observed enhanced carbon sequestration, increases in soil organic car…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While it's a good point that plant sequestration of CO2 is slow compared to digging up coal, oil or methane and burning it, it's not meaningless.
The point is, plant matter is not geologically sequestrated in the present world. The oceans are oxygenated and circulation is pretty strong, and permafrost is decreasing, not increasing. Hence, any photosynthesized carbon material will be returned to the atmosphere as CO2 relatively quickly. The only way to sequester carbon is to make something like limestone (Ca/Mg + CO2 + H2O -> (Ca/Mg)CO3) and that requires calci…
A redwood tree can live for more than 2000 years. That seems plenty long for carbon sequestration. We should pay the logging companies to save a certain number of trees instead of cutting them every 30 or so years.
I recently looked up the difference in CO2 emissions between burning 1kg wood vs 1kg petrol. Surprisingly, the values are relatively close: Burning 1kg wood releases 1.65 - 1.8 kg of CO2. [0] Burning 1kg of crude oil releases 3.16 kg of CO2. [1][2] I would have expected the carbon density of oil to be much higher! To me, this suggests that a very naïve approach of growing trees and storing them in the places where we…
Wood is valuable and other plant material is similar carbon/kg, so the low-hanging fruit is to take agricultural waste (currently burned or left to rot) and bury it. Hauling all that straw around burns a lot of fuel, so it’s not clear how well it scales compared to other approaches.
However planting new forests in forested areas, and harvesting trees periodically to encourage new growth is a great idea
A redwood tree can live for more than 2000 years. That seems plenty long for carbon sequestration. We should pay the logging companies to save a certain number of trees instead of cutting them every 30 or so years.
When the trees are logged for use as lumber, the carbon is sequestered into structures and new trees are typically planted (or allowed to grow) for future logging, capturing carbon in the meantime.
I wonder if a 1000 year old tree would gather more or less carbon over it's lifetime than 20 separate 50 year old trees?
A redwood tree can live for more than 2000 years. That seems plenty long for carbon sequestration. We should pay the logging companies to save a certain number of trees instead of cutting them every 30 or so years.