kind of funny given what a stink everyone made about forgiving student loans being an upper middle class subsidy that the climate provisions are very explicitly a subsidy on upper middle class homeowners.
kind of funny given what a stink everyone made about forgiving student loans being an upper middle class subsidy that the climate provisions are very explicitly a subsidy on upper middle class homeowners.
planting trees isn't enough - the act alone is carbon neutral in the long-run because the trees die and decompose, releasing the carbon back into the atmosphere. so you have to plant the trees then prevent their decomposition and do it at an accelerating rate to keep up with capitalism - would be a lot easier to leave the fossils in the ground and not burn them.
most tree species are giving decades-centuries of time between planting and decomp
yes, but that's kicking the can down the road and you still need to plant them at an ever-accelerating rate.
either get rid of capitalism or we all live in an endless mega forest, i like this plan.
look i get theres limitations to planting trees its just the cheapest most immediately impactful thing to be done and its gobsmacking the west cant even organise a big campaign for it. capitalists really do be accelerationists
I'm saying that any plan that doesn't involve getting rid of capitalism still kills us. it's not enough to replant the trees, we need to restore the forests, with all their biodiversity. otherwise, these artificial carbon stores only work until they die and release the carbon back into the atmosphere. in order to be true carbon sinks -- the kind that created the coal we're burning in the first place -- the forest was well and truly trap the carbon that's emitted by the decomposition process. we know this happens in real forests and does not happen in artificial ones, because we only plant the trees.
Coal comes from trees that didn't decompose because the micro-organisms that decompose them now didn't exist. There's no going back.
To clarify, we would need to replant massive amounts of trees and then maintain that amount of trees indefinitely to keep the carbon captured. There's only so many trees you can plant.
Eventually some carbon from dead trees would be fixed as coal I suppose, but now you are talking thousands or millions of years.
yeah + in well-established forests, the CO2 that's emitted ends up captured again by the plants growing in it. when the capitalists plant forests, they only plant the trees so it takes a while before the rest of the biodiversity is restored to the artificial forests and the same effect takes hold. we don't need to plant trees; we need to replant the forests. and that means restoring the plant AND animal life that used to live in them. unbalanced and artificial ecosystems just create new problems if they cannot sustain themselves.
can that even happen on any significant scale now that stuff's better at breaking down wood
not really, no. maybe if we intentionally bury it?
We'd need to dump them into the ocean or something where they'd petrify. That would cause all sorts of untold knock on effects on the deep sea ecosystem though.
We also have that little issue with algae blooms disappearing and the main oxygen engines of the planet failing.
You can pyrolyse the wood into charcoal, which is porous and mostly biochemically stable, so if you put that in the soil it will increase (ionic) nutrient adsorption and water retention, assist lots of organisms, and remain in the soil as elemental carbon for centuries if not millennia.
Charcoal burns at a hotter temperature than wood. So, you can have a Combined Heat and Power stove/engine, or a combined heat/char, or a combined power/char. As long as you're planting more trees than you use for fuel, and putting some char into the soil, you're doing a net sequestration of carbon. It's not fast or flashy, but it does work very reliably.