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Comment by bloogsy | Hacker News Reader

Admirable - considering the size of IKEA as a business this can only be a good thing. Hopefully they reach carbon neutral sooner than 2030 before pushing on to carbon positive. My only concern is that planting trees isn't necessarily accurate measured as a carbon sink, with the amount of carbon captured often overestimated. However to reiterate, this can only be a good thing.

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There's a lot of talk about planting trees now with TeamTrees and other similar things. I'm wondering what we will do with all the trees then when they have stopped growing and thus mostly stop sequestering CO₂. Trees don't live forever and when they die and rot, they will release the CO₂ back.

We could build things out of the trees and those would last maybe 50 to 100 years more. Or we could encase them in concrete and bury them to prevent rotting. But I don't really know a good solution and I was wondering what people have already thought of it. Or is the plan that we will come up with a solution to that in the next 50 years when the trees grow?

What if we focus on planting trees that are expected to live for hundreds of years and just hope we have better technology to cope with the situation once we’ve stopped burning every lump of coal we can find.

Growing them to restore grazing or otherwise degraded land works, though.

Hmm so when a forest grows, it sequesters a certain amount. When the trees start dying, they will start releasing it. But when the trees die, new trees will start growing in their stead and sequester the CO₂ released from the dying trees. Is the point to capture CO₂ into these cycles? So as only part of the trees are dying at any given stage, only a part of the CO₂ is "available" in the air at any given moment.

Is that how it works?

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