There are many reasons why everyone should grow a plant, but you need just one
permapeople.org
permapeople.org
World population is about 7,800,000,000. The population of Germany is about 83,000,000. That makes roughly 940 tomato plants to offset the CO2 emission of one person.
Even putting that number aside, tomato plants are not exactly small plants. A significant part of world population won’t have the leisure to keep even one, let alone ten, tomato plants (or the equivalent in other plants). Think people who live in slums, people who live in dense areas (e.g. people who subsist with minimum wage in subdivided apartments in HK).
Yes, we should definitely grow plants, but even more so, we need to consume way waaaay less.
So that means to compensate for the stated amount of CO2, you need to plant 10 tomato plants extra each year (the second year you would have 20, the third year you would have 30, etc.).
Sure, if emissions go down the number of plants goes down. But they aren't going down that much in the near term
Wouldn't it be the best when these two are actually the same? When growing more enables you to consume less? I didn't account for the savings you would do with consuming less in my simple calculation.
I mean, I'm a software engineer by training. Back in university, we had a courses on engineering ethics, environmental responsibility, stuff like that. That's where I learned the concept of lifecycle energy assessment. I know it's a thing, but I never learned how to actually do the assessment (e.g. where to pull figures, the kind of ballpark calculations you do).
It might be interesting to make the methodology of lifecycle energy assessment more accessible to the general populace. I think everybody can benefit from a new perspective.
While it is made by Apple itself it gives a rough idea of how much an iPhone costs.
This discussion also just came up 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24911413
So that means to compensate for the stated amount of CO2, you need to plant 10 tomato plants extra each year (the second year you would have 20, the third year you would have 30, etc.). That is not taken into account that it is challenging to overwinter plants outside.
According to the first referenced article[1], the tomato plant stores the largest part of the CO2 in its fruits. If you eat your freshly grown fruits, you will respirate (a large amount of) this CO2 again.
Besides that, I enjoyed the read. I had nine tomato plants on my balcony this past summer. They take a lot of room and a lot of work, but it is lovely to eat your own homegrown fruits. I can recommend it to anyone! I only think the calculation is way off.
[1] http://www.lessco2.es/pdfs/noticias/ponencia_cisc_ingles.pdf
The net change to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is roughly zero per year if you start with no tomato plant and end with eaten tomatoes and compost*
If you want to sequester carbon then you have to (a) increase the biomass of plants year after year or (b) take plant matter (or animal matter) out of the carbon cycle for good. That means doing something like burying it or dropping it to the bottom of the ocean. Anywhere where there’s no oxygen (the O in CO2). That’s what happened to the gigatons of algae and plankton that turned into the oil we’ve had so much fun burning.
* I believe healthy soil does store more carbon than dead dirt so if your ongoing growing is improving the soil every year then you might be winning a bit.
Ben