How does this compare to the most ancient carbon capture tech: Trees ?
I know this sounds boring, but a single $M would allow to plant as much trees and they will capture carbon from the atmosphere, without any maintenance, for decades.
I know this sounds boring, but a single $M would allow to plant as much trees and they will capture carbon from the atmosphere, without any maintenance, for decades.
However, trees cannot get us all the way there. Trees are great for drawing down atmospheric carbon emissions in the short-term, but when trees decompose, they just release that carbon back into the atmosphere. Additionally, the landmass and water needed to sustain all these trees will require another solution to get all of the way to where we need to be with carbon removal.
This is false and extremely deceptive. When trees die they don't just release all the CO2 they collected back into the atmosphere over the course of their lifetime. How much CO2 and pollution will your towers produce during its production, while it is being run (it must use some sort of electricity) and when it is eventually dismantled? I assume you, it will be a lot more pollution than anything that a tree would create.
Trees are the answer to CO2 capture. Period. End of sentence. It's cheaper and far more effective to plant trees and pay to stop deforestation than these ludicrous plans to supposedly capture CO2 from the atmosphere.
Dying trees and wildfire is especially problematic in Boreal forests in Alaska and Canada[3]. Managing Boreal forests as a carbon sinks is going to be difficult with climate change. In Canada million acre fires are normal as the species composition is susceptible to stand clearing fires and fire intensity can be high resulting in the ecosystem being an atmospheric carbon producing source. Conversely, Redwood forests even at maturity increase their capacity as carbon sinks and are highly resistant to catastrophic fire.[4] So, species composition, soil, and fire influence on whether or not decomposing trees are a carbon sink or source.
Building on the model presented earlier:
CarbonCaptureRateToStopGlobalWarming = growTreesPlantsAndBuryDeadOnes(...params) + newTech(...params)
Replace growTreesPlantsAndBuryDeadOnes with growing fire resistant species that sequester carbon in the soil/biomass at high rates. For example, Redwoods in coastal CA and Oregon.
[1] https://www.firescience.gov/projects/briefs/03-1-1-06_fsbrie... [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00167... [3] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-10-3638-5_... [4] https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=26107
And can't you just bury the dead trees?
I also don't understand what the equation is. Is it something like this:
CarbonCaptureRateToStopGlobalWarming = growTreesPlantsAndBuryDeadOnes(...params) + newTech(...params)
Proper sequestering, which I agree doesn't really exist yet, is to capture co2 back into the geosphere.
It just takes land.
As jsantos511 said many times, we need more shots on goal!
If I want to go ahead, and plant trees, there's no way for me, as an individual, to claim a bit of that money.
I think that's an issue.