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Comment by krisrm | Hacker News Reader

I do worry about the oversight and auditing of such metrics. The article does refer to the problem of "I planted X trees therefore I removed Y carbon", when that is true only under particular conditions.

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It's strange from an environmental "culture" standpoint (the treehugger epithet, "save the trees"), but to truly get a good carbon sink out of planted forests you then need to cut them down, bury them, and plant more ones.

Which is basically what happens if we use wood for all our housing and as many consumer products as possible and chuck them in a landfill.

But yes, lies, damn lies, and accounting is definitely a danger to any environmental regulation. It has been for decades, all the industry players know how to game the system:

- no real penalties

- insiders in the regulatory offices

- hide large amounts of pollution from inspectors

- accumulate penalties and lawsuits? Start new corp, transfer assets, declare bankruptcy for the old corporation

- industry-wide penalties? Offload that back to the government (that is, society) with lobbying and rescue funds and other business subsidies

I guess you need to plant X trees, wait Y years for them to accumulate Z carbon and then bury all the trees M meters underground to stay there forever.

A forest will only grow as a carbon sink on the century timescale, which is the window in which we irreversibly enter headlong into the anthropocene or mitigate our global anthopogenic effects. We don't have to plan for burying them.

That's incorrect, if you look into regenerative agriculture you'll see that soil carbon content can be increased from 1 to 8 percent in less than a decade. Carbon sequestration isn't just from biomass above the soil, it also occurs through carbohydrate transfer to microbes and as a result of the increase in microbial biomass in soils.

You're right in pointing this out. What I am saying is that we do not need to deliberately bury biomass. The forest ecosystem is not just the trees.

"Forever" is over ambitious.

I'd pile them up in some desert. Should last a few centuries.

Until they catch fire and release that CO2 right back into the atmosphere.

We’ve seen this happen with carbon capture programs already.

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