Carbon sequestration is trivial: we rewild destroyed ecosystems. We don't need to die waiting for Elon.
I await my downvotes.
I await my downvotes.
One year of carbon sequestration from a mature tree == 1 or 2 days of commuting to the city 20 miles away that many people who are priced out of this town drive back and forth from.
Trees are great, and most places should plant more street trees. But if you preserve trees at the cost of building dense cities that are more environmentally friendly, you're doing it wrong. Dense cities also allow for more trees in actual wild lands outside of them, rather than sprawl.
In the US, transportation and heating are our biggest individual contributions to climate change.
Shooting down solutions because they aren't the entire solution will mean we never make any progress.
In other unfortunate news:
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/25/gm-bolt-ev-production-to-end...
GM ending production of the Chevy Bolt in favor of bigger, heavier, deadlier, less efficient EV's.
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/figures/summary...
Reforesting, afforesting and ecosystem restoration are nearly as impactful, but listed seperately.
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/ecosystems/coastal-blue-carbon...
Serious question. Planting trees and re-growing ecosystems seems like a simple, straightforward solution, but I feel like it's a red herring.
Too many people jump from "it's not sufficient" to "therefore, we shouldn't do it".
So if we doubled the size and carbon trapping of all the forests on earth, yes, it would make a big dent (solve the problem entirely, maybe). But that's unrealistic, because forests currently cover 30% of the land area of the planet, so we're practically never going to get to 60% forest coverage. It would involve giving up important things like farming.
It's not entirely a red herring, it will undoubtedly be a big part of climate change mitigation, but the first and most important step is to stop pumping oil out of the ground and burning it, like the article.
To give a fairly obvious example, think about deciduous trees: once a year they shed a large amount of carbon (leaves) which then goes into the soil. The nitrogen content is used for matter for plants, while the carbon is not.
Over time, this deposits more and more carbon in the ground itself. This is a good, safe place for it, and the model above is one of the simplest. Ecosystems are great at this stuff if we stop setting them on fire or otherwise killing everything.
Agreed on keeping it in the ground, though.
Really the purpose of forests is more in terms of soil creation and preservation, as you point out, a lot of the times in the form of shrubs, leaves, or needles and downed wood being infiltrated into substrate.