Would love to have someone knowledgeable share why carbon capture is more viable than planting trees. I always thought the idea we need technology to capture carbon is silly, but never bothered enough to research more on it
If all we do is burn trees, there is no problem. We're not adding CO2 to the atmosphere that wasn't there before. The problem is that the stuff we pump up was not there before.
So capturing in trees is at best a temporary solution. In 20 / 30 years that tree dies and is burnt or rots, and so the CO2 is released again. At best it may buy us some time while we learn to do with less oil. But it's crazy talk to do a weekend in Thailand and then "offset it with trees". That's like saying "I was broke, but I found $100 on the street, now life can continue as before".
I won't even mention the fact that large parts of the "offset economy" are essentially fraud. People that own a swath of forrest declaring "I was going to cut these 10 km2 of forrest and prevent any new tree on it, but now I won't" just so that they can get carbon credits. Even if it is painfully obvious that they never intended to do that.
My house was built in the 60's. The basement recently started flooding. While digging a drain to fix the problem I uncovered evidence that ground level used to be 18 inches lower than it is now. 60 years of deciduous tree action created enough new soil to change how the water flows... Instead of going around my house now it goes through.
Trees are not seen as a solution because they don't represent a market opportunity. You can make millions selling EV's, how are you going to make money with trees?
If we actually wanted to fix this, rather than using it as marketing spin, I figure we'd be working on ways to replace deserts with forests and then on ways to ensure that whatever soil accumulation trick my tree is doing is also happening in those forests. (And golly I wish we would, I've been taking biology classes in this direction and recent political events have me thinking that the I've got some significant headwinds here).
Given that carbon is emitted continuously, and forests only offset a fixed amount of emissions (they stop sequestering carbon once they're fully grown and reach steady-state), you basically constantly need to be planting trees. That creates an obvious market for tree planting companies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Crowther_(ecologist) https://crowtherlab.com/ https://iview.abc.net.au/show/forest https://www.memorabletv.com/news/the-forest-trillion-tree-hy...
CCS would dispose the CO2 deep underground, like where natural gas is usually stored or extracted from. Given the cost of developing natural gas storage facilities, my hunch is that CCS is more of way of not having to deal with carbon emissions today.
https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0...
but as it is, the global net change in terms of forrest is negative. Hell, the amazon is losing 10.000 acres a day. And aside from direct human intervention, there's desertification that's not getting any better.
so in practice, no.
“ As of 2023, the Great Green Wall was reported as "facing the risk of collapse" due to terrorist threats, absence of political leadership, and insufficient funding. “The Sahel countries have not allocated any spending in their budgets for this project. They are only waiting on funding from abroad, whether from the European Union, the African Union, or others.” said Issa Garba, an environmental activist from Niger, who also described the 2030 guideline as an unattainable goal. Amid the existing stagnation, a growing number of voices have called for scrapping the project. “
You’re right about fire releasing carbon. But even after devastating fires, forests don’t burn completely and plenty of plant matter remains. Even ash and soot is still sequestered carbon, not to mention charred wood even if the tree doesn’t survive.
So we need to chop the trees down again and plant new ones. Which is more feasible than technological carbon capture, but still a drop in the bucket of what is needed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Crowther_(ecologist) https://crowtherlab.com/ https://iview.abc.net.au/show/forest https://www.memorabletv.com/news/the-forest-trillion-tree-hy...
If you cut down an entire forest to bury it (with hypothetical carbon-neutral machinery), then replant the entire forest, you can still end up emitting more carbon than you store.
OTOH, with the right chemical process running at scale (“synthetic carbon capture”, apparently), the sky’s the limit! We might not have the right tech at the moment, but AFAIK there are multiple plausible systems that would work much better than what we have now.