So it turns out that trees are actually carbon neutral, and aren’t carbon sinks like previously assumed.
The tree does store co2 in a sense, but as much co2 is also produced by the tree during its life cycle, it’s leafs are eaten by bugs, the leaves that fall to the ground decompose and also provide feed to microorganisms.
Now once the tree is dead, it also decomposes releasing co2 as well as providing food for bugs and organisms that all turn it to co2 as well.
Nature is wonderful, but they were completely wrong about trees scrubbing co2 from the atmosphere.
If the tree dies or is cut down and burnt, then absolutely, yeah. But a tree can survive for many decades, which is time when the CO2 is not in the atmosphere. Ultimately, the solution is to plant more trees and not cut them down until enough CO2 is bound.
You can turn it into biochar. (turn it into carbon) the carbon becomes stable for centuries and you can put it in compost to boost beneficial bacteria, use it to filter runoff, etc. You can just crush it and just throw it on the grass. You get about 50% stable carbon from whatever biomass you use.
A solution for a small but notable chunk of the problem perhaps.
There’s no way that we can solve the entire problem that way.
Before human civilisation trees covered entire nations that are mostly bare today. Humanity cut down a lot of trees during prehistory, and it presumably had an impact on the climate. But it was nothing compared to our fossil fuel burning.
And that’s pretty much the upper limit of what we can dream of achieving, realistically it seems unlikely that the UK will ever go back to mostly woodland, what countries will? Its have to be most of the countries in viable climates, and probably means most farmland, and we’d still just make a small blip compared to the scale of the problem.
Once we’re truly carbon neutral, and we’ve covered the world in trees, we’ll still have more carbon in the atmosphere, a lot more, and I guess a few billion starving people since we’ve turned the farms into forests that can’t sustain our population, and we’d still be a few degrees warmer.
We need a way to turn co2 back to solid carbon that won’t decompose, that’s the only way out long term (lower priority than carbon neutral of course).
Not to say that planting trees is bad or anything, it’s just not a solution to the level of problem we’ve created, it never could be.
You could bury the wood underground where oxygen doesn’t reach, or as someone else already suggested, turn it into biochar before you do it.
But whatever we do, we need an efficient way of getting the CO2 out of the atmosphere and there’s just no way that we’re going to beat trees in that, because it is an endothermic process and whatever machine we might build will require building that machine (at large scale) and will have inefficiencies all over the place.
So, planting as many trees as possible is always the first step we have to take.
But trees naturally die, they can’t last infinitely, that’s a non existent scenario.
Even if it’s cut down and made into housing, most of it eventually decays (25-30 years usually).
It just doesn’t work in the end.
Yeah, the actual permanent solution would have been to not unearth all that fossil fuel in the first place. The second-best solution is to bind it in trees.
We could try cutting down trees and burying them underground without (much) oxygen. But just having more trees alive at a time is a lot less effort.
They’re CO2 storages that can provide fruits, shadow, oxygen and other nice things. That’s pretty neat.
An individual tree is neutral, but a forest is carbon negative as long as it exists.
Untrue.
Just letting a forest grow wild is carbon neutral.
The soil reaches a point of saturation. Eventually the dead trees get eaten by detritivores, releasing the captured carbon back into the air.
Keeping it sequestered long term requires burying it deep - the trees would need to be cut down and transported to where bacteria, fungus, and so on can’t eat them.