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.
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.
Burying it does what? It still decays and releases the co2 eventually. All you would be doing is making it future generations problem, like what we’ve always been doing, so maybe we need to do so thing different…?
Do you not think that’s been thought of and deemed not viable?
And what do you think happen to those offspring? Eventually it reaches an equilibrium where it produces as much as it scrubs, and eventually as it inevitably does it creates more than it scrubs.
Yes the scientist have thought of this and figured out that it’s carb neutral….
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.
Of course, trees should be planted, but the notion that they are an expedient way of decarbonizing the atmosphere is plainly wrong. Had nature optimized plant life to remove carbon from the atmosphere, there would be no CO2, no plants, and the planet would be a snowball instead of the vibrant, warm (too warm) climate we have today. Nature maintains stasis - and therefore life - by avoiding carbon sequestration.
You may have seen the Keeling Curve, the “graph of the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere based on continuous measurements taken at the Mauna Loa Observatory on the island of Hawaii from 1958 to the present day.” Notice that it goes up and then down in Seasonal Variation. This is because, during the summer months in the Northern hemisphere, all the plant life decarbonized the air to form new leaves and greenery. Then, in the winter, all the leaves fell back to the ground where they were consumed by fungi and detrivores and converted back to CO2.
Suppose we stopped producing fossil fuels tomorrow. The Keeling Curve would still have seasonal variation, but it would be against a constant mean, rather than the current rising one. If we then just planted more trees, the seasonal variation would increase, perhaps, but the mean would remain more or less constant. While beneficial, none of the planting would make more than a dent in the hundreds of billions of tons of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere. The potential for soil sequestration is on the order of 1 Gt/year.[source] That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t practice sustainable agriculture and forestry, rather we should, but it won’t reduce our carbon debt or start to reverse climate change. Believing that it will is just magical thinking, coincidentally an inadvertent implication of the meme.
Given that nature is (almost) perfectly inefficient at long-term carbon sequestration, it would seem that effective, long-term decarbonization of the atmosphere on any scale short of millennia has to include mechanical means, no matter how inefficient such means may appear.