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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2024
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Haven't carbon offsets always been a scam, though? ~~Like, I'm pretty sure I recall that you can buy forests that already exist to offset new pollution. Or am I misremembering / making that up?~~ I'm not 100% sure what I was remembering wasn't from King of the Hill rather than an article. I still believe carbon offsets have always been a scam, though.
Trees are carbon neutral during their life cycle. They take and store carbon in their leaves, wood and roots while growing, than when they decay they release all that CO2 back out.
So yeah you can grow a forest, store the carbon, and ship it somewhere else to build buildings and now it’s their carbon problem. Paper, any wood products really accomplishes much of the same goal.
The trees really aren’t a “scam” just not as thought out as it was supposed to be. Some trees are better than others for “storing” carbon as well.
Trees do not necessarily release the same amount of co2 while decaying.
That will all depend on how it's decaying and if it's aerobic or anaerobic
Also, what portion of the decayed tree becomes soil. Sure some CO2 is released back out, but the net increase in soil over the tree's life is where the savings are.
Anaerobic vs aerobic decay is largely about the difference in short-term impacts. Anaerobic decay releases methane which is much more potent than CO2 in the short term, but naturally breaks down into CO2 over a hundred or so years, which is a long time for the generations of humans dealing with climate change, but a blip on the timescales of forests.
That soil is feed for other organisms that make CO2, some plants are better than others, but they almost all wind up being carbon neutral in the end. The only way to get rid of it, would be to cut it down and send it into space. If you could do that without producing more CO2…
The leaves get eaten by bugs that produce CO2, so even if it was somehow carbon positive, bugs and other things would make it a very moot point.m very fast.
Bottom line people have already thought of these things and debunked them, it doesn’t matter, they aren’t carbon positive.