this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The trees would die and rot at some point, which releases the CO~2~ they stored. We cannot keep capturing CO~2~ without increasing forest areas, and that's expensive. However, artificial carbon capture does not fare much better so the best strategy is to just burn less stuff. It is still more effective to offset fossil fuel power plants with clean electricity (as long as there is no oversupply) than using it for carbon capture.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Trees replace themselves. So yes, forests store carbon, rather than specific trees. Also, dead trees don't just evaporate into the atmosphere. Other species eat them, etc. Over time, more and more carbon will be stored somewhere, if it's left alone.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Dead trees don't evaporate (except for some of their water which isn't too relevant); the decomposing (micro)organisms that eat them release CO~2~ - about as much as burning the trees would. Yes, an old growth forest will be storing more CO~2~ per unit of area than a newly created one but that does not increase very fast and after a century, the forest will have reached most of its carbon storage capacity it will be able to store for the next millenium - at this point, basically only oxygen-free peatbogs where dead biomass does not decompose (as the decomposers cannot breathe) will provide extra carbon storage. This will eventually turn into coal (and sunken sealife into oil), storing its accumulated energy as hydrocarbons that won't be touched unless some pesky intelligent species start an industrial revolution.

Carbon capture is expensive: you need to isolate CO~2~ from the atmosphere, which takes energy, and turn it back into solid or liquid chemicals, which by laws of thermodynamics takes more energy than burning that amount of corresponding hydrocarbons. Then they need to be stored somewhere where nobody will find and burn them to enjoy cheap energy from them like we've been doing for the past 200 years. So we've had cheap energy at the expense of the environment, and we need to expend at least as much energy to get all that nasty carbon back out of the atmosphere. Thunderf00t made a very informative video about all this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

a very informative video

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

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