← Back to context

Comment by fc417fc802

16 hours ago

The point is that emitting CO2 into the atmosphere was never the problem. Adding geological carbon back into the carbon cycle is the root cause of the entire thing.

You can certainly bury dead trees. I'm not sure how deep you'd need to go to accomplish long term (ie geological timeframe) capture. I somehow doubt the economics work out since what is all the carbon capture research even about given that we could just be dumping bamboo chips into landfills?

> I'm not sure how deep you'd need to go to accomplish long term (ie geological timeframe) capture.

Coal mines are sequestered trees.

  • Correct, but burying trees today isn't going to turn them into coal.

    The big difference is that when the current coal layers were formed, bacteria to decompose trees hadn't evolved yet. There was a huge gap between trees forming and the ecosystem to break down trees forming, which led to a lot of trees dying and nothing being able to clean it up, which meant it was just left lying there until it was buried by soil and eventually turned into coal.

    Try to bury a tree today, and nature will rapidly break it down. It won't form coal because there's nothing left to form coal.