Comment by OroPla
7 hours ago
> Carbon capture is fraud.
Planting and growing trees is a form of carbon capture and it is one that has worked in Earth's history to bring CO2 levels down over the last millions of years from 7000ppm during the Cambrian Age to less than 700ppm.
You already know why that’s a confusing argument because you included the time scale yourself, but to say the obvious: I think we probably need to go a bit faster than “millions of years”.
It took nature millions of years to go from 7000ppm to under 700ppm. But we are talking a diff of only about 100ppm. Not cutting down the rainforest or raising a forest of that scale in some desert does seem like a positive contribution.
Another good idea would be to mandate working from home for everyone that reasonably can do so. During Covid I've only measured about 300ppm as the bottom baseline, while nowadays I do not measure lower than 400ppm. (Co2 measuring devices are fairly cheap and good to have in your office, as high Co2 affects your ability to think clearly. Without opening a window and having just one person inside Co2 easily climbs to about 3000ppm within a few hours just from your breathing.)
Planting trees as "carbon offsets" has been a hugely profitable rort
The idea that we can lock up land, forever, planted in trees to offset our consumption is blissfully naive
In New Zealand large swatches of land are being taken out of production, for a onetime big payment
It neglects two things:
1. Trees burn. Forests left untended for years choke with fuel and then catastrophically burn releasing all that carbon
2. We need the land. Future generations, this generation in a few years, will not be sympathetic to the vast swatches of unproductive land (that due to 1. above create costs)
We must stop producing carbon. It will mean many obscenely rich will be downgraded to wealthy. And the prospect of that is enough to burn the world
To capture 10% of daily emissions we need to plant like 20 million trees per day.