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Comment by philshem | Hacker News Reader

Trees that grow and die and decompose release their carbon back into the atmosphere. The only way to make tree-growing carbon negative* is to sequester the grown trees underground.

*edited from “neutral”, sorry, typo

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We use trees though. We build all kinds of things with them. Granted I would rather see native revegitation, often not great for building with depending on where you live. But given the circumstances and timescales involved, planting trees may give us some buffer time in the form of an initial dip in carbon.

Trees can be one element of many to mitigate emissions, but too often trees are bandied about as a complete solution, and it's greenwashing that distracts from the true scope of the problem at hand.

That argument gets brought up again and again, and is just wrong. Can't people see the basic contradiction in that reasoning? Trees have always died!

What matters with forest-based offsetting is the increase of forest biomass - the deaths of individual trees don't matter. If you grow a forest, the corresponding CO2 is offset for as long as the forest stays there.

We have burnt through hundreds of millions of years of fossil fuels (aka trees) in the past couple centuries. How can we regrow that “forest” one time and make a dent in carbon emissions?

Edit: I’d be happy to proven wrong, I just can’t imagine how if we increased the today’s biomass by an incredible percent, it would come close to the amount of carbon stored over millions of years.

Edit 2: 1.2 trillion trees would cancel out 10 years of human CO2 emissions. The planet currently has 3 trillion trees https://e360.yale.edu/digest/planting-1-2-trillion-trees-cou...

I was just refuting the incorrect statement: "The only way to make tree-growing carbon negative* is to sequester the grown trees underground."

It would indeed be foolish to believe we can halt climate change just by growing trees. But AFOLU is part of the toolkit we need to use (the most important tool in this toolkit is sobriety).

It takes years for a tree to grow and decades, possibly hundreds of years for a tree to decompose in its entirety through natural processes (that is, after possibly decades of life).

It is a viable solution.

Edit: if anyone disagrees look up about the Carboniferous period

The Carboniferous period stored that much carbon because the microbes at the time were unable to break down wood[1]. So yes, everyone should read about the Carboniferous period in detail to understand just how many millions of years of stored carbon in ancient plant material we're recklessly blowing out into the atmosphere all at once.

1. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2016/01...

Yes, and trees still take a lot of time to decompose

> The computer model calculates that the “residence times” (how long a tree will take to completely decompose) for conifer species range from 57 to 124 years, while hardwood species are typically around on the forest floor for 46 to 71 years

(I'll stand corrected on the hundreds of years, but it's still a long time)

https://northernwoodlands.org/knots_and_bolts/tree-falls-in-...

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