I'm astonished that there aren't national programs globally aimed at en-forestation.
(Trees also provide building materials - what a great way to sequester carbon!)
Wonder what it is about?
You're using <noscript>, why not use that space to actually talk about what you are doing?
Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but maybe companies should brand non-recycled paper products as carbon-sequestered paper instead, and tell people to send it to landfill rather than recycle it for maximum sequestration purposes.
I wonder if we should compost paper instead of recycling it? Or try to vitrify it?
Also, wouldn't composting it release as much carbon as putting it in landfill? And landfills are bad in many ways.
Recycling it seems a better idea.
Forests can be used to sequester carbon because of the large number of trees continuously in existence even if individual trees come and go.
For paper, the sequestration angle is more dubious but should also be considered based on the total amount of paper continuously in existence, not on the longevity of a single sheet of paper.
Every time I see a pack of paper, it proudly says "MADE IN INDONESIA." So long as cheap paper made from clear-cut rainforests and monkey massacres exists, I think I'd rather stick to (somewhat) locally recycled, even if it's not a perfect solution.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200521-planting-trees-d...
Two other issues:
1) Technology is the wrong way at looking at this for most of the planet. It's only in small areas of the globe where nature needs a guiding hand via irrigation and fertilization for example. Just leaving stuff alone will work for most places.
2) Tree planting efforts are great for publicity and marketing which is mainly a human benefit. The urge to meddle and "fix nature" is both a symptom and cause of the situation we got ourselves in.
It's like buying hair transplants on your head when you could just stop shaving.
If you expand forests it's a one-time sequestration. That's my point.
> One doesn’t count rainforests or boreal forests as “zero carbon” capture. They have an ongoing capturing capacity.
Each ecosystem has a turnover time. For rainforests it's like 20 years. For tundra it's as long as 65+ years. But in a stable state these carbon "sinks" are net zero carbon capture. For every ton of carbon they capture, a ton of carbon is released through decomposition.
A recent study published in 2019 said that if total emissions, agricultural land use, and other factors remained steady, planting trees might buy us 20 years: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2927/examining-the-viability-o...
The problem is that we're pumping out alot of carbon: about 10GtC/year. The entire Amazon rainforest sequesters only about 100-200GtC. Actually, the biggest problem as I said is that we're pumping out carbon from a resource (Carboniferous period deposits[1]) that can never again be recreated, at least not without significant geoengineering.
[1] Carboniferous deposits occurred at a golden period, immediately after woody trees first emerged, but before microorganisms evolved that could decompose them; trees could be buried long enough to fossilize before microorganisms could release all the carbon back into the atmosphere. That can't happen today naturally, at least not at any scale that could help us.
Plus, a place like the United States has 0 population growth absent immigration. Are we supposed to start tearing down houses just to build new ones? That's the kind of math that begat corn ethanol.
The dynamics here are just horrible. Can we slow emissions growth this way? Sure. Can we stop growth this way? Eh... okay, maybe, since we're pretending. Can we reverse global warming, removing carbon from the atmosphere? Not a chance. The only way to turn the dynamic from zero sum to positive sum is with other, major technological advances, at which point playing games with trees and home construction would very likely be the least meaningful use of such new technology.
EDIT: Here's a study that looks at various different models for wood processing and disposal. TL;DR: See figures #2 and #3. 100 years post harvest there's at best 5% net carbon sequestration, while most models show 0% net carbon sequestered. https://www.sierraforestlegacy.org/Resources/Conservation/Fi...
Oh, and also, there's always going to be a need for new construction even with 0 population growth. Better to use wood than concrete, as concrete is a large source of carbon emissions.
I agree, many small solutions can help. More efficient use of existing resources is a large reason why American per capita energy consumption has remained steady for the past decade. (At least if we ignore our outsourced carbon emissions.) But many, small efficiencies is a privilege only rich countries with strong institutions are likely to achieve. Certainly historically that has been the case. Yet such countries have enormous carbon footprints. Similarly, reforestation can be helpful in a strict sense, but our primary problem is deforestation in developing countries, and even with global warming increasing the growth of temperate and boreal forests, it's rather difficult to make up the loss of tropical forests.
More importantly, none of these measures can help nearly as much as nuclear energy or renewables like wind and solar, which are both necessary and at least theoretically sufficient on their own. I think we just need to be clear about the efficacy of various measures. By all means, plant more trees. We can certainly walk & chew gum at the same time. But when people think these activities are even remotely similarly efficacious, and when the lesser one is easier to accomplish policy-wise than the other (e.g. in a country where we've effectively already accomplished an efficient market for wood products), I worry about misdirected attention.
More specifically, we need to discard this widespread notion that trees (naturally, or even in an industrial life cycle) are perpetual carbon sinks. That's really what I was getting at by pointing out the Carboniferous period--that the fundamental dynamic of carbon sequestration by trees does not and cannot work as commonly believed. The article for this thread is interesting (though only experimentally showing what was already well predicted), but it's misguided to believe it's of any consequence in the fight against global warming. The oceans are a different matter, though I don't know how greater is the long-term sequestration potential--I don't think we understand the carbon cycle as well as we do on land; for example, we know less about the microbiota, especially on the ocean floor.
But that leaves it in the biosphere, and new forest is vulnerable to rapid deforestation and conversion to CO2 (fires, cultural change, etc.). We would ideally shift some of that highly mobile bio-sphere sequestration to far less mobile geologic sequestration. Most likely with technology that we haven't yet invented.
[1] chapter 2, afforestation is part of AFOLU carbon dioxide removal (CDR) https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/