Fungi stores a third of carbon from fossil fuel emissions
eurekalert.org
eurekalert.org
- Fungi currently store 1/3 of our yearly emissions (so, each year we emit 3 times as much as current stored carbon pool, they don't store 1/3 of each year emissions)
- China emits less than 1/3 of our yearly emissions
- We published a paper[0] on this, but could use some funding for research to maybe store some more carbon in fungi.
From skimming actual paper we can see that there is 1/3 FLUX of our CO2 emissions to fungi, but I didn't read enough to see what happens next (some of it is probably stored).
[0] https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)...
The diction and style leads me to assume LLM authorship, FWIW
The conclusion I got from the paper was mostly that it’s about soil preservation efforts than building fungus sequestration. It would be hard to build at a similar scale to all soil on earth.
The only way to permanently store carbon is in ocean floor sediments or in some anoxic environment.
"A widely accepted explanation for this peak in coal production is a temporal lag between the evolution of abundant lignin production in woody plants and the subsequent evolution of lignin-degrading Agaricomycetes fungi, resulting in a period when vast amounts of lignin-rich plant material accumulated."
So this theory is generally considered correct with some people thinking it might not be.
Because we know for sure that more plants have been fossilized without being decomposed, it is certain that either the plants were growing faster or after death they were decomposed slower or there were some phenomena that caused the frequent burial of the dead plants before being decomposed.
The last cause is implausible as an explanation for something that had a duration of more than one hundred million years and which never happened later.
Maybe the plants were growing faster, due to a higher content of carbon dioxide in the air, but that is not enough for a quantitative explanation, especially because if efficient decomposers had existed, their population size would have increased to match the available food. The decomposition must also have been much slower than today.
So there is little doubt that the wood was decomposed much slower than today. What is much less certain, and this is the only part of this research paper that may be correct, is that lignin was the culprit. Perhaps the fungi of Carboniferous and Permian already had all the digestive enzymes of today, but all of them were less optimized than the modern enzymes, so the wood decomposition speed was lower than today.
Their essential thesis is maintaining soil health globally is important. This seems kinda non controversial but they’re adding another weight to the calculus.
We start mass producing these fungi to have them store co2 put then in a warehouse, repeat?
Give the amount of CO2 we need to remove that would quickly fill all available storage space.
Trees store C02 as they grow. Then they contain CO2 until they burn or rot.
In order to exploit the absorption and storage we need to cut the trees at the optimal time and then store it all to contain it. Quickly filling up all available storage.