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Comment by Aardwolf | Hacker News Reader

> industrial cropland typically produces more carbon emissions than it absorbs over the long term

Question about this: where does the extra carbon it emits come from? Is it already in the land beforehand?

I believe Vox slightly screwed this up but it's an understandable mistake: the article[1] refers to CO2 equivalent of emissions, not literal CO2. In particular methane from fertilizers seems to have a more negative impact on overall greenhouse gases than whatever CO2 the plants are absorbing.

[1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/acd5e8

It has a much shorter atmospheric half life though, on the order of a decade vs thousands of years for CO2. If we cut methane emissions this will have a near term impact whereas cutting CO2 emissions just stops things from getting worse as fast. It reverses nothing.

Atmospheric methane converts to co2

Methane’s greenhouse effect is 80 times more powerful than that of CO2, so cutting methane right now would have near-immediate effects as it would convert to less potent CO2 in a matter of years. Whereas cutting CO2 would stop things from getting worse, but wouldn’t have an immediate reversal effect like methane would.

It’s a one-off trick that would buy us some time (assuming we can implement it).

Petro chemical based fertilizer and gas powered equipment.

From trucks coming to and from fields?

Fertilizer?

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