The kingdom is elevating the use of fans and filters to pull carbon dioxide out of the sky. But its motives are under scrutiny at global climate talks.
trees don’t fix carbon long term because they eventually rot. Coal/oil are the only natural ways in sizeable quantities and because organisms that can digest shit exist now.
Wood frame buildings are standing for hundreds of years, some of it might need to get replaced every now and then but if a couple of 2x4 last 70 years and it takes 50 to grow a tree that provides us with more than the number that needs to get replaced, it’s a net positive.
Good question. The answer technically is maybe! however a few caveats.
Charcoal washes away into the ocean where it mysteriously disappears https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130419160715.htm it seems to enter the carbon cycle rather than get fixed. So maybe we could prevent that if we buried it very deep and sealed it in. Remember we are looking for a centuries long solution.
In practice: charcoal compacted has a density of like 1.5 g/cm3 coal is about 1.8. They’re both mostly carbon, we would need to bury a loooot of charcoal. We have dug up and burned tens of billions of tonnes, that is a lot of charcoal to bury and not just in the sort of open cut surface mines coal is usually excavated from.
Further making charcoal costs energy, even if you fuel it with the wood you’re processing. It’s a staggeringly expensive prospect to make billions of tonnes. There are around 280 billion tonnes of carbon that need fixing, that is just atmospheric. Significant portions are dissolved in the ocean and would start to come out as we reduced atmospheric carbon.
Carbon fixation is an unimaginably large project, we would need cheap fusion and decades to make it practical. Essentially you want to reverse the energy consumption of everyone on earth for the last 200 years, it just isn’t realistic.
For the few thousands of years we’re pretty much stuck with whatever we emit. Barring massive technological changes that are unforseeable
Imagine if instead of buying it underground we could instead use it to build useful things like housing…
Sweet baby Jesus! We just invented trees!
trees don’t fix carbon long term because they eventually rot. Coal/oil are the only natural ways in sizeable quantities and because organisms that can digest shit exist now.
Wood frame buildings are standing for hundreds of years, some of it might need to get replaced every now and then but if a couple of 2x4 last 70 years and it takes 50 to grow a tree that provides us with more than the number that needs to get replaced, it’s a net positive.
you have to consider the steady state case.
What? You think we would reach a point where we don’t need all that wood anymore or where we only manage to grow what we need to replace?
By the time that happens I’m pretty sure fusion will be our main mean of energy production and climate change will be a long forgotten issue.
We’ve deforested about a third of the land that used to be forest 10 000 years ago, about 20% of the world’s habitable land!
https://ourworldindata.org/world-lost-one-third-forests
We don’t replant about 5 million hectares every year!
https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation
We’re trying to reinvent the wheel because we can’t see the solution that’s right in front of us.
yeah and uhhh how much of that wood is still around. A lot of the carbon is in the atmosphere which is part of the problem.
I don’t think you quite comprehend how much we’ve dug up. Reforestation isn’t a bad thing but it wouldn’t put a dent in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
So you missed the point entirely… Oh well, I tried.
Ok bye!
Why can’t we just turn them into charcoal and bury it?
Good question. The answer technically is maybe! however a few caveats.
Charcoal washes away into the ocean where it mysteriously disappears https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130419160715.htm it seems to enter the carbon cycle rather than get fixed. So maybe we could prevent that if we buried it very deep and sealed it in. Remember we are looking for a centuries long solution.
In practice: charcoal compacted has a density of like 1.5 g/cm3 coal is about 1.8. They’re both mostly carbon, we would need to bury a loooot of charcoal. We have dug up and burned tens of billions of tonnes, that is a lot of charcoal to bury and not just in the sort of open cut surface mines coal is usually excavated from.
Further making charcoal costs energy, even if you fuel it with the wood you’re processing. It’s a staggeringly expensive prospect to make billions of tonnes. There are around 280 billion tonnes of carbon that need fixing, that is just atmospheric. Significant portions are dissolved in the ocean and would start to come out as we reduced atmospheric carbon.
Carbon fixation is an unimaginably large project, we would need cheap fusion and decades to make it practical. Essentially you want to reverse the energy consumption of everyone on earth for the last 200 years, it just isn’t realistic.
For the few thousands of years we’re pretty much stuck with whatever we emit. Barring massive technological changes that are unforseeable