It was supposed to be a good-news story out of the damaged Amazon rainforest: a project that replanted hundreds of thousands of trees in an illegally deforested nature reserve in Brazil.
Trees are cheap and effective, but humans are destructive. If we just left nature alone, cut meat production to a level where we could pull everything back to older fields, it would recover relatively quickly.
Meaning we need to prosecute and take punitive actions against humans and corporations who just can’t cope with not being destructive. Any business that’s willingly involved needs to lose everything. Make it impossible to profit from, remove the incentives for farmers when the money disappears and loans can’t be given out because the banks stopped existing.
The trees would die and rot at some point, which releases the CO2 they stored. We cannot keep capturing CO2 without increasing forest areas, and that’s expensive. However, artificial carbon capture does not fare much better so the best strategy is to just burn less stuff. It is still more effective to offset fossil fuel power plants with clean electricity (as long as there is no oversupply) than using it for carbon capture.
Trees replace themselves. So yes, forests store carbon, rather than specific trees. Also, dead trees don’t just evaporate into the atmosphere. Other species eat them, etc. Over time more and more carbon will be stored somewhere, if it’s left alone.
Sounds good, yes! That can reduce the risk from arson. What remains is the risk from natural pests, droughts and wildfires, which increase due to climate change.
When weighing our options, we should consider their real-world value, not an optimistic estimate under ideal conditions. Trees could be great, but there are many things which can go wrong over the decades that a tree needs to grow.
Trees are cheap and effective, but humans are destructive. If we just left nature alone, cut meat production to a level where we could pull everything back to older fields, it would recover relatively quickly.
Meaning we need to prosecute and take punitive actions against humans and corporations who just can’t cope with not being destructive. Any business that’s willingly involved needs to lose everything. Make it impossible to profit from, remove the incentives for farmers when the money disappears and loans can’t be given out because the banks stopped existing.
The trees would die and rot at some point, which releases the CO2 they stored. We cannot keep capturing CO2 without increasing forest areas, and that’s expensive. However, artificial carbon capture does not fare much better so the best strategy is to just burn less stuff. It is still more effective to offset fossil fuel power plants with clean electricity (as long as there is no oversupply) than using it for carbon capture.
Trees replace themselves. So yes, forests store carbon, rather than specific trees. Also, dead trees don’t just evaporate into the atmosphere. Other species eat them, etc. Over time more and more carbon will be stored somewhere, if it’s left alone.
Sounds good, yes! That can reduce the risk from arson. What remains is the risk from natural pests, droughts and wildfires, which increase due to climate change.
When weighing our options, we should consider their real-world value, not an optimistic estimate under ideal conditions. Trees could be great, but there are many things which can go wrong over the decades that a tree needs to grow.