If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging!
By all means, feel free to figure out about filling it back in second, but that's doomed to failure if you skip step 1.
If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging!
By all means, feel free to figure out about filling it back in second, but that's doomed to failure if you skip step 1.
Deal.
Next!
Good. hardest part of a solution is figuring out what we need. , now let's go drop apple tree seeds everywhere.
Not kidding. Couldn't hurt
Frankly I'm surprised it's so little. I thought it wouldn't be possible with Earth's landmass period with trees alone.
Too bad global warming is rapidly worsening forest fires. Pretty sure these kinds of solutions are already DOA, even if they were being taken seriously. The runaway effects have begun to snowball.
Can't they use Russia instead?
There's enough room to plant them in the huge deserts, like the Gobi desert, Sahara, etc.
The upside is you get to stabilize the ground. The downside is you need to supply water directly to the root to be viable
And even if you did do that, where would you store the wood afterwards? You can't let it decay, that'd just put the carbon back into the atmosphere.
... don't cut them down?
You think trees don't die and fall down on their own?
Sometimes, sure.
And the rest of them just stay frozen upright forever, I suppose.
As long as new trees start at a higher rate than the old ones fall down...
That would require an ever-increasing amount of forested land. A carbon pyramid scheme. As soon as you stop increasing the forest's area it goes back to an equilibrium of trees decaying equalling trees growing.
Another problem with storing carbon as cellulose is it uses up all the available water. So the trees would need to be cut down and turned into charcoal to release the H's and O's, and then buried.
The world isn't short of water. I'd be more concerned about phosphorus and other such mineral nutrients, those would get pulled out of the soil and then not returned.
Frankly, I think the best approach to sequestration is to make plastic and bury it. Plastic has a much more controllable chemical structure, you can be sure to only get carbon that way.
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