Occidental Petroleum is investing in billion-dollar projects to suck carbon dioxide out of the sky. The effort is raising hopes — and eyebrows
By Daniel Estrin, Camila Domonoske
3-Minute Listen / Transcript available
Occidental Petroleum is investing in billion-dollar projects to suck carbon dioxide out of the sky. The effort is raising hopes — and eyebrows
By Daniel Estrin, Camila Domonoske
3-Minute Listen / Transcript available
Let me introduce you to:
PLANTS
A great example of something that needs to be done in addition to direct carbon capture and all the other things that need to be done.
Plants are direct carbon capture.
Uh huh. They also decay and release their carbon back into the atmosphere.
Not if the dead wood gets into anaerobic environment such as sinking to the bottom of swamps. And I don’t know if you’ve heard of it but wood is also a great building material. So you can literally take the wood, build something and afterwards just not incarcerate it but instead store old wood in artificial anaerobic environments.
I’m not going to sit here pretending “We can sequester enough carbon from the atmosphere to make a difference globally by building with wood and sinking trees into swamps” is a good faith argument.
Keep shilling for fossil Big Oil then.
To quote another commentator: “Unless your grid is running on 100% renewables and has excess capacity carbon capture causes net positive emissions.”
Stopping deforestation and creating new forests is absolutely a way to sequester carbon.
Considering that trees can live for hundreds of years, it would be beneficial short term, even if at one point a tree dies and release carbon.
And when a tree dies, other new trees can take its place and sequester the carbon the dead tree releases.
For sure it is, and I noted it as one of many steps that needs to be taken earlier in this comment chain. Not to mention that doing this is a no-brainer even without the context of climate change. The problem with relying on them as your only strategy for carbon sequestration is that once the forests are mature, they start being basically carbon neutral - we need to pull out way more than even full reforestation could ever hope to do.
Farming trees could even work for large scale long term carbon capture, if you do something like turn them into coal and re-fill and re-seal old mines with it in mass. I suspect we’ll be able to do much better with technological solutions though.