How capturing CO2 from air can combat climate change

originally posted by: dubiousatworst
Just grow trees (or some other faster growing thing), cut them down in, throw them in the ground to rot.

When the trees rot, the carbon they contained is eventually returned to the environment as CO2, a respiration product of the creatures doing the decomposing.

If you wanted to lock up the carbon in trees, you'd have to prevent them from rotting somehow. Using them for building lumber locks up the carbon as long as the structure stands, but we don't have enough lumber needs to offset the amount of CO2 we are adding to the atmosphere.

Instead of putting them in the ground to rot, if you want to keep the carbon locked up you'd have to do something else, like put them in an environment where they won't rot, but such environments aren't easy to find or it may not be economical transporting the dead trees to such environments, especially if you use fossil fuels for transportation, which adds even more carbon to the atmosphere to relocate the dead trees. Such rot would occur very slowly or not at all at the south pole for example, but that's not an economical or practical solution.

Oxygen-starved bogs are a type of environment where dead plant material doesn't decompose and return carbon to the atmosphere, so while I have nothing against growing trees, I generally don't see much effect on the overall carbon cycle with trees like is seen with bogs, which can actually lock up the carbon for long periods of time:

Ultimate bogs: how saving peatlands could help save the planet

They are one of the harshest environments on the planet and also one of the most important in terms of carbon storage. New research hopes to reveal the role these threatened bogs could play in the climate change story

This advantage of bogs over trees to lock up carbon seems to be overlooked by some posters here, but some people are recognizing the importance of bogs.

originally posted by: TheRedneck
There is nothing the government can do to help the Earth. Nothing. Every time they try, they mess it up worse; that was the point of my post. They'll mess it up again if we give them power to regulate carbon dioxide. We're going to change the environment; no lifeform exists that doesn't. We need to accept that, and accept that we're a part of this world and not invaders.

TheRedneck

Amen Brother!

originally posted by: Arbitrageur

originally posted by: dubiousatworst
Just grow trees (or some other faster growing thing), cut them down in, throw them in the ground to rot.

When the trees rot, the carbon they contained is eventually returned to the environment as CO2, a respiration product of the creatures doing the decomposing.

If you wanted to lock up the carbon in trees, you'd have to prevent them from rotting somehow. Using them for building lumber locks up the carbon as long as the structure stands, but we don't have enough lumber needs to offset the amount of CO2 we are adding to the atmosphere.

Instead of putting them in the ground to rot, if you want to keep the carbon locked up you'd have to do something else, like put them in an environment where they won't rot, but such environments aren't easy to find or it may not be economical transporting the dead trees to such environments, especially if you use fossil fuels for transportation, which adds even more carbon to the atmosphere to relocate the dead trees. Such rot would occur very slowly or not at all at the south pole for example, but that's not an economical or practical solution.

Oxygen-starved bogs are a type of environment where dead plant material doesn't decompose and return carbon to the atmosphere, so while I have nothing against growing trees, I generally don't see much effect on the overall carbon cycle with trees like is seen with bogs, which can actually lock up the carbon for long periods of time:

Ultimate bogs: how saving peatlands could help save the planet

They are one of the harshest environments on the planet and also one of the most important in terms of carbon storage. New research hopes to reveal the role these threatened bogs could play in the climate change story

This advantage of bogs over trees to lock up carbon seems to be overlooked by some posters here, but some people are recognizing the importance of bogs.

Peat compressed under high pressure and temperature turn into coal starting with lignite. Pakistan has only just began burning their 180 billion tons of lignite. Nature is amazing.