Anytime carbon capture comes up, the conversation devolves into commenters saying the entire idea is dumb and trees already exist. I’d like to know more about the full life cycle of a tree and if the carbon it captures is permanent.
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So the carbon capture is not permanent, but you have to think about how natural decomposition processes work – they aren’t a solitary process. Decomposition is the process of a ton of smaller organisms from microorganisms to bird-sized animals consuming/carrying away pieces of the plant. Some natural offgassing will happen but most of it is being absorbed by other lifeforms in order to continue their own lifecycles. And those lifeforms, in turn, become food that ultimately feeds new plants, including trees.
The bigger problem is how much of the Earth we would need to reforest to actually achieve carbon capture storage on the scales we need to offset even a fractional portion of the cO2 reductions we need to achieve. Reforestation isn’t just effective carbon capture – it’s a massively good idea in general – but it can’t be the single answer to the amount of cO2 capture that humanity needs to achieve.
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