Does burning wood release all of the carbon a tree has captured in its lifetime? Does a dead decomposing tree do the same?

Question

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.

In: 199

Answer 1

Trees will almost certainly be the superior method of carbon capture. Because power, processed materials, trucks to deliver it, and food-eating people to build and maintain it are needed, a man-made process will actually produce X mount of carbon to, conceivably, capture Y (and we hope over Z number of years, Y becomes greater than X) amount of carbon. This is just thermodynamics. Unless the man-made process is way more efficient than what hundreds of millions of years of evolution created to run on solar power, trees are going to be better at it.