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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Not all the carbon a tree captures goes into its wood. A lot of it ends up making stuff like leaves and fruits and stuff like that.
What you do with those matters.
Generally it makes less sense to look at individual tress that live and die over a large enough time-span but at the woods and forests they make up.
You compared how much carbon is contained in a completely empty patch of land with a meadow or a forest.
Forests it turns out are not the best landscape to capture carbon.
Peatbogs are better than forests by most metrics. They often contain tons of organic material that due to the lack of oxygen in them hasn’t decayed for millennia.
Still turning cattle grazing land (back) into forests will end up with a net increase in sequestered carbon even if individual carbon atoms cycle through the trees as they get absorbed and released again.
Natural carbon capture by forests and other landscapes also works a whole lot better than anything we can do with technology as trees are comparatively low maintenance and forests have been proven to be easily able to scale up to enormous sizes. They can even make more of themselves without human help.
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