I was a bit discouraged to hear that the CO2 the plants remove is ultimately rereleased into the atmosphere when the plant decomposes. So I’m wondering what positive impacts I’m making with my backyard garden, if any.
Also, with millions of gardens, would they really be totally useless for CO2 removal? Or is there some small amount that gets captured by the plant and then *not* rereleased into the atmosphere, in other words, permanently removed from the air?
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To my knowledge, plants only permanently capture carbon in the ground under rather specific circumstances which you will not find in your avarage garden.
If you think about the big picture, there is a certain amount of carbon in the planets biosphere (air, soil, oceans, etc.). The only natural thing that increases this amount is volcanoes. Whatever natural processes exist to remove carbon from the biosphere altogether, as in transport it into the depths of Earth, must happen in the same order of magnitude, otherwise the amount of carbon would just naturally decline rapidly all by itself.
Unfortunately, us humans are introducing carbon into the biosphere over 100 times faster than volcanoes do. Since we cannot expect the natural processes to just become a hundred times faster, nature will not fix this for us. (Unless we’re talking about the *very* long-term)
There is however one thing we can do, at least as a band-aid: When a tree is old and about to die, instead of burning it or letting it rot, we can use the wood and do something to preserve it. For example, we can use the wood to build wooden buildings. That way the carbon will be stored in the wood long-term.
Of course, this wood will also decompose and release the carbon *eventually*, but at least we can buy time to come up with a permanent solution this way.
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