I saw a youtube video about how Japan burns materials that can’t easily be recycled to produce energy and captures the CO2 produced from the process. The CO2 is then sold to some local factories to produce various things like fire extinguishers, and some algae farms (I googled this and algae is used to produce food and oil).
I googled that at sea level, CO2 in the atmosphere is at 350 PPM, but certain plants thrive at 1500 PPM.
It got me thinking – why can’t we pump CO2 into indoor farms, plantations or forests to sequester more carbon?
Would that even work? Is the carbon just released into the air again once the plants are eaten or broken down?
In: Biology
Trees do a tremendous amount of carbon sequestration for us. This is why there is international political pressure on places like Brazil and Canada to limit logging. And the worst is when the Brazilians burn the trees. But yes, wood and lumber are sequestered carbon. But we don’t really have the ability to ramp that up. It’s not like we can hook up technology to a tree to make it grow faster. All we can hope to do is plant more trees, for that type of sequestration. Doing that artificially costs energy, which also produces more emissions. The math just makes it non beneficial for us to try to increase the tree count on our own. It’s way better to preserve the trees we already have, and current sustainable logging practices have the companies planting new ones in the forests they log.
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