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
We can and do, and actually, downramping animal agriculture would free up a lot of land for this very purpose. The sequestration from going globally plant-based would be enough to offset more than a decade of carbon emissions.
Reforestation also helps. There are large reforestation projects on-going, that have a tangible – if a minor – impact on the net increase of carbon in the atmosphere.
Alone these methods are not enough to offset carbon emissions though, and eventually these methods would reach a point of saturation, after which no more carbon can be tied to trees or the ground.
Ideally we’d decrease fossil fuel use while increasing sequestration of atmospheric carbon to biomass and the soil. The technology and knowledge is there as it is. The problem is more political.
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