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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
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Because 1) There's not enough land on the planet, and 2) A big fossil fuel company has a hard time pointing to a specific tree and saying "that one, that's the plant that's halfheartedly absorbing my carbon so I can keep polluting"
CCS is putting lipstick on the fossil fuel hogs - they'll keep it in the news as part of their quest to dodge regulation.
Trees don't permently sequester carbon. A forest is a bunch of bound up stuff, but since fungi can now digest trees when they die they don't become coal anymore.
So unless you want to make the surface of the earth rainforest somehow you would need to bury trees in a sealed sterile mine or something. Or you could just do that directly.
Carbon capture is kinda dumb though, coal and oil are what ideally captured carbon looks like. We should focus on not digging that up and burning it.
Look I understand you're trying to be positive but this doesn't work. It's not really viable for me to put more effort into explaining why each specific thing doesn't work but take e.g. paper towels, well they rot. Unless you pack them up in an environment which they can't rot in. Like a sealed mineshaft, which you could just pump co2 into. In either case you're filling an empty coal mine with low density coal while using energy that could go to something with exponential payoffs like sustainable power infrastructure.
Protecting greenspace is good, reforestation is good and has all sorts of positive effects from stabilisation of local temperature to cleaning the air of pollutants. It is not however a solution to climate change. There is only one, and it is not burning fossil fuels. It is completely impractical to reverse the damage we have already done. We have added 0.02% of the atmosphere's mass in co2, that is 1.E17 kg or a hundred million billion kilograms.