I just got a CO2 meter and checked the levels in my house and went down a rabbit hole trying to address the issue. Apparently it would take 249 areca palms to offset the carbon RESPIRATION of one adult.
So okay 249 trees just for me to breathe, not to mention the rest of the bad things we all do.
So how can this math ever balance? 249 trees just to break even seems like an impossible number. Then all the flights I have been on, miles driven, etc.
I feel like that’s… Way too many trees. Is it hopeless or am I missing something?
Breathing does not create Carbon, it is only transformed.
There are basically 2 pools of carbon. The carbon already in circulation in the athmosphere, plants, animals and so on, roaming at the surface. That Carbon can be CO2, or other mollecules, but there is always a fixed amount. You breathing is simply borrowing the carbon for a bit and putting it out again in the air when exhaling.
The second pool is carbon locked away in the ground, as coal, oil and whatnot. That carbon is OLD and is not supposed to be in the first pool. When you burn oil, the carbon from the 2nd pool ends up in the 1st one. You cannot really offset it because even planting trees just transforms it as wood for a bit, but if the tree burns or rots, the carbon goes back in the air. The only option long term is to send the carbon back in a locked state in the second pool.
But for you, just reduce the amount of carbon you move from pool 2 to pool 1 to help the earth. Cut on oil, gas, coal as much as you can. The rest is basically irrelevant.
You can compare it to the water cycle. You are at a lake with a pump, and pump the water from the lake back into the lake. You can keep going forever and will not cause the lakes to rise since the water is pumped from there anyway. BUT, if a mega corporation starts pumping from underground sources and dumping it in that lake, it would overflow for sure. And they would blame you for all the water you are pumping.
This is a really important insight. To add to it: back when the carbon from Pool 2 was in the atmosphere, dinosaurs were roaming the earth and it was a lot hotter than it is now.
This is obviously a simplification, it but it drives home the point that once the carbon is out of Pool 2 it will cause global warming. The only way to stop that is to stop moving carbon from Pool 2 into Pool 1, ie stop fossil fuel mining.
Of course we could try to move carbon from Pool 2 to Pool 1, but it took the Earth millions of years to do that, and many of the plant species that did it are now extinct. Perhaps once we’re exinct, they might evolve again.
Is there any way to bring carbon from pool 1 into 2? Or we already fucked up and have to live with it now?
Yes, carbon sequestration is the term for it, but none of them are currently practical to do on a scale that would mitigate the effects of the fossil fuels we burn. Growing trees is an example of this, as they do lock up carbon in the process of growing, but they’re kind of a risky prospect since if the tree dies and rots or is caught in a wildfire then it releases the carbon again. Another option is literally just sticking it back underground in mines or oil wells, but of course that takes a lot of energy to do and then whole point of burning fossil fuels is to get energy so this one is currently a bit self-defeating. They’re things that might be helpful to do if we succeed in transitioning to clean energy and have an excess of it available
If we can get nuclear fusion to work, that would be the kind of things that would then make sense to do. I can only hope that we figure it out as soon as possible.
Absolutely. Or even just excess capacity of wind and solar, to be honest. Whatever works, so long as we don’t need it to replace fossil fuels and it isn’t itself making more CO2 to lock away the CO2
Re trees: It follows that growing some trees doesn’t help much, but growing a forest on otherwise bare land will act as a carbon sink as long as it’s not cut down - dead trees will be replaced without human intervention