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by hinkley 3551 days ago
Any carbon you can put below the surface tends to stay put. So it's not 'grow trees' it's 're-establish healthy forest ecosystems'.

A bunch of Doug firs growing on compacted clay isn't going to sequester much of anything.

1 comments

I'm not saying that healthy forest ecosystems don't have a lot of benefits, it's just that "grow moar trees" as a carbon sink is a trigger for me. Planting trees is the perfect feel-good solution that solves, at most, 0.1% of the problem. It's a "send food to Africa" or "build the wall" analogue solution that doesn't address any of the root causes.

Things one can actually do to help solve this: Plant trees as part of restoring ecoystems; recycle metals (esp. Al); join the diplomatic corps and negotiate climate and trade agreements; buy locally grown food and locally obtained materials; start a massive battery/solar/car company to obsolete the fossil fuel industry; research atmospheric alchemy; eat less meat. Not necessarily in that order.