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by l_camacho84 2662 days ago
The best negative carbon tech that exists are trees and plants. It's not future tech it's already here!
3 comments

Yes. However it only works when trees grow and are not burnt after (use in construction for example). I will try to find sources if you're interested but basically this solution (planting forest & not burning wood) does not scale. You'd have to cover very large areas with trees (losing land for agriculture btw). To push it further as the amount of land is limited this can't work with a scenario of growing emissions. It's clearly interesting to mitigate the problem though.
We don't need to scale up if the developed countries agree to scale down consumption. Reducing commuting (working from home when possible), have taxes on airplane travel, tax goods that come unnecessarily from far away, invest in durability. This is not scyfy solutions sorry to disappoint
Sure, and the UK could have a 4-hour work week if it halved it’s manufacturing and automated all its services.

Annoyingly, people don’t follow such oversimplified economic models. (If we did, free market economics and communism would both be ‘right’).

Well they are both "right" in the sense that they have different premises and optimise for different variables in the economy. They both work in certain circumstances and not in others. There's no such thing as a perfect economic system that magically solves all human problems, but that doesn't mean that there aren't gradations of how good one is compared to another, given a set of things you want to achieve in a society.

Capitalism has advantages and disadvantages, and the same is true for communism. If, however, the variable you want to optimise for is carbon footprint, then clearly capitalism is the wrong tool for the job.

Also, models are a perfect representation of reality, but since we can't possibly capture all the data inherent in a system as large as our planet (or Solar System, or the Universe), it's pretty much all we have to make sense of the world.

Wetlands and algae or pond plants are even more effective than trees.

Though yes, generally, biological carbon fixation is highly effective.

australia made the news about billion trees project, I wonder how many similar ideas are being rolled out