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by eveningcoffee 2484 days ago
I am lately thinking that we are assigning too less value to this fact. We all need oxygen and we should have enough forests to produce it and this means that we should globally subsidize forest keeping. It is not a single country problem. It is a global problem.
1 comments
nearbuy 2484 days ago
1. The article explained this isn't true. Carbon dioxide is a problem. Oxygen depletion is not. Burning enough forests to decrease atmospheric oxygen by just 1% would increase CO2 by 5000%. We'd be dead long before we ran out of oxygen.

2. I'm not sure what you have in mind for "short term" vs "long term", but oxygen levels only change significantly over hundreds of millions of years.

3. Just like a stable sized forest doesn't produce any significant net oxygen, humans don't overall use up oxygen from breathing. The plants you eat (or if you're eating meat, the plants your food ate) released oxygen into the air when forming the carbohydrates and fats you eat. Your body then recombines these with an equal amount of oxygen to produce energy.

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eveningcoffee 2484 days ago
Of course excess CO2 is greater problem than lack of oxygen but these things are in 1 to 1 correlation - you need oxygen to burn carbon. The more you burn carbon the more oxygen you join from the environment. To get the same oxygen back you need to breakup all the carbon you burnt.

If you destroy the forest then you will reduce the capacity to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere and produce oxygen or do you disagree with this?

link
nearbuy 2483 days ago
Then why mention oxygen? It's irrelevant. It's like advocating that people should only shoot people with non-lead bullets so the victims don't get lead poisoning.

> If you destroy the forest then you will reduce the capacity to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere and produce oxygen or do you disagree with this?

The linked article explains this isn't true. The rainforest is in equilibrium. It doesn't remove CO2 overall. It's a carbon stockpile.

If you were to burn the forest, it would release the stockpiled carbon into the atmosphere as CO2.

link