If we could somehow pull the carbon out of the atmosphere, bind it up into a solid rock, and bury it deep underground away from bacteria and fungi that would metabolise it back into the air that would be really good.
In the mean time we should focus on not digging up exactly that aka coal.
trees don’t fix carbon long term because they eventually rot. Coal/oil are the only natural ways in sizeable quantities and because organisms that can digest shit exist now.
Wood frame buildings are standing for hundreds of years, some of it might need to get replaced every now and then but if a couple of 2x4 last 70 years and it takes 50 to grow a tree that provides us with more than the number that needs to get replaced, it’s a net positive.
Good question. The answer technically is maybe! however a few caveats.
Charcoal washes away into the ocean where it mysteriously disappears https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130419160715.htm it seems to enter the carbon cycle rather than get fixed. So maybe we could prevent that if we buried it very deep and sealed it in. Remember we are looking for a centuries long solution.
In practice: charcoal compacted has a density of like 1.5 g/cm3 coal is about 1.8. They’re both mostly carbon, we would need to bury a loooot of charcoal. We have dug up and burned tens of billions of tonnes, that is a lot of charcoal to bury and not just in the sort of open cut surface mines coal is usually excavated from.
Further making charcoal costs energy, even if you fuel it with the wood you’re processing. It’s a staggeringly expensive prospect to make billions of tonnes. There are around 280 billion tonnes of carbon that need fixing, that is just atmospheric. Significant portions are dissolved in the ocean and would start to come out as we reduced atmospheric carbon.
Carbon fixation is an unimaginably large project, we would need cheap fusion and decades to make it practical. Essentially you want to reverse the energy consumption of everyone on earth for the last 200 years, it just isn’t realistic.
For the few thousands of years we’re pretty much stuck with whatever we emit. Barring massive technological changes that are unforseeable
I mean, all life on Earth is basically carbon based and that’s how oil formed in the first place, organic matter burried deep and left there for a very long time. We’d just have to find a way to put organic matter in the places we extract oil from now.
Living things already pull carbon out of the atmosphere (via plants, for instance - plants pull carbon from the air and nitrogen from the soil, and along with water build up all manner of sugars and proteins. animals then eat those and they become the building blocks for the animal’s body). They also put some back as byproducts of metabolism - CO2 for higher organisms, methane for some bacteria. Living things just go through a cycle and none of the carbon remains locked away, as it was in the case of oil deposits. All that oil was at some point huge hunks of living, breathing, eating, multiplying beings. So we wouldn’t actually need to form it into a solid rock before disposing of it.
I don’t know, maybe we can just dig an extremely deep pit and shove all our organic waste down there. Or make some very sturdy concrete tombs (similar to nuclear waste, minus the lead) and just seal it all away, but it’d have to be completely sealed so as not to seep into the environment around it. Or deep enough so that it won’t contaminate groundwater if it does.
If we could somehow pull the carbon out of the atmosphere, bind it up into a solid rock, and bury it deep underground away from bacteria and fungi that would metabolise it back into the air that would be really good.
In the mean time we should focus on not digging up exactly that aka coal.
Imagine if instead of buying it underground we could instead use it to build useful things like housing…
Sweet baby Jesus! We just invented trees!
trees don’t fix carbon long term because they eventually rot. Coal/oil are the only natural ways in sizeable quantities and because organisms that can digest shit exist now.
Wood frame buildings are standing for hundreds of years, some of it might need to get replaced every now and then but if a couple of 2x4 last 70 years and it takes 50 to grow a tree that provides us with more than the number that needs to get replaced, it’s a net positive.
you have to consider the steady state case.
What? You think we would reach a point where we don’t need all that wood anymore or where we only manage to grow what we need to replace?
By the time that happens I’m pretty sure fusion will be our main mean of energy production and climate change will be a long forgotten issue.
We’ve deforested about a third of the land that used to be forest 10 000 years ago, about 20% of the world’s habitable land!
https://ourworldindata.org/world-lost-one-third-forests
We don’t replant about 5 million hectares every year!
https://ourworldindata.org/deforestation
We’re trying to reinvent the wheel because we can’t see the solution that’s right in front of us.
yeah and uhhh how much of that wood is still around. A lot of the carbon is in the atmosphere which is part of the problem.
I don’t think you quite comprehend how much we’ve dug up. Reforestation isn’t a bad thing but it wouldn’t put a dent in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
So you missed the point entirely… Oh well, I tried.
Ok bye!
Why can’t we just turn them into charcoal and bury it?
Good question. The answer technically is maybe! however a few caveats.
Charcoal washes away into the ocean where it mysteriously disappears https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130419160715.htm it seems to enter the carbon cycle rather than get fixed. So maybe we could prevent that if we buried it very deep and sealed it in. Remember we are looking for a centuries long solution.
In practice: charcoal compacted has a density of like 1.5 g/cm3 coal is about 1.8. They’re both mostly carbon, we would need to bury a loooot of charcoal. We have dug up and burned tens of billions of tonnes, that is a lot of charcoal to bury and not just in the sort of open cut surface mines coal is usually excavated from.
Further making charcoal costs energy, even if you fuel it with the wood you’re processing. It’s a staggeringly expensive prospect to make billions of tonnes. There are around 280 billion tonnes of carbon that need fixing, that is just atmospheric. Significant portions are dissolved in the ocean and would start to come out as we reduced atmospheric carbon.
Carbon fixation is an unimaginably large project, we would need cheap fusion and decades to make it practical. Essentially you want to reverse the energy consumption of everyone on earth for the last 200 years, it just isn’t realistic.
For the few thousands of years we’re pretty much stuck with whatever we emit. Barring massive technological changes that are unforseeable
I mean, all life on Earth is basically carbon based and that’s how oil formed in the first place, organic matter burried deep and left there for a very long time. We’d just have to find a way to put organic matter in the places we extract oil from now.
Living things already pull carbon out of the atmosphere (via plants, for instance - plants pull carbon from the air and nitrogen from the soil, and along with water build up all manner of sugars and proteins. animals then eat those and they become the building blocks for the animal’s body). They also put some back as byproducts of metabolism - CO2 for higher organisms, methane for some bacteria. Living things just go through a cycle and none of the carbon remains locked away, as it was in the case of oil deposits. All that oil was at some point huge hunks of living, breathing, eating, multiplying beings. So we wouldn’t actually need to form it into a solid rock before disposing of it.
I don’t know, maybe we can just dig an extremely deep pit and shove all our organic waste down there. Or make some very sturdy concrete tombs (similar to nuclear waste, minus the lead) and just seal it all away, but it’d have to be completely sealed so as not to seep into the environment around it. Or deep enough so that it won’t contaminate groundwater if it does.