I got curious and will attempt some math and duckduckgoing.
A forest can remove between 4.5 and 40.7 tons of Carbon Dioxide per year per hectare during the first 20 years of tree growth. Sauce
Humanity is currently generating around 40 billion tons of CO2 per year. Sauce
So now some simple math: it would take between 1 billion and 10 billion hectares of forests, depending on their maturity, to keep up. 100 hectare = 1 km2sauce, so this means 10 to 100 million km2 of forests.
Earth’s total surface area is 510 million km2. sauce.
So 10ish percent of the 510 million km2 of land on earth, or around 5.1 million km2 is a good candidate for tree planting. That’s not enough if we want to sequester all the carbon produced by humanity. Without getting to net zero global warming will continue. The best we can do is slow it down. More disconcertingly, our appetite for energy is only increasing. The good news is that we’re really starting to see large scale wind and farm operations ramping up, but there are still a lot of power plants scheduled to come online in the next two decades.
Technologies? No. But the oceans are 42x better at sequestering carbon than the surface, and there are some pretty interesting ideas around promoting phytoplankton blooms and kicking the ocean currents up, that sort of thing.
But trees are rad. We should absolutely have more of them. Besides, they’re proven, as you noted.
But really, humans have to stop emitting as much CO2eq. That’s it. There is no magic sciencey solution.
For a starts, we need to shut down all coal mines and power factories, stop oil, reduce animal exploitation as much as possible, stop fast fashion and reduce AI to scientific uses.
Nothing here is new or controversial, it’s just a bit boring, difficult, and goes against massive entrenched interests. That’s the hard part.
But any approach that is banking on technological breakthroughs maybe helping us capture all the CO2 (and methane, and nitrous oxide, and…) is inane.
I got curious and will attempt some math and duckduckgoing.
A forest can remove between 4.5 and 40.7 tons of Carbon Dioxide per year per hectare during the first 20 years of tree growth. Sauce
So now some simple math: it would take between 1 billion and 10 billion hectares of forests, depending on their maturity, to keep up. 100 hectare = 1 km2 sauce, so this means 10 to 100 million km2 of forests.
Earth’s total surface area is 510 million km2. sauce.
Of that, here’s a quick breakdown:
Sauce
So 10ish percent of the 510 million km2 of land on earth, or around 5.1 million km2 is a good candidate for tree planting. That’s not enough if we want to sequester all the carbon produced by humanity. Without getting to net zero global warming will continue. The best we can do is slow it down. More disconcertingly, our appetite for energy is only increasing. The good news is that we’re really starting to see large scale wind and farm operations ramping up, but there are still a lot of power plants scheduled to come online in the next two decades.
yeah, sure, but have any of the other carbon sequestration technologies proven more efficient while being equally scalable?
Technologies? No. But the oceans are 42x better at sequestering carbon than the surface, and there are some pretty interesting ideas around promoting phytoplankton blooms and kicking the ocean currents up, that sort of thing.
But trees are rad. We should absolutely have more of them. Besides, they’re proven, as you noted.
But really, humans have to stop emitting as much CO2eq. That’s it. There is no magic sciencey solution.
For a starts, we need to shut down all coal mines and power factories, stop oil, reduce animal exploitation as much as possible, stop fast fashion and reduce AI to scientific uses.
Nothing here is new or controversial, it’s just a bit boring, difficult, and goes against massive entrenched interests. That’s the hard part.
But any approach that is banking on technological breakthroughs maybe helping us capture all the CO2 (and methane, and nitrous oxide, and…) is inane.
I think there’s argument about whether or not even that’s enough.