this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
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A Boring Dystopia
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Correct me if I'm wrong but as far as I know trees are no real solution. Yes, they take CO2 to grow, but everything is released again when they die and are consumed by bacteria which just didn't exist a few million years ago. So they only ever store what the forest is made of and not a bit more. They will rot and never ever become coal again. So while it sounds nice to plant a forest and there are other benefits, when if we planted a forest on every inch of the planet it would not solve our problem. Am I wrong here? Tell me!
That carbon will stay sequestered if the trees are cut down, and the wood is used to build something that lasts for a long time.
A long time isn't forever. Wood burns and wood rots. How many wooden structures from over a thousand years ago are still around?
I'm just saying we aren't helping ourselves with this plastic throw-away culture we've developed. Things like fine wood furniture can last as long as the owner wants it to. Every time something is replaced, it ends up somewhere in the environment, and we have the carbon footprint of something new being made. Beautifully made objects tend to be restored when they get old and ratty. When was the last time a Frank Lloyd Wright house was torn down to be replaced by a McMansion? That wood is sequestered.
The carbon in that wood is only sequestered until it rots or burns. It may be a hundred years, it may be a thousand years, but it has not been removed from the carbon cycle. At best, you're kicking the can down the road.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
This is one case where kicking the can down the road is the best option we really have, as long as we don’t stop working on the tech we need down said road. In a few hundred years we’ll probably have far better solutions, or a radically different lifestyle and technology than now. But we don’t have those now. And right now every little bit will help.
Keep in mind we’ve only been industrial for what, a couple hundred years? Sequestering for equivalent to the entire span we’ve been causing the problem seems like a pretty good start.
I want to be clear, nowhere have I said that we shouldn't be planting trees. Having a deeper reservoir for the carbon will buy time to develop more efficient and permanent sequestration technologies. It's just that a lot of people in these comments seem to think that we shouldn't even pursue sequestration tech because trees exist, despite the fact that they fill different roles in the solution to anthropogenic climate change