this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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No. Carbon neutral isn’t enough. We are going to have to go carbon negative.
We can’t just take hundreds of millions of years worth of sequestered carbon and dump it into the atmosphere and leave it there to re-sequester itself. That’s going to take a long time to reverse enough to even buck the current trend of global warming, if we were able to just go carbon neutral today.
Trees also don’t really sequester carbon for long. They die, and the carbon gets eaten by organisms and the cycle continues. Or it burns and most of the carbon is released instantly and only ash remain.
Coal only got there specifically because there was nothing evolved to eat lignin for a long time and dead trees piled up so high that dead trees on top ended up compressing their ancestors into it.
Crude only got there because plants and algae in shallow water died, mixed into sediment, rinse, repeat times a few million years, get compressed by the weight of all the layers above, and turn to crude.
The sequestration of ancient carbon wasn’t just by virtue of being plants, but what happened after those plants died.
I thought this hypothesis was disproved and it was some geological process that buried the trees? I remember there was a study about lignin content in other fossils and it was compatible with fungi decomposing wood.
The trees got buried in oxygen-free peat bogs where decomposers could not survive.