Trees Can't Save Us From Climate Change

TL&DR:? when people bring up the problem of climate change, and when they suggest the idiotic notion of direct air capture (DAC), please don’t post a picture of a tree and make the point that trees are effectively natural DAC units.? While trees do sequester some CO2, and store even more while alive in their wood, we still have to stop burning fossils as fuels.? Trees could not possibly keep up with even a small fraction of our current fossil CO2 emissions.

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Trees, and especially forests, are awesome- in their own right.? I have the privilege to be caretaker of 28 acres of forest of my own, and stewardship of that forest is something I take very seriously.?

Trees do absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, and convert it into other molecules which we call “biomass”.?

Next to the oceans, and perhaps soils more generally, forests are one of the largest natural carbon dioxide sinks on earth.? Forests absorb about 16 billion tonnes of CO2 per year, and re-emit about 8 billion tonnes of that, for a net capture of about 8 billion tonnes per year.? That’s not a small amount!

https://www.wri.org/insights/forests-absorb-twice-much-carbon-they-emit-each-year

Trees also store a lot of carbon in their wood and forest soil biomass, while they’re alive.? It’s estimated that standing forests represent a carbon dioxide reservoir of about 861 billion tonnes of carbon, i.e. about 3160 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

https://www.woodwellclimate.org/global-forest-carbon-storage-explained/

In comparison, we emit about 38 billion tonnes of fossil CO2 per year, by burning fossil fuels like fossil gas, petroleum and coal.? Add to that the enormous amount of methane, N2O and other greenhouse gases we emit, with global warming potentials far higher than those of CO2, and you get CO2 equivalent (CO2e) GHG emissions of about 48 billion tonnes per year. ?That should give you an idea of the size of problem we’re facing when we talk about decarbonization.

All the forests in the world today, therefore, absorb about 1/5th of our fossil CO2 emissions, or about 1/6 of our CO2e emissions. And there simply isn’t room for 5-6x as much forest cover as we have today, period.? And before we can begin “afforestation”, we have to first end “deforestation”.? At present, we’re shrinking the world’s net forest cover, in net terms, rather than adding to it, as we do what humans have done for millennia:? cutting down forest to make room for agricultural land.

Furthermore, that 8 billion tonnes/year figure is an average.? Vast areas of forest on earth are barely in balance in terms of net carbon sequestration at present.? Areas such as the Amazon can switch from being net carbon sinks to net carbon sources as the climate warms.? The boreal forests of northern Canada are a similar problem, with wildfires releasing enormous reserves of stored carbon in a single year.

So please- the next time you’re tempted to post a comment about trees being better direct air capture (DAC) units than any human unit we’re ever likely to make, please realize two things:

1)????? ?You’re probably right, because DAC is dumbass, but

2)????? You’re not actually helping.? You’re distracting us from the real problem- and its real solution

DAC isn’t just a fun but hopelessly premature energy-destroying Rube Goldberg apparatus.? It’s also a fossil fueled meme.? Its false promise is being used to promote the continued burning of fossils as fuels for longer, with less guilt.? It’s a predatory delay strategy, keeping us from meaningfully engaging with real decarbonization.

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/why-direct-air-capture-sucks-good-way-paul-martin/

Which is, sadly, almost exactly the same thing as the promotion of planting trees as if it were a meaningful GHG emission mitigation.

We need to get it through our heads:? net zero is nonsense.? We need to target actual zero.? We need to reduce fossil GHG emissions by ending the combustion of fossils as fuels- as quickly and as completely as we can do so practically.? We need to start by eliminating the cheapest emissions, which can be pruned merely by ceasing to treat the atmosphere as a free or very cheap public sewer- by imposing carbon taxes or other carbon pricing schemes.? Then we can work our way down to the smaller quantity of emissions that are much more expensive to eliminate, trimming them via regulatory controls such as emission bans.

Get it through your head:? we can’t plant our way out of the global warming problem.? We have to stop the burning.

Disclaimer:? this article has been written by a human, and like all human-produced work, it can certainly contain errors and omissions.? If you find something glaringly wrong with what I’ve written, and can correct it with good references, I’ll be grateful to you for providing that correction.

If, however, I’ve cut into your business interest with this article, i.e. you’re standing next to a forest with a chainsaw, demanding ransom money in the form of “offsets” in return for not cutting down the trees- well, you can contact my employer, Spitfire Research Inc., who will be happy to tell you to piss off and write your own article.