I can't wait until they makes these no cost, low-maintenance, and self-replacing. Oh man, just think of how easy it would be to fix our climate issues!
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
426 points (93.6% liked)
A Boring Dystopia
13676 readers
80 users here now
Pictures, Videos, Articles showing just how boring it is to live in a dystopic society, or with signs of a dystopic society.
Rules (Subject to Change)
--Be a Decent Human Being
--Posting news articles: include the source name and exact title from article in your post title
--If a picture is just a screenshot of an article, link the article
--If a video's content isn't clear from title, write a short summary so people know what it's about.
--Posts must have something to do with the topic
--Zero tolerance for Racism/Sexism/Ableism/etc.
--No NSFW content
--Abide by the rules of lemmy.world
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Trees very quickly stop being effective though. As soon as they die, they return all that captured CO2 back into the atmosphere
You'd also joined to plant billions of trees just to keep up with current CO2 emissions, let alone all part emissions
Basically, to convert all CO2 from the atmosphere into oxygen you'll need to spend the same amount of energy as you got out of it by burning fossil fuels. With losses included, you can triple that. Add to that the energy required to gather the CO2 and the e energy required to safely store it and you can easily quadruple it
So basically take all the energy we've generated since the industrial revolution, quadruple that, and that will be the amount of energy we'll need to spend to remove the CO2 from our atmosphere. If for the next, say, 200 years we stop emitting CO2 and double our output, we spend 50% of the world's power on CO2 scrubbing, we'd end up with a clean atmosphere. That is being generous
Planting a few trees won't do anything at all
Planting entire forests the size of larger countries would do little
We opened Pandora's box and it'll cost us centuries to close it
You're right about most of this, but the carbon doesn't return to the atmosphere "as soon as they die".
I have a log in the back garden that has been there for twenty years, there's wood houses a hundred years old
Wooden houses will typically have a waterproof roof and some kind of treatment to prevent them rotting. A log that's left outside will release all it's carbon in much less than a century. Human intervention is needed for trees to achieve permanent carbon capture.
That wasn't always the case, though. After trees evolved lignin, it took a while for fungi to evolve ligninase to digest it, so trees fell over and just got buried under more trees later without rotting, and that's where a significant fraction of all coal came from.
I think the wildfires speed things up
Big oof.