Occidental Petroleum is leading the global charge to vastly expand the use of technologies that suck up carbon dioxide. The failure of company’s biggest-ever bet shows the challenges ahead.
Very, very few trees live that long in practice. The average tree lifespan is three to four hundred years, though there are plenty of species that are sub-100 on average. But that’s not the point. The point is that you’re just cycling the carbon, not really removing it from circulation. The instant there’s a devastating forest fire or something causes those trees to die, that carbon is back in play. Even if the trees don’t all die at once, you’re still going to hit an equilibrium where the number of trees dying of natural causes and releasing carbon balances the number of trees growing and locking up carbon. It’s not the worst stop-gap solution (that honor belongs to industrial carbon capture facilities) to buy ourselves some more time, and we SHOULD be planting more trees, but it’s not a good solution for permanently reducing our carbon load.
Very, very few trees live that long in practice. The average tree lifespan is three to four hundred years, though there are plenty of species that are sub-100 on average. But that’s not the point. The point is that you’re just cycling the carbon, not really removing it from circulation. The instant there’s a devastating forest fire or something causes those trees to die, that carbon is back in play. Even if the trees don’t all die at once, you’re still going to hit an equilibrium where the number of trees dying of natural causes and releasing carbon balances the number of trees growing and locking up carbon. It’s not the worst stop-gap solution (that honor belongs to industrial carbon capture facilities) to buy ourselves some more time, and we SHOULD be planting more trees, but it’s not a good solution for permanently reducing our carbon load.