Re:Restoring natural forests is the best way to remove atmos...
by ajross on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @03:16PM
(#19557627)
> The plantation being cut down and then regrown has 0 net impact, just like trees dying and new trees growing in a forest.
That's logically equivalent to saying your car won't run out of gas because on balance there's always exactly as much fuel going in as being burned. It's missing the point.
The issue here is that a farm "stores" very little carbon, as most of it gets re-released at the end of the season when the crops are harvested and decomposed in some way back into atmospheric carbon. A forest, on the other hand, continues growing for decades as a net carbon sink. All the carbon it absorbs stays in the forsest as biomass (and metabiomass stuff like peat and logs and soil).
A mature forest, effectively, has a much larger "tank" for the carbon that doesn't involve storing it in the atmosphere, where we don't want it. Farms don't.
That's logically equivalent to saying your car won't run out of gas because on balance there's always exactly as much fuel going in as being burned. It's missing the point.
The issue here is that a farm "stores" very little carbon, as most of it gets re-released at the end of the season when the crops are harvested and decomposed in some way back into atmospheric carbon. A forest, on the other hand, continues growing for decades as a net carbon sink. All the carbon it absorbs stays in the forsest as biomass (and metabiomass stuff like peat and logs and soil).
A mature forest, effectively, has a much larger "tank" for the carbon that doesn't involve storing it in the atmosphere, where we don't want it. Farms don't.