Re:I liked the idea of carbon offsets until I tried to expla...
by phire on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @12:04AM
(#30998476)
There is no fundamental problem with a forest burning. It might release all it's carbon into the atmosphere while burning, but when it regrows it will re-absorb all that carbon.
Bit of an accounting nightmare. You have to make sure it is allowed to regrow. You can't count that regrowth as new carbon sequestration, it's sequestrating it's original carbon again. And it's also going to take decades before it fully regrows.
Re:I liked the idea of carbon offsets until I tried to expla...
by joe_the_user on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @01:21AM
(#30998914)
My point above is that because of fire suppression, California's forests have grown denser than the long-term, sustainable average. California's forests were much less dense in the 1880s because fires were quite common - it is a "fire shaped landscape", the ecology evolved with fire.
If someone is attempting to make things even more dense, they simply will stoke fuel for more fire.
Re:I liked the idea of carbon offsets until I tried to expla...
by phire on Tuesday April 12, 2022 @08:23AM
(#31001621)
Yeah. The accounting can become even more of an absolute nightmare if you actually have to start planning that far ahead and taking into account the long-term sustainable average of converting land to forest, instead of the short-term best case.
Re:I liked the idea of carbon offsets until I tried to expla...
by datadata on Monday April 11, 2022 @10:36PM
(#30997947)
That's why I said "can". Obviously there is a lot of diversity of forests in the world. Cutting down half of them to make room for human stuff might have reduced the average amount of carbon stuck in wood on average?
Here in California we had two million acre burn last year, including, I believe, some "carbon sequestering" forests.
A lot of forest in the US actually have an excessive amount of growth due to suppression policies.
You can't expect to "plant" a forest in some random location and expect it to simply endure. Ecosystems have a more or less natural level of vegetation and getting more to grow is asking for it to burn away later (accelerating global warming, later). And that's not talking about the greater propensity for fire due to global warming itself.