Quote:
Originally Posted by Bill Bumface
Edit: Browser was stale and replied, I see other people beat me to it.
A little tree seedling turning into a full grown tree captures a bunch of carbon (the trunk, limbs etc are all essentially solid carbon).
A mature tree is really not growing much at all, and captures a minimal amount of carbon.
A dead tree that will rot, or a tree that burns down turns all that solid carbon in the wood back to CO2 in the atmosphere. As mentioned above, rotting is even worse as methane is 28x more effective as a greenhouse gas than CO2.
So the only way to capture CO2 with forests besides planting new ones, is to cut down existing ones and either bury the wood where it can't rot, or store the wood. Building wood buildings, furniture etc. is a great way to store wood in a useful manner.
So if you cut down 1 tree and build something with it, you've gotten rid of something sitting there not collecting much CO2 that was destined to burn down or rot and release all it had stored anyway.
In it's place, a new try can grow, and capture a tree's worth of CO2. So you just increased the CO2 in the world stored as a solid by one tree's worth.
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Thanks for this, but say you burn it in biomass, you release that 30 years of carbon capture immediately, and take 30 years to grow it back. so I get the building a little more, but these wood buildings are not going to last too much longer, then what? they are waste again, maybe burned, so over the long term is that a better option?