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Scientists say net zero by 2050 is too late
(mronline.org)
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this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2020
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since you seem to actually know things, is plastic carbon sequestration? this seems like a stupid question cuz obviously nobody is making plastic outta atmospheric carbon but like, is it "good" if petrol already extracted got plastic'd instead of fuel'd???
Well actually this is the first time I’ve ever been asked this and it’s a hilarious question (BUT NOT BECAUSE IT IS BAD OR DUMB) so let’s undress the question a bit:
Is plastic sequestration? Short answer is yes. There are ways to lock the carbon in plastic out of the carbon cycle for a very VERY long time.
Long answer is no, because as far as Im aware nobody is making plastics out of atmospheric carbon, like you said. If they could this is still a good idea on paper, but any long term storage that I can think of for plastic will result in its eventual decay back into carbon.
It is a great question though, because in theory if we could add plastic to deposition environments and make sure it remains contained that could definitely be a form of sequestration but I don’t see it being feasible at current rates of consumption.
Is direct air capture tech like this stuff very inefficient or does it have any real possibility to actually sequester carbon directly? Also what's your opinion of Planet of the Humans if you've watched it? I thought it was weird how intense the backlash was to basically a film that just showed the very real downsides of renewables and pointed out correctly that green capitalism will not work and we can't just shift everything to renewable and go on as we are right now without significantly addressing overproduction and overconsumption here.
As current tech stands, it is pretty much always better to plant trees than worry about this. One of these capture systems does the work of less than 10 trees before maturity (plus trees serve other great purposes). Granted, this system will continue to sequester carbon while a tree will no longer effectively do so once it is full grown.
In the longer term though, systems like these will ideally be what is used to accelerate the process I was speaking of in my original comment.
Also I have not see the show/movie but we will, at least in my opinion, NEVER have an overpopulation problem in any foreseeable future, and I’m talking thousands of years. I do think it’s fairly obvious, especially when living western lifestyles, that the issue is overconsumption and production, as well as commodifying necessities like housing and healthy foods
Over the past decades China has undertaken a large reforestation project in the norther part of the country, which has been widely successful. They had planted something like 70B trees. However what they came across was that while the project worked in stopping desertification and reforesting the area, that the new forests created a serious impact on the ground water supply, which in China is already scarce in the northern part of the country, so now they have to import large quantities of water from the south and from other places. Will the sort of large scale reforestation projects that are being proposed around the world not face a problem of increasing water shortages as things continue getting worse?
Also for the movie I thought it was strange the criticism focused on claims of overpopulation, the movie never really put forth any such arguments from what i remember, it just addressed that overconsumption and overproduction is present in our society. Overpopulation is a really dumb prevailing narrative though.
Yes! I’ve actually written papers about China’s “Green Wall” initiative back when they were doing trials for it and watching it actually succeed feels amazing. These sorts of large scale projects are certainly possible but any large scale project will also have large scale impact. I know one thing that hasn’t happened with the green wall initiative that was predicted is that it HASNT increased rainfall, and as you’ve said this has had an impact on ground water. As for these projects elsewhere in the world, some will have water issues and some won’t. It really depends on where they are happening.
One very scary example, at least to me, is that many places in South America that used to be rainforest but were clear cut for farming simply no longer have the moisture or biodiversity to support a rainforest in the area. Many of these cycles are self-perpetuating, which is what China anticipated happening but unfortunately didn’t.