I was talking to a normie associate about the efforts to reduce "carbon footprints." He was mentioning about electric vehicles and wind turbines. I said "if they really believe that there's global warming, then why spend $4 million on an ugly wind turbine? How many beautiful trees do you think they could plant for $4 million?"
His response did find the problem with my suggestion, but it instantly made me realize how insane the entire premise of CO2 fear is.
He said "well, trees do absorb a lot of CO2 from the atmosphere each year, but the problem is that when they die and decompose, they put the CO2 back into the atmosphere."
He was right. Whenever a tree dies, all that carbon goes back into the air. But not not just trees, we're talking about every living thing on earth-- insects, farm produce, grass, weeds, fish, algae, mammals, bacteria, EVERYTHING! Not just when they die, but whenever a tree loses it's leaves, or an animal sheds skin or hair, much eventually becomes carbon in the air.
That's the way the world works! It's a huge cycle based on helpful CO2, helpful oxygen.
Trying to fight our carbon footprint is like telling people they need to drink less water and pee less or they'll be in danger of flooding the earth.
Not exactly.
A lot of decomposing wood ends up as coal/oil/peat in the earth crust, as huuuge CO2 depositories.
A tree is a net positive O2 contributor in its lifetime, as long as you don’t burn those deposits.
Planting trees (or even better, things we can eat) is a much better use of money against co2 than wind turbines, but not if that wind turbine is replacing the burning of theses huge co2 depositories.
Peat is a good example. Buried deep down in a bog, it will release all its co2 during hundreds of years. If we mine it and use it as soil for plants, it will release all its co2 in less than ten years. If we burn it, it will be released in minutes.
On the other hand; we’re in a period of record low ppm co2 in the atmosphere, so low that farmers are adding co2 to their green houses to increase growth.
Co2 is food for plants, but we should be very careful about how much of it we release into the atmosphere. It’s not a problem now, but it might be further down the road.
Tl:dr. Dead wood is a huge depository for Co2(oil/coal/peat), and we should be careful when burning hundreds of thousand years worth of Co2 in the matter of a few generations.
Good points! Never thought about adding peat to soil.
BTW, shouldn't the Tl:dr; go at the top of a post, to save reading the whole thing before finding it?