Climate Scientist’s Solution – Plant Trees, Then Burn Them
Looks like climate “scientists” are back at it again.
This week, scientists revisited the idea of solving global climate change by burning trees.
That’s right.
To refresh your memory, the plan was to plant fast growing trees and plants, burn them for energy, and then recapture the emissions. According to theorists, this would permanently take good amounts of Carbon Dioxide out of the atmosphere and is one of many carbon recapture plans that have been floating around for a while now.
At face value, this might make sense. If you think about it deeper though, the logic vanishes.
Like other stupid plans to solve climate change, such as refreezing the arctic, this plan likely ignores the emissions and financial costs of planting millions of trees, harvesting them, burning them and storing their energy. Not to mention the relative inefficiencies when compared to burning fossil fuels.
Instead of noticing the obvious flaws, a new study was funded to point out the flaws with this strategy that assessed its geopolitical feasibility.
The journal Earth’s Future published the study that explains the main issues with managed biomass growth. Essentially, aside from the fact that it wouldn’t offset emissions nearly enough without necessary coinciding reductions, biomass growth management creates a dichotomy: either create a food shortage or eliminate 50% of natural forests.
They concluded that while it may be a good supplementary mitigation technique, the solution on its own would not be a viable alternative to reducing global emissions.
In total it’s just another “solution” that wouldn’t work in practice.
Wolfgang Lucht, one of the authors of the study, implied that planting trees is not the ultimate solution it’s always cracked up to be. In an interview with Thomson Reuters, he stated:
“Climate physicists talk about (the technology), and macroeconomists. Both seem to think that because it’s about green stuff it’s somehow ecologically sound. But it’s not[.]… One should not save the climate and ruin (the planet) in the process”
At least one scientist has taken into account the myriad of geopolitical issues with these solutions such increasing conflicts over land. Lucht himself noted that “growing plants for fuel would require large-scale irrigation” which leads to easily foreseeable problems as global population increases.
Now if only the world had a cheap, safe and reliable fuel source that could solve these issues.
Oh wait.
