this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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We have that. They're called "plants." If we just stop cutting down all the trees and poisoning the seas, plants will capture the carbon in the air and return it to the ground when they die. Or it will become part of the natural food chain.
So don't worry, either we will stop destroying all of the ecosystems, or the plants can fix the planet after we're all gone.
I've always wondered how big an impact burying all grass clippings would have... I assume very little since I've never heard it mentioned before.
You would have to bury them really deep to prevent them from being converted fully back to CO2, or worse methane, by other organisms.
Not to mention, all the nutrients that would normally be returned by their decomposition will never return back into the ecosystem.
We have a simple biologocial solution for all of that. Peatlands. They transfer the carbon into more and more stable chemical compounds that end up being sequestered. All the coal that is extracted now used to be peat some hundred million years ago.
Just leaving them on the ground allows them to decompose naturally. A better option is to not cut your grass, or have a native groundcover lawn.
Cutting the trees down is fine (well the ones we plant for the purpose I mean) - turn them into books and then store the books. As an added benefit you get books!
Then conservatives get elected, burn all the books and we are back to where we started
damn! didn;t think of that
I'm not a scientist by any stretch, but would disposing of plastics with these mushrooms in a terrarium of sorts help? They would have to be big and numerous.
The mushrooms would break down the plastics into CO2 and water and the plants would absorb the CO2 and water. As the plastics start to go away, we could add more of our excess plastic to keep the cycle going.
If this works, it also keeps the plastic eating mushrooms contained and away from all the essential plastics we have today.
Sounds like a good plan. I don't know. Considering the rate at which we produce plastic, I doubt we could ever grow enough mushrooms to keep up, but it would be worth funding the research.
Speak for yourself
Why not
I think you are wrong, do you have anything to back your claims?
Well it's going to happen one way or the other. The only question is whether humans will be there for it.
I wouldn't underestimate our capacity to fuck up the planet. When the food runs out and the water riots spread, things are going to go south very quickly for the human race. We like to make post apocalyptic movies about how we survive in the desert that used to be Iowa, building war-cars from scrap and isolated communities from the remainders. The reality is that almost everyone will die off without the electricity, medicine, and food production we have all come to rely upon. Gasoline will expire in the tanks of a million cars, and the ammo will run out faster than the potato chips. Farms will be pillaged, and GM seed stocks don't produce a new generation.
When society breaks down, all the little things will fall away, and we'll all realize how actually few survival skills people actually have.
We could make charcoal from the trees and bury the same amount we dug up, but as long as we burn coal for power it's kind of pointless.