Don’t stop reading!
I would like to point out, before I start actually writing, that this is NOT another article telling you how badly you have done (you have), how terrifying climate change is (it is), and how much you should sell your car (you should).
Instead, it is one of those rare articles explaining how you can survive climate change without destroying your precious polluting lifestyle, and with the occasional back-handed statement that will probably drive you bonkers.
Without further ado, I present the simplest and best method for climate change aversion: Trees!
Nearly educated people will assume that trees don’t work, because the capture isn’t permanent. You have to understand a fundamental rule of carbon dioxide to understand why trees work: Carbon dioxide is immutable. There is the same amount of carbon dioxide in the planet now as there was thirty thousand years ago, it is just in a different form, that of a gas. The other forms are simple:
- Fossil fuels: Carbon dioxide and hydrogen are the key ingredients for every hydrocarbon. Very, very permanent, takes a long time to go away.
- In plants: All sugars are hydrocarbons too, but they can’t be stored for long. Plants store lots of sugars, and when they die, they can either be burned or digested by bacteria, which releases a lot of energy, carbon dioxide, and water vapor. That’s why compost gets hot! This isn’t terribly permanent, but can hold carbon dioxide in huge quantities, if permitted.
- In the atmosphere: This is the one we have to be worried about. The above two methods are basically ways to keep the carbon out of the atmosphere, because carbon in the atmosphere contains heat. It’s like insulating a house in the summer - it will get much hotter than necessary, and will eventually kill the inhabitants.
Carbon sequestration is where we remove the insulation, either long-term in low quantities or short-term in high quantities.
How, you say, is that going to do anything? Isn’t it just going to be released again?
Well, I can only answer that we do the obvious and plant more trees when the old ones die - or use bamboo for sustainable architecture, because if we protect the ends, the skin of the bamboo will keep bacteria out and the carbon won’t be released. And, eventually, when we stop our ridiculous fascination with fossil fuels, we can fill the old oil wells with sea moss and algae (some 90% of fossil fuels is from things like that) and seal them off forever, in the hopes that in a million years when they are viable fuels, our ancestors won’t be idiots and will keep them under the ground where they belong.
How, you say, can I help? I’m not going to go on a carbon-free diet, or get rid of my car - even if I could afford those things, it would be impossible for me!
To this I reply with some numbers. If you don’t like numbers, you may skip immediately to the good part.
The average human releases 4.5 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year.
An average human lives for 79 years, so 79 * 4.5 = 355.5 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide per human life.
Pine trees can sequester up to 10 kilograms of carbon dioxide every year (https://www.gotreequotes.com/how-much-co2-do-trees-absorb/), and one hectare of trees can capture 10 metric tonnes.
The average life span of a pine tree is 12 years
Pine trees cost 40 dollars per 1000 seeds (https://askinglot.com/how-much-do-pine-tree-seeds-cost).
The good part
10 metric tonnes * 12 years = 120 metric tonnes with just one hectare of pine trees, more than a third of your carbon debt! With three hectares (3000 trees), you could be carbon neutral. 120 dollars could buy all of these, but unfortunately land prices are expensive. As per https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Average-market-price-of-1-hectare-by-land-categories-Note-Based-on-data-provided-by-the_fig2_317307153, we know that one hectare of agricultural land costs… 3000 pounds! This is well above what most people can afford, unfortunately, as carbon neutrality would cost a total of 3000 pounds * 3 hectares * 1.36 pounds per dollar + 120 dollars for seeds = 12,360 dollars, which is far too much.
If you own enough land, you can do this easily. You probably shouldn’t do pine trees, however. If you don’t already own enough land, but you intend to buy some, you should plant some trees on it. If you don’t want to buy more land, you can ask the local government to give the local community some land to plant trees on. This might work if your in campaign season, because politicians want people to vote for them - just find one with a lot of money, ask them to buy your community some land, and guarantee them the vote of the community in return.
An even better solution is to exercise libertarianism and declare sovereignty over your neighborhood, then declare war on the surrounding areas, win, and plant a lot of trees there. As a nation, you might even be able to get things for free, by dissolving your government after you have a national debt 😄.