I just got a CO2 meter and checked the levels in my house and went down a rabbit hole trying to address the issue. Apparently it would take 249 areca palms to offset the carbon RESPIRATION of one adult.
So okay 249 trees just for me to breathe, not to mention the rest of the bad things we all do.
So how can this math ever balance? 249 trees just to break even seems like an impossible number. Then all the flights I have been on, miles driven, etc.
I feel like that’s… Way too many trees. Is it hopeless or am I missing something?
You’re not supposed to plant trees like there’s no tomorrow, but simply stop using fossil fuels. Simple as that.
Your respiration is already net zero. Plants capture CO2 to grow, you eat the plant, breathe out CO2, plants absorb that CO2 again. You should have heard about the carbon cycle in school. If not, look it up.
All the other emissions, the not net zero ones, are some form of fossil resource. Oil, gas, coal. You can’t reasonably offset these, you just stop using them. There’s no way around that.
Yeah it just kind of clicked for me that if I eat plants, that was net zero, but if I eat meat, there was another animal that had to emit CO2 (and other gases) at the same time as me before becoming food. So the opposite of plants taking my CO2 to become food, the animal emitted CO2 while becoming food.
What did you think, the animal ate? Oil?
Directly they dont but it does take oil and gas to make the fertillizer that feeds the crops and pesticides that prevent pests from destroying entire harvests, diesel to run the farm equipment and transport the crops to market. Modern farming, even organic, is very much Carbon positive.
Yes, but that’s almost all by proxy. You’re not supposed to offset the CO2 you’re breathing out.
Unless you actually eat coal.
Do you think the climate cares at all that CO2 emissions are by proxy or not?
That’s not my point. OP was clearly talking about the CO2 of the calories themselves.
I specifically addressed, that fossil fuels can’t be used, if you want to be carbon neutral.
Don’t bend your mind over backwards and put words in ny mouth to prove your self-righteousness to yourself.
Those animals ate plants op. Thats not where the emissions are coming from. At least not directly. Theyre coming from all the fossil fuels that were burned to run the farms and make the fertillizer used to grow crops that you and those animals ate. And realistically most of the CO2 you emit is indirect. i.e Production and transport of products that you buy. Even just drinking water from your tap required resources to be expended to purify, chlorinate and pump to your house.
In order to acheive a Carbon neutral or even Carbon negative economy, CO2 needs to be captured and the reality is that the steps that are needed to do this are not being taken. Industry is moving at a snail’s pace and government has made no real attempt to either facilitate or force the level of change needed.
Not directly, but if tons of biomass was chopped down and burned so those burgers could graze…
All life on earth is based around carbon
Most of what we eat (which is mostly carbon) ends up being exhaled as CO2, and what we don’t and ends up as poop gets eaten by bacteria and such and turned into CO2 then (or other stuff like methane, which still ultimately ends up breaking down into co2.) We’re not taking any significant amount of carbon into our bodies from any source but our food.
And that’s true the whole way down the food chain, all the carbon you get from eating a cow, the cow got from eating grass. If you eat, for example, a fox, the fox got it’s carbon from eating a rabbit or squirrel or whatever which in turn got it from eating acorns and carrots and such. If you eat a tuna, it got it’s carbon from a smaller fish, that got it from still smaller fish, down until you find something that’s eating plankton.
And pretty much all of the carbon that made up that grass, oak tree, carrot, plankton, etc. came from the air, so from animals and such breathing it out.
And it just keeps going around and around the carbon cycle.
That’s all pretty much a self regulating cycle, you don’t really need to worry about reducing or offsetting what you’re breathing, nature takes care of that pretty well.
The issue is that for millions of years, we’ve had a lot of carbon sequestered deep in the earth in the form of fossil fuels- coal, oil, natural gas, etc.
That carbon has been out of the cycle for a very long time, and within the last couple of hundred years we started burning a whole lot of it, releasing it back into the atmosphere, and for a lot of reasons, our environment isn’t really able to do anything with all that extra carbon now.
So that’s the carbon you need to worry about reducing and offsetting.
A lot of carbon offsets take the form of planting trees. Trees do ok at carbon sequestration because trees are made of carbon, and they tend to stick around for a while. You suck a bunch of carbon out of the air, turn it into a tree, and then that carbon isn’t really going anywhere for usually years, decades, maybe even centuries depending on the species, the climate, etc. But of course we also cut down a lot of trees, so that’s kind of a Sisyphean task to plant trees faster than they’re being cut down elsewhere.
This is also all of course a big simplification, that leaves a whole lot out for the sake of keeping things simple.