Um... no.... planting trees is ~99% feel-good and 1% effective. We're adding 40B tons/yr of CO2. A tree can only sequester ~0.003 tons/yr and that's temporary. When the tree dies most of that CO2 is released, it's called 'The Carbon CYCLE' for a reason. We'd need ~13,000,000,000,000 trees. A healthy forest has ~200 trees per acre so you'd need to add >60M square miles of forest to the planet (The Amazon is 2.1M square miles).
The only solution is to stop using fools fuel. Our energy needs to come from wind and solar. If we use BEVs we need ~70% less wind or solar to meet our needs than if we use Hydrogen. That's not a small difference.
Good, So we all agreed that capturing the biogas/methane in the decomposition cycle of the trees/biomass is good for the environment.
Planting trees next to your house has secondary benefits, as the shade keeps your home cool cutting down the A/C usage. You bring up some interesting information and do some interesting math.
But it seems it is quite simplistic and you base it on may be numbers you heard from someone or somewhere.
First, I never said we have to maintain 40B tonne CO2 (as in US ton of 1000 lbs?) a year and try to absorb it all.
Second, trees and vegetation is the best option to sequester CO2. You seemed to have missed the CO2 absorbed by other plants, such as grasslands and wetlands. Read this link for some details. One has to really read it fully to understand the impact of these.
Storing Carbon in Plants and Trees – How Much CO2 is Absorbed by Trees and Other Vegetation? - Disruptive Environmentalist
* Despite only making up 3% of total land area, wetlands sequester 30% of all soil carbon.
(9) Prairie wetlands alone sequester 7.5 tons of carbon per acre.
*
Algae (or phytoplankton
) absorb approximately 45 to 50 gigatons of carbon per year into their cells. (10)
- (
Curious George side note: 50 G ton carbon = 183 G ton CO2)
* In total, grasslands store 343 gigatons of carbon in the vegetation and top one metre of soil, sequestering an average of 0.5 gigatons per year. (5)
You are also wrong on the inevitable carbon cycle. For example, you can cut a fully mature live tree and use the lumber, locking away the carbon and avoiding decomposition. Or bury it in ground.
You seem to be also confusing between new carbon (dug up as fossil fuel) vs. using biogas that is already in the atmosphere. These are vastly different.
While checking on numbers you brought up, I calculated the average American vehicular CO2 emissions.
Infographic: How Americans Commute to Work
* 128.3M commuter by cars/trucks etc. in 2016
* 25 mle each way is average commute
* With a hybrid Camry, that's 1 gallon per day => 19 lbs => less than 5 ton CO2 a year
*
For 128 m American commuters, that is mere 660 M tonnes. Nowhere close to 40B tonnes.
This is a tiny fraction of the 40B tonnes/yr you said, and I also verified by googling. So I tried to see where rest of it is coming from.
It turns out power production is the biggest culprit. Wind, solar and LED light bulbs will help. Not electric cars though. Vehicular emission can be easily reduced to almost 50% by hybrids without too much extra mining, that pushes the industrial part up.
TLDR: I don't see any disagreement here.
Planting trees around the house and elsewhere is good for sequestering CO2.
Capturing biogas is also great. The 'C' in methane is already there in methane.
CO2 is 86x less potent as greenhouse gas than CH4; so capturing methane is good.
OK now?
