Technology

There's even worse stuff: Planting trees is sold as carbon offset. But where do you plant trees? Certainly not on valuable farmland. Instead they drain bogs to plant trees instead.

The issue is that bogs can store about 10x as much CO² as a forest can, and by draining the bog, that CO² is released.

And bog land isn't exactly well-suited for growing trees, and also the carbon offset only pays for planting the trees, not for keeping them alive. So the trees die almost instantly, thus releasing their stored CO². But the upside to it is that on the now re-deforested land, more trees can be planted.

It's complete greenwashing with at best no effect and at worst terrible effects.

The main issue with planting trees to remove CO² is that a forest doesn't consume CO² but instead just stores it. Once a forest is fully-grown, no more CO² is sunk in there. A hectare of forest stores ~400t CO2. Germany creates about 650 million tons CO² per year. So to offset that, Germany would need to plant 1.6 million hectars of forest a year, which is about 4.5% of the surface area of Germany. 32% of Germany is already forest, so that leaves a theoretical maximum of 14.5 years of CO² emissions that Germany could offset by planting trees.

But Germany has been creating CO² for much longer.

Yeah i was expecting the externalized cost route with this one.

Technically it's more common to pay investment firms with forest land to not cut down the trees they weren't going to cut down to begin with.

The thing is that these carbon credits make it so that things which would otherwise reduce CO2 in the atmosphere don't happen unless some money changes hands. Most of the time credits effectively do nothing.