Forest Carbon's Back-End Durability Problem

half of the carbon stays in the plastic. (The actual percentage varies quite a bit, depending on which kind of plastic you’re talking about, but around half is a reasonable approximation.) Carbon

In practice, we’d be lucky to see a fraction of this, especially in a warming world with increasing water constraints (limiting some types of forestation) and potentially more wildfires and forests turning from sinks into sources of greenhouse gases.58 While we should be doing all of this today, and quickly, there are limits to what natural climate

How much carbon dioxide can a tree absorb in its lifetime? It varies, but a good rule of thumb is 4 tons over the course of 40 years. How long will the tree survive? If it burns down, all the carbon dioxide it was storing will be released into the atmosphere.

are now predicting rapid decarbonization. Those same people would be shocked to know that our present situation cannot be changed easily or rapidly: as we saw in the preceding chapter, the ubiquity and the scale of the dependence are too large for that.