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Want to offset your carbon footprint? Here’s what you need to know - Ars Technica

Want to offset your carbon footprint? Here’s what you need to know - Ars Technica

Nov 25, 2020 1 min, 22 secs

Do carbon offsets more closely resemble the former or the latter.

There are many reasons why you might seek to offset part of your carbon footprint, whether it’s to assuage a general feeling of guilt for your lifestyle, to precisely cover the estimated emissions of a flight, or just to do something beneficial for the environment.

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is part of a bio-geo-chemical dance called the carbon cycle.

Carbon regularly changes form and area code, cycling among the atmosphere, oceans, ecosystems, and even bedrock.

These are just some of many exchanges in the carbon cycle.

This increasingly took carbon that had spent many millions of years locked up deep underground and liberated it into the atmosphere.

Some carbon offsets projects help with this goal by preventing emissions that would otherwise have occurred.

Others promise to preserve something that in carbon cycle terms is known as a “sink”—a durable form of carbon like forests or even mineralized carbonate in the ground.

These offsets aren’t always identical to prevented emissions, as they can have climate effects separate from carbon.

Assuming that you find a program you can trust to actually plant the promised trees, many things will influence their carbon cycle impact over time.

Some grow quickly, accumulating a lot of carbon per acre over the first decade or so, which provides immediate help to our carbon emissions balance sheet.

But fast growing trees are typically less dense than slower-growing species, so the ultimate amount of carbon stored per acre is lower?

The leftover plant material decays or burns, releasing carbon back into the atmosphere, which ends its time as a sink,.

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