People tend to forget that trees have roots.
Roots cause problems with infrastructure.
Hence why when a problem arises you try to "get to the root of it".
People can grow trees. You need a lot more to make one of those contraptions. Hard to control people when they can just grow a plant to do what they need.
It’s been proven that humans didn’t actually get most of their fresh air from the rainforest, but actually from millions of these algea in the sea… Which is actually more logical, since trees do the opposite at night, kinda undoing any advantage they made during the day… Hence why it’s said you should never put a decorative small tree or even plants in the bedroom as they can take away oxygen levels in closed rooms at night. It’s even said not to sleep under trees outside at night cause it can cause respiratory problems.
They don’t use enough oxygen over night to negate the effect as they use the carbon to grow. It’s still bad to have a lot of plants in your bedroom, but it doesn’t really matter as long as they are relatively small.
That had me go and look it up and apparently you’re right that they use part of the carbon dioxide as energy storage, but as I understand this storage eventually gets released in full when the tree dies too…
Not sure if that would be so much to balance it out again, but it does still diminish their overall effect even more…
It is just how a tree works, it gets the matter to grow from the carbon dioxide. If they are burned or they die this carbon is slowly released again, same way as coal has carbon that is stored until burning
I don’t even understand which part of the tree experience these tanks are supposed to replace. Are they really just there to pick up CO2? Because you can also plant a forest outside the city for that.
You’ll miss out on all the other tree benefits, but so you also will with these glass tanks.
Guys, it's not one or the other. We can have trees and algae tanks. Trees can still offer all of the benefits they do like shade and beauty while algae tanks can be used to increase fresh oxygen. Algae is much better at absorbing CO2 than trees and providing clean air which is a big problem in a busy city.
It is one or the other because they’ll come out of the same budget - it’s an “opportunity cost”. So if the city has $1000 to spend on either a tree or a tank, then they can’t spend the same $1000 on both items. We’d need some balance between the two.
Trees offer real world benefits of carbon reduction, temperature reduction, shade for people, the psychological benefits that trees offer, some limited wildlife habitat, and they do it without much outside help. They grow themselves with decent maintenance.
But you have to build and maintain this tank. What carbon was used to do so, and what maintenance will it need. Can it offset its own cost? It offers no benefits to wildlife, no shade, no temperature reduction.
Yeah, trees leave leaf litter and can heave sidewalks with roots, but given that neither system is perfect, there’s no reason to argue that boxes of algae are better.
Why do we need to argue which is better? In some places, beautification isn’t really practical, but you can still stick these around. They don’t look hard to install or uninstall, unlike trees.
I would hate to see a tree actually replaced by one these. But no one but the meme is saying that is the plan.
I think we have reached the limit for how much we should “improve” and replace nature, if there’s no room for trees we should make room instead of accomodating yet another industrial solution to a problem created by industry in the first place.
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