It’s one of the more common anti-climate change memes. “We’re dumping all this carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, so let’s just plant more trees! That’ll solve the problem!” Yes, because trees can also process all the methane and nitrous oxide we’re farting out as a species!
Nonetheless, it would be a great idea to plant more trees because, hell, it can’t hurt, right?
Yeah, one small problem, though. It turns out that fungi, in addition to being kind of disgusting and creepy under a long film exposure, are also polluting dicks.
Well, actually, they’re incredibly considerate. To plants. Humans, on the other hand, can piss right off.
Specifically, arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, a kind of fungi that lives in the roots of about 80% of the plants on earth.
In theory, a plant sucks up carbon dioxide, breathes out oxygen, and dumps the carbon into the soil. Great, right? Not so much.
The fungi likes this carbon and also likes its friend the plant. So it ever so helpfully takes that carbon the plant removed from the atmosphere as part of a process to feed it nitrogen and… turns it back into carbon dioxide.
In fact, it’s so good at this that the fungi actually turn plants into de facto carbon dioxide producers.
Dammit. Does this mean M. Night Shyamalan was right? Man, we’re never going to hear the end of this one.
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Scumbag Fungi. That should def be a meme…
SLIDESHOW THIS TUESDAY!
Well, the study used grass and not trees (which is over 2/3 of U.S. forestland.) Trees store most of the CO2 in their wood and roots. Meaning it doesn’t go anywhere until it burns or decays after death.
Also important to note, mycorrhizae provide nitrogen to the plant by breaking down organic material in the soil (leaf litter and other dead plant stuff.) This experiment had two boxes of grass with and without the fungi. That means two things:
1. The increased CO2 is merely from the breakdown of organic material already in the soil. (Count the carbon. CO2 in the air, carbon in the plant mass, and carbon in the dead plant matter in the soil. The box without fungi will have just left the biomass in the soil. Trapping the carbon, yes… as well as the nitrogen.)
2. This meas dead plant matter will just pile up, locking away that precious nitrogen from future generations of grass. At this point, a fungus will move in anyway because it isn’t a box in a lab and nature will restore itself back to the conditions of the other box.
Take home message: Don’t try and sequester carbon with grass.