Efficiency is great unless it’s not scalable. We need a way that reliably pulls carbon out of the atmosphere and scales. It’s even better if it’s dead easy to “deploy”. Plants are less efficient at absorbing sunlight than solar panels, but they are viable in places solar panels are not and definitely scale plenty well.
Plants are not efficient. They dont scale. Nor do they even trap carbon. Plants turn carbon into plant matter ... which eventually rots or otherwise breaks down and releases that carbon. Only in special places like bogs or permafrost does the carbon remain for an extended time. Plants dont turn carbon into something inert and storable like coal.
Solar panels can reduce carbon emmissions, but to actually take the carbon out of the air and keep it out means converting it into something akin to coal. This takes massive power, which must in turn come from a green source.
CO2 levels have steadily declined from 3,000 ppm over the last 150 million years. How do you explain such enormous, steady decline if plants do "[not] even trap carbon"?
Further, how do you explain the Carboniferous CO2-fixation that started with CO2 at 4,500 ppm and ended down below 210 ppm?
Contrary to your claims that only bogs or permafrost could keep plant-fixed carbon in the long run, phytoplankton absorb carbon in vast quantities, and when they sink their accumulation in sea floors for millions of years is the primary origin story of oil and coal.
Scientists say that plant life has exerted and continues to exert "massive power" over geological eras. Are they in error?
Plant life typically decomposes and so it's carbon neural. I can't speak to the plankton, but I definitely want to look that up now, because 70% of the surface is water. That could be a big effect. I do want to point out that the carboniferous was unique though - microorganisms had not yet evolved to be able to digest the cellulose of trees. So there was millions and millions of years of trees growing, dying, and sequestering carbon. That doesn't happen anymore.
On the one hand I commend you for wanting to learn about the role of phytoplankton in carbon fixation -- if you don't know about it, what else might you not know? On the other hand I am disheartened that you confuse lignin with cellulose. It is lignin that evolved at the outset of the Carboniferous, and which fungi and co did not yet have the ability to break down.
