Opening words

In the past two years, I have found that electric-driven cars have become more and more common on the road. My relatives and friends have replaced petrol vehicles with electric ones. The rapid development of electric cars has brought a tremendous upsurge in the automotive industry. Compared with ordinary gasoline vehicles, the lower travel costs and intelligent interactive systems are the main reasons for people's choices, and the high permeability even exceeds the expectations of statisticians.

The industry's progress has also brought considerable profits to new energy vehicle enterprises. And what amazes me is that these car companies not only make money by selling products, but carbon trading has become a large proportion of their income sources. For instance, the most prominent new energy car enterprise Tesla made $1.4 billion in 2021 by selling carbon credits.

Besides these car companies, with the gradual improvement of carbon exchange and trading rules, many forestry companies have also made their success. They exchange carbon credits by planting forests and selling their carbon in the market.

I began to think, why do countries worldwide join forces to implement such measures?

Background

In recent decades, climate change, characterized by significant global warming, has become a major global issue of universal concern to the international community. It not only causes environmental problems, but also affects national and local security in terms of economy, energy, and even politics.

According to the State of Climate in 2021 from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration were 413.2 parts per million (ppm), which was 149% of the pre-industrial (1750) level. The increase will continue in 2022.

To show the level of global carbon emissions more intuitively, I downloaded the data table of global greenhouse gas(GHG) emissions in 2018 on World Resources Institue and used ArcGIS to visualize the data on a map.

It can be seen from the above pic that the emission of GHG is not optimistic. Suppose the total amount of carbon on earth remains unchanged. In that case, carbon sequestration is becoming more and more critical as an essential technology to recover carbon under the condition that GHG emissions cannot be rapidly reduced.

Carbon sequestration

Wiki defines carbon sequestration as the process involved in carbon capture and the long-term storage of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

In recent years, interest has increased in carbon sequestration to find ways to mitigate climate change. By capturing carbon dioxide and storing carbon within soils and forest biomass (trunks, branches, foliage, and roots), forests play a vital role in mitigating climate change.

The worldwide forests have absorbed as much as 30% of annual global anthropogenic CO2 emissions­—about the same amount as the oceans in the past few decades.

Furthermore, carbon stored in forests constitutes approximately 68 per cent of US terrestrial carbon stocks. The strong mitigation potential of forest ecosystems makes carbon management a key component of proposed future natural climate solutions.

Under the phenomenon of the rapid development of electric vehicles around the world, it is one of the most critical environmental problems faced by human society. Afforestation is not the only technology in carbon sequestration. The invention of new materials and industrial processes is gaining more and more attention.

Thank you for reading. I'm glad that I've finished my first blog. Hope to write more funny content in the future.