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Carbon dioxide, one of the main greenhouse gases, is demonized for being a suspected contributor to climate change.
But the odorless, invisible gas is a natural part of the Earth’s ecosystem, said Lee Spangler, director of the Big Sky Carbon Sequestration Partnership in Bozeman.
Your breath contains CO2.
“If you eat food, that’s a hydrocarbon,” Spangler said. “In order to get the energy out, you oxidize it and exhale CO2.”
Some of the CO2 goes into the atmosphere. Some is dissolved into water.
Vegetation turns CO2 back into hydrocarbon by breathing it in and using it along with solar energy to produce more plant. “They grow,” Spangler said.
The problem is that the carbon cycle is out of whack, Spangler said.
“There’s been changes in land-use practices, and some of those have resulted in more CO2 being released into the atmosphere,” he said.
For example, cutting down of old-growth forest and converting lands for farming has increased the amount of CO2 released in to the atmosphere.
Globally, about 30 percent of all the man-caused CO2 in the atmosphere is from land-use changes, not the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal, Spangler said.
Besides geological sequestration of CO2 in the ground, a big part of the research of the Big Sky Sequestration Partnership involves studying “no-till” farming practices that improve the storage of carbon in the soil.
Based on current land use practices, the six-state region could potentially sequester 7.4 million tons of CO2 a year in agricultural lands, the partnership says.
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