This may sound stupid, but has there been a study...

[slor]

that shows which plants are most efficient at pulling CO2 from the air. Or any other pollutants for that matter? Also is cannabis good at this? TIA

[NJCher]

1. can't cite a specific study but

I know evergreens are very good for this. As far as indoor air goes, spider plant.


Cher

[Yogi]

2. I went to the Dr. on Monday

and they had that health news channel ( from CNN) on. They had a question something like... How many indoor plants dose it take to clean the air in a house. Well, the answer as I remember was one plant dose about 1000 sq ft. They gave a list of plants that were best but the only I remember was the peace lily. Hope this was of some help.:)

[slor]

3. It was helpful and thanks...

but somehow my question appears to have created the impression of concern for the indoor air of my house. I want to start planting the plants that will help the air outdoors.

[slor]

4. LOL I just realized this is...

wrong forum.

[On the Road]

5. I Was Wondering About That

:)

[German-Lefty]

6. CO2 is kind of a zero sum game

If you burn down a forest you'll create C02, but if you grow it back you'll suck the C02 out of the atmosphere. If you do this 1000 times it still won't change C02 levels. My point is just that you can't grow some crop to capture the carbon, unless you figure out some way to store the biomass in a way that it doesn't burn or worse decompose (CH4 is something like 30 times worse at trapping heat in the atmosphere).

If we stopped burning fossil fuels and powered everything of biomass, CO2 levels would stop getting worse, but they wouldn't get better in a hurry either. There are other ways that nature can get rid of C02 by locking it into CaCO3 like in coral reefs, but I'm guessing that takes a long time to have an effect.

[MrSandman]

7. IIRC, Plankton levels increase...

resulting in Chalk/Limestone Deposits.

Anything humans can plant will likely, as already noted, be a zero sum unless you can "store" the fixed carbon in a fossil fuel.

Burning fossil fuels releases, what, must be a million years worth or more of fixed carbon in less than 150 years.

[German-Lefty]

8. Capturing Carbon

So do you have idea how quickly Plankton could bring CO2 levels down?

I've had these strange visions of people growing tons of barnacles or oysters and dumping them into the deepest parts of the sea.

I've heard of crystal CH4 on the bottoms of oceans, where temperatures are low and pressure is extreme. Could we maybe sink some "carbon crop" down the to bottom of the ocean knowing that the CH4 would stay down there? I'm guessing any C02 would still come up.

There's probably a better way to do this, like taking a plant oil and pumping it into the ground.

[cosmicaug]

9. Fertilizing the antarctic.

German-Lefty wrote:

So do you have idea how quickly Plankton could bring CO2 levels down?

I've had these strange visions of people growing tons of barnacles or oysters and dumping them into the deepest parts of the sea.

There have been some proposals to fertilize the anctarctic for this purpose. However, I don't remember what the limiting nutrient is supposed to be there (P?).

[seasat]

11. Yep, they tried fertilizing with iron.

Iron is a limiting trace metal for some algae and nitrogen fixing cyanobacteria. The problem is this produced a bloom that didn't really state agregated and didn't have a lot of bang for the buck. Search for the Ironex experiment off the Galapogos. The other problem is the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere can depress phytoplankton growth through decreases in oceanic pH due to more CO2 dissolved in the ocean and shifts in oceanic circulation due to climate change.

[Robert Oak]

10. fairly off topics but here is the book reference

"How to Grow Fresh Air" , Wolverton

http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-0140262431-0

Please buy from Powells, they do not outsource, unlike Amazon.