this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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Unless humans get involved and harvest and sequester the tree remains themselves.
Then there still is still a need to expend tons of energy disposing it in a way to not have it re-release in a few hundred thousand years.
The scale is insane to comprehend. We would essentially have to manufacture the equivalent of every pound of coal that’s ever been burned to get to pre-industrial levels, while also consuming as little fossil fuels as possible. I do not think it is possible to do so with trees alone unless we have a lot of cheap green power. Because ultimately some entity, be it government or corporation or philanthropist, will have to pay for it.
And then there is the issue of land rights for where you’re gonna dump all of the captured carbon. That’s a problem either way. I hope we start discovering some new post-space-age reclaimed-carbon-based building materials. That’s probably the best we could hope for. Then there is a huge downstream market for captured carbon which means way less ancient carbon being pulled up into the cycle, and hopefully we can get start regrowing back some old-growth forests and continue to sustainably harvest old wood.
I’m not poo-pooing this technology. It’s super important for us to invest and scale up carbon capture methods. But it can’t be expected to be immediately economically viable. It’s still very immature. Thats not a bad thing. That just means it needs time (and funding) to mature.
Don’t get me wrong — I wasn’t saying it’s a good idea. But absent any fancy technology it’s not entirely impossible to plant fast growing trees, harvest them, and then bury them in a mine or at the bottom of a hypoxic body of water.
It would certainly have to be a global, multi-generational undertaking. But it looks like that’s going to be the case with every other solution as well.