Are you suggesting we cut down trees and bury them to save the planet? For me, this idea marks the departure from reason and into crazytown.

When our civilisation is excavated in 500 years, they are going to say we were as crazy as all of the others.

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adrianN 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I suggest it’s easier to leave to carbon in the ground in the first place. Carbon capture promises are unrealistic. But if you want to go with charcoal it’s probably best to get wood from coppicing.

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harimau777 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable. As I understand it, the lumber industry has optimized the ability to grow massive amounts of fast growing pine as quickly as possible. So this isn't suggesting that we start clearcutting forests, it's suggesting that we start growing massive amounts of lumber with the explicit purpose of converting it to charcoal and burrying it.

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dathinab 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

it actually is a bad idea if you look into the details

trees aren't just carbon, they are bio mass/nutrition

and if you constantly remove bio mass you sooner or later run into issues

(Which we already do in some places, e.g. when over using fields (see US dust storms), or with some managed Forrest getting increasingly more unstable not just because of warmed climate but also because of removing dead treas leading to an interruption of the natural nutrient recycling (and insect habitats) leading to Nutrition deficiency in the long run.)

but we do have working carbon removal technologies, they are just not cheap

hence why you want companies to pay for them, it gives them a huge reason to reduce emissions instead

	▲	mrguyorama 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The point of turning the trees into Charcoal is to return all the non-carbon elements to the environment and remove any metabolic activity from releasing that carbon. The USA currently produces about 70 million tons of paper per year, which is about half carbon by weight. We produce about 2 gigatons of lumber per year, which is again about half carbon, all absorbed from the atmosphere. Unfortunately, we produce like 40 gigatons of CO2 per year. So we would have to scale lumber work dramatically. It's also not a clean industry itself, reliant on heavy machinery running on gasoline or diesel, and turning that wood into charcoal would require massive refineries. IMO more effective bets are figuring out how to artificially induce massive blooms of algae and plankton in parts of the ocean to essentially recreate the conditions that lead to the hydrocarbon deposits in the first place. There's some work on this right now, but like any massive engineering and ecological tampering, there will be tradeoffs and downsides. I also don't know how you prevent the dead plant matter from decomposing and releasing the carbon.

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nDRDY 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It is such an unreasonable idea! Ignoring the loss of biomass (and the fact that there would be no way to implement this scheme without providing a very unwelcome financial incentive to cut down trees wherever they are found), you'd use as much CO2 in the machinery required to cut the trees down and dig a big hole! Unless you're suggesting we do it all by hand? In which case, the picture of a crazed, doomsday cult is complete. I suppose at least it involves less murder than the Aztecs and their sacrifices.

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blitzar 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

my read was ... we should cut down trees, burn them and bury the ashes to save the planet

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nDRDY 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It's too controversial now, but one day we will recognise the current narrow-minded obsession with CO2 as the Western civilisation-wide doomsday cult that it is.

	▲	BizarroLand 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I think this is literally the most head in own ass stupid thing I've ever read on the internet.

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dathinab 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

the only crazy thing here is your comment

completely ignoring all existing technologies related to that topic to spout obvious nonsense about "cutting down trees and burying them" (which would bind active bio mass which isn't a grate idea, also that won't produce oil anyway not that this is relevant for the discussion)

various ways to reduce the carbon in the air do exist (and without trees)

and the carbon can be both recycled for other usage and literally placed in the earth, too

it is not rally a solution for climate change as it's very expensive to do. But this also makes it a good idea to "make companies pay for it" (at least if their carbon-equivalent output goes above a certain threshold). Because if they have the choice between very expensive carbon removal or reducing carbon output for a much cheaper price they will do the later; But in emergency/outlier situations they still can do the former, just at a very high price.).