Re carbon capture -- we can cut trees and dump them in "carbon storage" places like the bottom of some water bodies where due to lack of oxygen no rotting happens, like peats and e.g. Black Sea.

And grow new trees in their place of course.

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tasty_freeze 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Considering the scale that we are burning oil and gas, our sequestration efforts would have to be comparable. Continuing to burn oil and gas and trying to recapture it is madness, like realizing you are driving way too fast and instead of taking your foot off the gas, you keep flooring it but start applying the brakes.

If we could actually grow trees to capture carbon equivalent to 250M+ barrel of oil per day, it would be better to just grow trees and burn them for energy.

	▲	chinathrow 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If we just could stop burning that oil, that would be great.

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adrianN 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s difficult to scale this to the levels we would need to make a difference.

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deepsun 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, agree. But I'm not sure direct air capture is more scalable than trees. Yes trees need to be moved, but at least they grow by themselves.

	▲	adrianN 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		IMO DAC promises are either wishful thinking or a deliberate attempt to sabotage more aggressive climate policies.

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zdragnar 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Depending on the tree, freshly cut wood can have anywhere from 1:3 to 2:1 ratio of water to actual wood fiber.

So, unless we want to remove a massive amount of fresh water from the ecosystem, we also need to invest energy in drying out the wood well below natural humidity levels (transport to a desert maybe?) on top of electrifying what is currently a diesel and gas heavy industry (cutting and transporting logs with heavy machinery).

There's definitely lower hanging fruit for getting C02 out of the cycle.

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adrianN an hour ago | parent | next [-]

You can make charcoal, you even get a little bit of energy out of it or can use the wood gas as chemical feedstock. It’s still completely impractical to scale to the gigatons we’d need to sequester.

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MarkusQ 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Dumping wet wood--even very, very wet wood in a lake and sinking it to the bottom does not "remove a massive amount of fresh water from the ecosystem". It does not remove any fresh water from the ecosystem.

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zdragnar 15 hours ago | parent [-]

Sinking wood into a lake won't remove the carbon unless you have a very deep lake, and you'd need many, many of them to have any impact on the CO2 levels whatsoever. The scale of wood that would need to be harvested is far beyond dropping some logs in a lake.

They need to go into a deep enough pit where the methane produced from anerobic breakdown won't reach the atmosphere.

The conditions that created the lignite coal and peat simply aren't that easily reproducible, especially with large volume of wood (rather than ferns over thousands and millions of years).

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MarkusQ 13 hours ago | parent [-]

So sink them in the ocean. Or better, burn off the hydrogen and use the energy to dry the wood, leaving the bulk of the carbon, and then mix that in with the soil.

Recreating the lignite era process could be as easy as genetically engineering an alternative,presently indigestable version of lignin.

But my point is that the claim above that sequestering wet wood will somehow take meaningful quantities of water (fresh or otherwise) out of the ecosystem is just plain silly.

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zdragnar 13 hours ago | parent [-]

> Recreating the lignite era process could be as easy as genetically engineering an alternative,presently indigestable version of lignin.

Ah yes, so easy. Why on earth have we been treating wood with chemicals to prevent rot in our structures when we could have just engineered them to not rot all along?

	▲	MarkusQ 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"Easy" is relative. If the comparison is completely abandoning fossil fuels, launching continent sized parasols into space, running a significant fraction of the atmosphere through a magic filter, etc. the bar is quite different than your moved-goalposts of "compared to spraying something on some fraction of our lumber".

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lazide 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The more likely candidate is mineral based, because yes trees are hard to scale this way.