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A comment on Carbon Removal Technologies. Parent comment

Re:Carbon Removal Technologies by lowdest on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @02:44PM (#18286208)
Trees ultimately burn or rot, releasing a large portion of that carbon back into the atmosphere. Cutting them down and burying them to grow more would be ideal, but takes additional work.

Someone want to engineer a tree with enormous, deep roots? Basically make the trees self-burying.

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Re:Carbon Removal Technologies by hinkley on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @03:27PM (#18286606)
Too narrow a view.

The tree already buries almost half of its biomass in the ground for you. And a lot of material goes through the food chain when the tree rots in situ. There's a big difference between regrown forest and converting prairie to forest and a lot of that has to do with quantity and quality of decaying matter on the forest floor. Dead trees are better than no trees.

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Re:Carbon Removal Technologies by ceejayoz on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @02:59PM (#18286353)
> Trees ultimately burn or rot

Not all at once, though, and new trees spring up pretty quick. If you're replacing unforested land with forested land, you're still storing substantial carbon. Cutting down / burning an existing forest to plant trees doesn't work, sure.

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Re:Carbon Removal Technologies by yazaddaruvala on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @08:10PM (#18288597)
https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_green_why_we_should_build_...

This video makes me pretty proud to have graduated from UBC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHtdnY_gnmE

An extra reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DPp2NcnTb0

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Re:Carbon Removal Technologies by Tempest1981 on Wednesday October 24, 2018 @04:05AM (#18290498)
Wood buildings using Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT), which doesn’t significantly burn. Cool!
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Re:Carbon Removal Technologies by soperj on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @03:25PM (#18286587)
We're essentially doing just that when we use the wood for housing and other products and then eventually landfill, then you can plant more trees on that land.
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Re:Carbon Removal Technologies by noselasd on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @05:29PM (#18287670)
It's a buffer as long as there is a forest. Once you establish a forest where there previously was none, you have tied up a certain amount of carbon in all those tree trunk/root/branches.

Sure, the individual trees will eventually die and release a lot, though far from all, carbon back again. But by then, new trees will grow and act as the storage buffer.

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Re:Carbon Removal Technologies by richardw on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @09:14PM (#18288905)
Make more stuff from wood. Replace lots of throwaway plastic goods with wood that lasts. Slow the rate at which it rots. Engineer landfills to retain the carbon.
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Re:Carbon Removal Technologies by hannasanarion on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @05:42PM (#18287779)
Not if they're treated with preservatives and built into houses. Every wood-frame house and piece of wooden furniture is carbon sequestration.
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Re:Carbon Removal Technologies by bskinny129 on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @05:53PM (#18287854)
As long as those houses don't burn down...
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Re:Carbon Removal Technologies by hannasanarion on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @09:28PM (#18288964)
What percentage of houses burn down out of all houses ever built? I think not that many. Most probably stand for a hundred years and then are torn down and their component parts recycled.
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