Destroying old growth forests is still a bad idea even if you have enough energy to capture all the carbon.

Everytime I hear the word 'carbon capture' I just think of trees. This is literally what trees do, they capture carbon.

Yes, but to get a long term net effect we'd have to bury them about as deep as the fossils we are excavating. I dare claim that this won't happen (it would be far cheaper/more efficient to leave those fossils and synthesize something from those trees up here)

Sometimes I wonder, as a mind experiment, how close we could get to practical carbon burial with a process based on sinking polymer blocks in the ocean: the specifics of the polymer blocks wouldn't matter at all as long as the surface doesn't degrade into spreading microplastics and total density would be high enough to sink, and they could be shaped like standard containers for easy logistics. The result of the mind experiment is always the same, even that could not possibly compete with leaving fossils underground.

Fossil fuels are not the only thing we do that cannot be carbon neutral though, such as construction with cement.

Additionally, carbon capture does not necessarily mean we are burning "fossil" fuels. Carbon capture could be using the Sabatier process to create methane from the CO2 in the air, which you then use to power rocketships/jets/etc, which we are still not very close to electrifying.

We could turn the trees into furniture and surupticiously spread them out in buildings around the world. Hey wait a minute?

So the missing link would be a second page in the manual where the reverse path from furniture back to flatpack is described? A nightmarish challenge, definitely makes me the Ikea manual guy with the questionmark, ready to phone into the help line.

> to get a long term net effect we'd have to bury them about as deep as the fossils we are excavating.

Why? What is wrong with capturing carbon the way trees naturally do? (Honest question)

Trees are part of a closed cycle: eventually they burn or are decomposed biologically (fungi and animals). As far as I know, all the high quality fossil reservoirs we excavate have been accumulated in an exceptional era when the biological defense mechanisms of trees happened to have so much of an upper hand over all potential decompositors that their corpses basically stayed around forever. Imagine a C heap when for a while free() is a noop... (it has been fixed for quite a while now).

The closest thing we have today to those "eternal tree corpses" are peat bogs were decomposition is kind of broken even today (and guess who discovered that dried up peat can burn, even if it's a very dirty fire? Humans. We just love oxydating carbons).

I think they mean 'after the tree has been cut down or otherwise reached the end of its life'.

And then release a large majority of it when they die and are eaten by fungus and bacteria.

https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/recycling-dea...

Thus, growing a tree and burning the wood (or disposing of it) is 100% carbon neutral. What's the problem, then?

The problem is that it's useless for sequestering carbon that's already in air, that we sourced from deep underground.

Yes, the obvious step would be to stop burning fossil carbon, it seems like a much more pressing issue than sequestering the one that is already in the atmosphere.

By now we need to do both, there is already too much carbon in the atmosphere. If you look at the IPCC projections, 1.5°C is only achievable with carbon capture of some sorts [0] (if at all). Research and development for this has to be pushed yesterday.

Though word is in the air that the previous assessments might have been very optimistic.. although that will probably only be discussed in 2022 when the 6th assessment report is to be published. Which presses the issue only further.

[0] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SPM3...

People probably aren't going to be flying around in wood-powered passenger jets any time soon.

I mean sure, but a forest will still capture more carbon than a plain. And it provides many more advantages than just capturing carbon for the diversity of our ecosystem.

Ooh and stop mining Bitcoin

Actually, as part of "Electrify everything", it would probably be good to replace a significant chunk of the banking system with a cryptocurrency layer (maybe bitcoin, maybe not).

With green energy, digital gold is a lot more green than physical gold. Bitcoin is like electric cars – not super green right in this moment when the grid is still dirty, but all it takes to make it greener is to green up the grid.

Meanwhile the classical banking system: uses all forms of transport which green up slower (armored cars, planes, etc), requires crazy amounts of construction (I don't even want to guess how much cement has been used in the construction of physical banks all over the world), all those buildings use energy for AC/lighting/etc, require huge amounts of manpower to manage trust in the system (people definitely aren't green), and also need their own datacenters anyway. And I'm sure I'm forgetting some things, where as with BTC pretty much all consumption is baked into mining, which again just gets greener automatically as the grid gets greener. Nobody is running a Bitcoin mining operation off of diesel generators. If you did the math (impractical given the breadth of the existing banking system), I think you'd find Bitcoin is already far greener than the existing banking system, by a huge margin.

And cryptos like Ethereum have the potential to 10x/100x/1000x that with things like PoS vs. PoW as well as the fact that Ethereum smart contracts can not only replace banking but probably other industries as well, such as title companies and various other middlemen.

> And cryptos like Ethereum have the potential to 10x/100x/1000x that with things like PoS vs. PoW as well as the fact that Ethereum smart contracts can not only replace banking but probably other industries as well, such as title companies and various other middlemen.

It's been 13 years now and nobody's done it, because that's a terrible idea. The reason lawyers exist is that all contracts have ambiguity and require a human to review and consider. All contracts have circumstances that aren't captured. Just ask the DAO folks.

Middlemen exist for a reason. Efficiency, conflict and ambiguity resolution, and so on.

Blockchains are only useful for things that are entirely captured within the blockchain. As soon as you interface the blockchain with the outside world you have to trust something to enter and capture that data accurately - garbage in, garbage out. Once you're trusting someone, you don't need a blockchain, just fire up and RDS instance and save everyone the headache.

For starters, I think you're underestimating how much of what we do in the modern world is entirely digital and therefore can be entirely captured in a blockchain. There are decentralized trustless platforms running on Ethereum right now. You can transact currency on a plethora of decentralized exchanges, without all the layers that doing so with an exchange of USD -> RMB requires today. There are pilot programs built around blockchain that allow people to sell excess energy production (e.g. with home solar) back to other people on the "grid" in an entirely decentralized way.

And with tokens that are tied to real-life things, the benefit is that once you've used real-world trust systems (e.g. real-life contracts / lawyers / courts / etc) to tie something to the blockchain, you can (going forward) hand everything over to the trustless and secure system. i.e. You tie your property to the blockchain once, and from then on you don't need to involve all those inefficient systems, you just transact the tied token directly on the blockchain.

Just because it hasn't been done successfully yet doesn't mean it's not viable. How long did the internet exist before [thing that is taken for granted on the internet now] was successful?

Finally, Ethereum launched in 2015, not sure where you're getting 13 years from.

But how else will people make money than in a global, decentralized pyramid/MLM scheme?

s/make/lose/

But I see your point.

We should make a pyramid/MLM scheme where you're promised rewards for planting trees, segregating waste, cleaning up in any potential wildlife habitats, and reducing/reusing stuff in general.