I can't wait until they makes these no cost, low-maintenance, and self-replacing. Oh man, just think of how easy it would be to fix our climate issues!
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
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Trees do not permenantly sequester carbon, they act as a reservoir. If we cover the entire land area of the earth in amazon rainforest, it'll sequester like 150 years worth of our carbon emissions. After that, there would be no more land left to plant trees on, and we would be back to where we are now. The only solution is to simultaneously stop bringing carbon from outside the carbon cycle into the carbon cycle, and also remove the carbon that we've already brought in.
You could fell them and pile them up, then replant. We need to stop bringing more in sure, but we also need to sequester what was already brought. But it took 100 years to get here, so surely it will take longer to get back.
Wood rots and wood burns. Felling the trees and piling them up does not remove the carbon from the carbon cycle, at best it's kicking the can down the road
But if you kick the can down the road such that the original field where the trees were grown can grow more trees, the your carbon sink can remove atmospheric carbon on net at a rate faster than it releases carbon back into the atmosphere.
Forests cannot grow faster than trees decay forever. We gotta turn the carbon back into rocks at some point, and we gotta get working on that tech sooner rather than later
Maybe not forever as in the heat death of the universe, but I don't see why timber can't be a carbon sink for timelines longer than humanity.
There are structures made of wood that have been standing for over 1000 years. There are lots of structures made of wood that have been standing for over 500 years.
Hominid-harvested wood still exists in archaeological sites dating back from before homo sapiens emerged as a species
And coal is basically timber and other plant matter that has been sequestered underground and subjected to pressure, heat, and time.
Plants can provide a carbon sink that lasts long enough to remove atmospheric carbon indefinitely, especially with modern engineering (making carbon-rich soil with charcoal dust, manufacturing cross laminated timber as a building material that should last centuries, if not millennia, etc.).