"Humanity has only so much time to limit global warming and minimize the severity of future climate disasters. And with mostly tepid attempts to slash greenhouse gas emissions, researchers are scrambling for realistic ways to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. Flashy, high-tech proposals that promise to vacuum pollutants out of the sky, or to scrub them from smokestacks before they hit the atmosphere, have attracted attention and investment—but are falling far short of expectations. Now a growing number of scientists and entrepreneurs are trying a vastly simpler approach: collecting truckloads of logs, branches, wood chips and sawdust—and burying them.
Wood burial, also called wood vaulting or biomass burial, could potentially store more than 12 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year and decrease global warming by more than a third of a degree Celsius (more than half a degree Fahrenheit), according to a recent study in Nature Geoscience. This difference sounds small, but preventing a few tenths of a degree of warming could keep polar ice caps from completely disintegrating, coral reefs from collapsing and other tipping points from triggering.
“If we want to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,” says the study’s lead author Yiqi Luo, a Cornell University ecosystem ecologist, “we basically need to create new reservoirs in land, ocean or geological structures.”
How Wood Vaulting Works
The concept is straightforward: instead of constructing massive machines to collect atmospheric carbon dioxide and inject it miles into the Earth’s crust, wood vaulters simply divert materials from Earth’s fast-paced biological carbon cycle into the much-slower geological carbon cycle.
“Every year, terrestrial plants alone capture six times as much carbon as our fossil fuel emissions,” says Ning Zeng, a University of Maryland climate scientist, who has been a leader in the field of biomass burial for two decades and was not involved in the new research. “But pretty much all of that goes back into the atmosphere as leaves fall and trees die and decay.” If carbon dioxide is buried under just a few yards of dirt—where bacteria no longer have the oxygen they need to break down woody tissues—however, none or very little of it is released. If even a small fraction of woody debris that decays aboveground each year was treated this way, it would be easier to achieve the 10 billion tons per year of carbon that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the United Nations body that is responsible for informing global climate policies) agrees must be achieved by 2050 in order to keep the planet’s temperature rise to less than two degrees C (3.6 degrees F).
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wood-vaulting-could-help-slow-cli...Cut down the trees with fossil fuelled harvesters, transport any "waste" with fossil fuelled trucks, bury them deep, with fossil fuelled excavators. We're saved.
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