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Comment by oliwary | Hacker News Reader

What about building houses and furniture with the wood?

That is typically only sequestering the carbon for 20-50 years. In the end, the house is torn down, or the furniture burned. Very little lasts for more then a century, and basically nothing lasts for more than a millennia.

Deep underground sequestration is the only viable strategy if your goal is total CO2 reduction in the atmosphere.

What if you develop an animal that eats the plants, and then when they die they are buried, such that after the decomposition process all that's left is a fossil? I don't see how that could go wrong unless someone digs up the fossils later on for use as a fuel, but that seems like such a ridiculous an unlikely scenario ha ha ha!

Or the animals turn out to be delicious and people start coking them.

One of the things I really like about regenerative agriculture (there are so many things to like) is that it makes eating meat cool again.

When the animal eats the carbon (as a food source), it combines the carbon with oxygen and exhales...

> Deep underground sequestration is the only viable strategy if your goal is total CO2 reduction in the atmosphere.

That is untrue. So untrue it seems like a deliberate lie.

The only solution is to stop pumping CO2 in into the atmosphere.

There are mitigations. Building huge machines to sequester relatively small amounts of carbon in underground chambers is probably a mitigation. It seems to me that there are better ways and these sorts of ideas are not worth the opportunity cost.

Even if we stopped burning fossil fuels 100%, we still have too much carbon in the atmosphere no?

Yes but not too much that we can't just wait it out. It's not like the planet is a hot fireball right now. If you wanted to make the planet more hospitable to humans, you would most likely attempt to stop desertification and deforestation rather than attempt CO2 capture. Increased water retention will help with droughts more than a 1°C reduction in global temperatures.

Of course, we are going to see far more than a 1°C increase which is why it is worth doing.

It's not a terrible solution, but you need specific trees of specific thicknesses for it to be possible at all (and these aren't always the same trees best suited for rapid growth). Selecting the most carbon-intensive plants and then turning them into biochar is probably better for long-term sequestration.

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