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You know what's a long term carbon sequester?
Logging trees, making products out of those trees, then throwing those products in landfills. Works particularly well with paper products, as paper can be made from especially young and low quality trees.
Logging trees, making products out of those trees, then throwing those products in landfills. Works particularly well with paper products, as paper can be made from especially young and low quality trees.
Appears that the numbers of trees cut every year is high enough to make a dent in the problem too: very roughly 10 billion trees cut per year, in comparison to the roughly 40 billion tons of CO2.
Need more research but sounds like those are within one or two orders of magnitude.
Need more research but sounds like those are within one or two orders of magnitude.
Like it or not, we got ourselves into the climate change mess with technology, and it's probably going to take even more ugly dirty technology to get out of it.
Landfilling paper *is* geo-engineering, just particularly slow geo-engineering. Same as burning coal.
Landfilling paper *is* geo-engineering, just particularly slow geo-engineering. Same as burning coal.
Most challenging part would probably be figuring out optimal landfill conditions: landfills produce methane, which is a major short term GHG, but also useful and easily dealt with.
So may want to optimize short term methane production for fuel, while minimizing long-term.
So may want to optimize short term methane production for fuel, while minimizing long-term.
Basically, produce all the methane as fast as possible, early in the life of the landfill, so people are around to do something useful with it and prevent its release.
Long term: as close to an inert, stable, pile of coal as possible.
Long term: as close to an inert, stable, pile of coal as possible.
Another advantage of landfilling carbon: we might need it.
It's almost certainly not possible to re-bootstrap civilization again the way it was bootstrapped the first time around, as all the easy coal/etc. reserves are gone. Landfills full of fuel could prove useful.
It's almost certainly not possible to re-bootstrap civilization again the way it was bootstrapped the first time around, as all the easy coal/etc. reserves are gone. Landfills full of fuel could prove useful.
Fun fact: current best estimate on the number of trees in the world is about 3 trillion.
scientificamerican.com/article/how-ma…
scientificamerican.com/article/how-ma…
