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Comment by ISL | Hacker News Reader

Most plants have negative carbon-dioxide emissions. The trick is not cutting them down.

The trick is to cut them down at the optimal point (some time before they stop growing) and replant. Then use the wood in a way which won't release the carbon back into the atmosphere: don't burn it or let it rot.

Stopping wood rotting for 20 years is doable. Stopping wood rotting for 1000 years is rather tricky.

If you let the wood rot or burn, you're back to where you started.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar

Chemically speaking making trees inert is relatively simple, if you look at polylactic acid or rayon, there are a lot of polymers you can make out of cellulose that are practically non biodegradable (though humorously they are often labeled as biodegradable since they will degrade in specific conditions e.g. ground very finely and mixed with a large volume of other material in a high-temperature industrial digester).

Sink it all to the bottom of a cold freshwater lake?

The more CO2 is in atmosphere, the sweeter and less mineral-rich plants become, becoming less beneficial to poisonous to surrounding animals and insects.

Do you have a source for "poisonous"?

The studies I've seen indicate that some grain crops may lose a bit of nutrient density (zinc, iron decreasing by 5-14%) while other crops are unaffected or may increase in nutrition.

e.g., overview at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/swelling-co2-cuts...

Cutting down trees and building permanent structures with the wood is a great way to take CO₂ out of the air.

“We had to destroy the village in order to save the village.“

There is some misunderstanding here.

Does it help if I point out that new trees grow up to replace the chopped down ones?

Though I recently defended stick-frame homes in a comment, I've yet to encounter a "permanent [wood] structure".

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