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Comment by beachy | Hacker News Reader

Timber buildings, furniture are possible targets for medium term sequestration of co2 via timber.

More offbeat approaches might include modern giant pyramids built of timber, perhaps in the Australian outback. As long as they could be secured from fire and decay.

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It would catch fire in the Australian outback. Dry, hot, windy thunderstorms would see to that! We have tonnes of natural wildfires, and some are still started by aboriginal tribes as part of their nomadic way of life and spiritual beliefs. It wouldn't last.

Just throw it into the empty mining pits instead.

Dump them in the poles then.

In June and July wildfires have been tearing through the arctic destroying insane amounts of forest. Go stack it on the poles and as the temps continue to warm it'll just do the same eventually.

And cross-laminated timber could let us use wood even for bigger construction projects like skyscrapers and bridges.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-laminated_timber

wooden skyscrapers seem like good candidates for devastating fires

I'm no expert, but from what I heard CLT can achieve fire resistance similar to concrete. (Measured in minutes it can withstand a particular heat.)

These sources are far from unbiased, but nevertheless:

http://www.greenspec.co.uk/building-design/crosslam-timber-f...

https://www.woodworks.org/wp-content/uploads/presentation_sl...

Maybe it's easier to let them rot in place like it worked in the rainforests for millions of years?

Look up terra preta, regular wood would just decompose and release the carbon back. You have to make charcoal out of it to be able to sequester carbon in the longer term (thousands of years)

Rotting releases their co2.

All good when things are in balance - but they're not.

To sequester the c02, you need to prevent rot.

If you cut down the trees and sequester the carbon elsewhere, you can sequester more, but just establishing new forests all over would still increase the amount of carbon cycling in those local ecosystems, and get it out of the atmosphere. Both is probably best.

I don't have any figures, but on the assumption that few processes are 100% efficient I'd guess you wouldn't get complete decomposition before the fallen tree is buried. You'd probably get a reasonable, if inefficient, removal of carbon from the atmosphere. Probably better than nothing if you couldn't figure out a way of using the wood more effectively.

Hm, as far as I remember that was the way CO2 was turned into fossil fuel, depositing layers over layers of vegetation...

I believe that accumulation happened before microorganisms had evolved to digest cellulose (?). If we can ever produce a surplus of electricity, we would ideally sequester carbon in a place other than the bottom of the ocean, creating a giant Earth-battery. Although it would be ironic if "carbon sequestration" meant heaping plastic in landfills.

Probably a really bad idea but what about chemical treatment to prevent rot.

That would negate the advantage of not requiring extra effort/energy. And decomposition of organic material is required for the rainforest ecosystem to work.

And I'd go with radiation or heating for sterilization.

or you know, maybe just using the new "easy" tech of lignin removel through oxidation. But you're right, we can't excessively clean the forest of organic "waste".

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