All plants are carbon neutral. What we need to do is to stop adding new fossil carbon into the biosphere.
But a new forest will be a large carbon sink if allowed to remain.
Individual trees are also great carbon sinks, as long as the resulting wood is not consumed.
I wonder about just growing trees/bamboo and storing the logs on big piles as a carbon sink.
Or what if we GMO some algae that grabs carbon through photosynthesis, and then sinks to the ocean floor?
Log houses have been a thing for a LONG time in many parts of the world, and other types of wooden building exists as well. It seems like environmentalists have totally forgotten this obvious and superior form of carbon sink.
Here in Finland we're building even large blocks of flats from wooden materials these days. Yet the EU keeps telling us not to utilize our forests as much as we do now...
Run it through a translator if you don't read Swedish.
Harvesting, milling, kiln drying, and transport all seem to me like quite energy intensive operations.
Not that I've done any math, so I could be wildly wrong.
If this were to become a global trend, I think it could really absorb a lot of carbon while also reducing concrete emissions. Admittedly logistics could increase the costs for many parts of the world that lack forests with suitable wood.
This can be managed as long as the demand curve moves in predictable ways.
Now the question is how to utilise used wood without releasing carbon. May be just drown it to deep water?
So it seems you could weigh wood with some rocks and sink it there as a permanent enough solution.
Biochar is pretty similar to what you're describing.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/amazo....
We would have to essentially recreate the Azolla event (a geological process that took place for 800,000 years) to undo the carbon we are putting into the atmosphere:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event
The only way to stop climate change is to stop digging coal and oil out of the ground and burning it.
If you plant a new forest it would take some carbon out of the atmosphere because old dying trees would be replaced by new tree. Sure eventually the carbon inputs and outputs would be equal, but the built up forest would hold some carbon.
Sure, if you bury wood in deep mines and seal them, you are removing carbon from the biosphere. But for that, it doesn't really matter if it was wood that you grew or an already existing forest. The mere act of planting is neutral, it's the burying that is important.
By that, you notice that it would be fairly idiotic to keep unearthing old carbon and burying new carbon at the same time. Thus, it is absolutely essential to stop unearthing million-year-old carbon and putting it in circulation.
For this reason, living in the heavily forested countries on the equator is much more tolerable than living in the interior of the Arabian peninsula.
I'm very skeptical that as we keep mining new carbon from the deeps every year, we con manage to put all this carbon into the biosphere, and none into the atmosphere.
Of course, reforesting Sahara is a tall order. Even Israelis, who are arguably very good in reforesting semiarid regions, only have limited experience in this regard.