The world generates ~40 billion tons of CO2 a year, meanwhile the total mass of everything transported in the entire world is only around ~12b tons.
Maybe something like building solar arrays in semi-arid regions and mixing up the resulting solid carbon into the local soil for some ecological engineering or filling up old mining pits.
It's certainly going to be cheaper, in most cases, to avoid emissions in the first place. But there will also be cases, like long-haul jets, where it may be cheaper to remove the CO2 later. Plus the CO2 is already above a safe level, so we'll have to draw it down somehow anyway.
Not sure if that answered your question or if you meant something else.
I think that was the idea. He's viewing it as a mass transfer problem. You "harvest" CO2 with trees, then put it back in the ground.
I think the hard part is not hurting ecosystems in the process, but at this point honestly this might still be the best solution we have available.
Which government? Is that some hypothesised World Government?
The UK Government runs a lot of the forestry in this country. It is run as a commercial timber operation. The Brazilian and Indonesian governments appear to be committed to commercial exploitation of enormous amounts of old-growth rainforest timber. The Polish and Hungarian governments are also committed to logging old-growth.
There's no time left for this kind of dreaming.
I meant the US government. But you can insert lots of other governments in there, including the UK like you mentioned.
> There's no time left for this kind of dreaming.
Nobody's dreaming. I'm just talking about the feasibility, not claiming anything about the likelihood.
Do you have links to more reading on that? This is the first time I've heard of this particular reason why it might not work.
Conclusion: all that old wood is either buried, or it's busy turning into CO2.
So I'm not impressed by claims of "carbon offsetting". On the contrary, I take such claims as evidence that the organisation in question is part of the problem.
Incidentally, how are you supposed to recycle chipboard? Like, for example a chipboard kitchen counter? For several decades, I had in my home a pair of oak side tables, that were made by my grandfather from the remains of a large oak dining table. You can't do that nowadays with chipboard.
But regardless, I also don't get where you see a discussion of "carbon offsetting". This isn't about "offsetting" emissions or impressing you, this is about repaying "debt" that's already incurred. Pulling down old carbon is something we have to do regardless of what we do with our current emissions, even if we drive them to 0, because the current carbon in the atmosphere is already too much. Whether we do it with trees or machines or something else, it needs to happen.
I mean think about it, we can't be emitting more waste than we are transporting, because that waste comes from fuel, and the fuel itself is part of what we're transporting.