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Comment by blincoln | Hacker News Reader

> The act of planting trees, in itself, is carbon neutral. Not good, not bad, just irrelevant to the presence of carbon: the carbon is still in the cycle of life within the biosphere.

Isn't this a little like saying that humans in a confined space don't actually use up any of the oxygen, because it's still technically present in the CO2 they exhale?

> For example, by cutting trees and burying their wood in sealed mines several kilometers underground.

What would be the net benefit of treating it like radioactive waste versus using it as a construction material? Yes, a small percentage of the carbon would escape, but most of it would stay locked up in the wood, and one wouldn't create the massive amounts of CO2 necessary to build and operate those hypothetical mines.

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> What would be the net benefit of treating it like radioactive waste versus using it as a construction material?

Man, that was just a silly example to illustrate the absurdity of the situation. We are currently unearthing millions of years worth of sequestered carbon per year and dumping it all into the atmosphere. Talking about planting trees is ridiculous at this point. Like pumping water out of the sinking titanic with a champagne glass. If we don't want to increase the amount of carbon in the atmosphere we just need to stop putting it in!

Generally I agree but Sequoiadendron wood is famously unsuitable for construction. It’s brittle and shatters easily.

Not the same as Sequoia wood, which is famously wonderful for construction!

You seem to be assuming that the carbon will stay locked in the construction materials. But I doubt that it will, what will happen to it after the building is destroyed ? Either it will have been by fire, or as waste, will likely be back in the atmosphere after wood-eating life is done with it.

I wonder how feasible it would be to put wood (from particularly dense species ?) on the bottom of the expanding anoxic ocean zones ? That seems to be one of the rare locations where the only thing that could possibly degrade it are sulphur-"breathing" bacteria, which seem to have trouble digesting lignin ?

But even here, it might still be easier to just stop burning fossil fuels ? EDIT : ninjaed

P.S.: For an opposite example, see how concrete reabsorbs over decades back up to half of the CO2 exhaled during its production.

P.P.S.: Supposedly, soil-buried charcoal is also decently stable, I guess even fungi find it unpalatable ??

The thing is humans build more and more. Any destruction or burning is replaced with more building. So in that sense construction with wood has aligned incentives and is more economical than just burying carbon with is purely a cost. But construction seems unlikely to be sufficient alone. Tho most of the world prefers concrete which is also releases carbon iirc so them switching to wood may help.

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