MIT engineers make converting CO2 into useful products more practical

My wife actually has established a cheap, energy-efficient facility for converting CO2 into useful materials right in our yard.

She planted a garden.

I was thinking about that the other day, how our beautiful trees, flowers, and bushes draw a few minerals from the soil, but are really mainly knitted together from the components of water and CO2.

Yes, yes, I know, planting more trees won't do much about the greenhouse gas problem at scale, but the only thing that will are the three P's: powerdown, permaculture, population control. I do not expect industry to solve the problem industry created in a way that doesn't create more problems.

> Yes, yes, I know, planting more trees won't do much about the greenhouse gas problem at scale, but the only thing that will are the three P's: powerdown, permaculture, population control. I do not expect industry to solve the problem industry created in a way that doesn't create more problems.

But I am always wondering: Couldn't we have planted forests, from which we take the grown trees and put them back down under the earth, in some old mining facilities or dig some tunnels that lead deep down and put that stuff there? Or perhaps build lots of long term use furniture from the trees? Anything, except burning them or letting them rod? Then we would use nature's mechanism for capturing and prevent releasing, by putting it deep down, or making meaningful long term use of it.

And couldn't this be done on a bigger scale as well?

> I do not expect industry to solve the problem industry created in a way that doesn't create more problems.

but it's not one "industry" that has to change their mind, this'd create a whole new secondary industry that is able to profit from negative externalities made by the former.

capitalism got us into this mess, but it's also the only thing powerful enough to get us out.

if we can get tech that allows us to make an economic case for reducing atmospheric CO2, it would be far more robust than relying on government regulation and/or unpopular moral appeals that ask people to sacrifice.

> Couldn't we have planted forests, from which we take the grown trees and put them back down under the earth, in some old mining facilities or dig some tunnels that lead deep down and put that stuff there?

This is basically how coal was created in the first place.

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

Assuming carbon in = carbon out, we'd have to plant trees for millions of years on virtually all arable land and bury them underground to undo our burning of coal, since that's how the coal (which is almost pure carbon) was originally created.

The problem is we're putting millions of tons of carbon into the air every year and it takes a while for a freshly planted tree to reach a ton of carbon stored. So you would need to plant millions of trees per year and take care of them for years before you can chop them down and bury them.

Yes, you could grow and bury trees to reverse the carbon cycle. Even just leaving the trees standing is a pretty good carbon sink.

Housing is also a great carbon sink as the wood used in construction is protected from rotting.

Just switch to EVs for transportation and it will be hard for the oil industry to keep going. Many wells will be closed despite being potentially productive just because there isn't enough demand to keep them maintained. Prices are likely to go up for plastics if there isn't much demand for oil as fuel just to keep all the oil stuff maintained - much of which is too big for their needs so the industry faces shutting down working refineries and building new smaller ones or operating the current ones at low capacity. And of course the plastics industry is also interested in going green, so if this isn't too much more expensive than oil based plastic they will switch anyway.

The question is how cheap can we do this process and how fast can we get transportation off of oil.

So I guess it is simply too slow, or alternatively, we would all be busy in that business and not do anything else any longer?

A garden actually isn't that great, it has limited CO2 storage capacity once it's in balance.

Productive land, specially timber, is a good way of capturing CO2, because it will end up stored in products.

We tend to naively think we should reforest land and leave it there, and it can be good for other reasons, but is a poor strategy for carbon capture. We need to _aggressively_ go back to using timber and vegetable fibers as construction material, instead of concrete and steel that have an enormous carbon footprint.

As someone New Orleans-adjacent, I totally support this and think timber use would be even better if we perfected techniques for strengthening wood through high pressure at construction scale.

I for one would love to see wooden skyscrapers with the aesthetic of the movie Her that are as strong as their concrete-and-steel equivalents.

Simpler: nobody will pay you to buy land, grow trees, and bury them. You will get paid for farming, logging, mining, drilling, and much more.

Check this out

https://www.archdaily.com/1006779/timber-skyscrapers-a-low-c...