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by antisthenes 2462 days ago
> Which seems to rest on the absolutist premise that we will never know an economically feasible way to go negative carbon. Otherwise, buying time should absolutely be a reasonable thing to consider.

Well, that absolutist premise happens to be correct. There's no such thing as negative carbon. The carbon is never destroyed. Plants don't destroy carbon either, they just store it.

What we need is to find a way to be able to store long term X amount of carbon using X-Y carbon's worth of energy output, netting us Y carbon-free energy output to use for productive activities. So far the best/cheapest method here still seems to be planting trees and burying bio-char, almost entirely replicating the process that occurred millions of years ago before bacteria could break down lignin.

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Second version would be trying to bacterially attack said trees after burial to speed up the process, making buried bogs.

Trees are slow, maybe there's something a bit more efficient.