[bamboozled]

Burning wood and plant matter in a non destructive way is carbon neutral as that carbon will grow back as trees. It’s part of a natural cycle, like a carbon bank.

The problem is that we’ve been pulling up buried and fossilised trees and burning them, which introduces excessive amounts of CO2 and ruins the natural balance of the carbon bank.

[joe_the_user]

Yes, burning wood is carbon neutral in the long run but clearly emits carbon now (and the earth gets hotter now).

It would be nice to think about maybe collecting undergrowth and turning it to charcoal in something like a kiln and then burying it - reverse coal mining. Of course, we'd want to stop regular coal mining first.

[rmrm]

Plants leave roots in the ground and carbon in soil. No till farming practices of grains and corns sequester massive amounts of carbon into the soil. We dont need to do anything special just quit doing things wrong.

[adrianN]

I think you underestimate the amount of carbon we dug out of the soil if you believe that no-till farming will sequester even a fraction of that back in reasonable time frames.

[rajamaka]

The logistics required to do this will eventuate in much more CO2 being emitted than just burning the undergrowth.