[FooHentai]

After much fanfare near the beginning of the article about tackling climate change, part way into this it mentions the trees reaching maturity and indirectly that they can then be successfully logged. Which means such plantings are little more than a note in the margin as far as tackling climate change is concerned. If you're not securing the continued sequestration of that carbon either as standing trees or burying it then it ends up back in the atmosphere again and the net benefit is zero.

Frustratingly this seems to be a common flaw in lots of talk about reforesting. The NZ billion trees initiative is similar, once you get into the details it turns out to be little more than a continuation and scaling up of commercial forestry.

[smileysteve]

Though, logging itself isn't releasing all of that carbon (though it's likely worse because of diesel, water and energy in milling) - the wood doesn't all go up in smoke the day it comes down, it often goes into construction that has a meaningful life of 50 more years.

[sp332]

Burying it and letting it rot would release the carbon. Logging it and turning it into lumber delays that process a lot longer.

[FooHentai]

There's research into this. Release to atmosphere from buried logs is minimal if done with that aim in mind: https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0...

It's not onerous either, a hectare of trees can be sequestered in a 25m2 pit.

Alternatively you can biochar it and then interr, but more labour and time intensive with the extra steps.

[hinkley]

The charcoal will contain at most half of the carbon, the other half goes up in smoke. You could do cogeneration with that but now you need a plant nearby or heavy transportation which likely won’t be carbon negative. And the more you process it the more extractive the process is, and the we need something that isn’t extractive.