[MauranKilom]

Trees do that, but what happens when they die? Planting trees to fix CO2 emissions is like fixing the leak in your roof by putting more buckets below. Sure, it helps a bit, but it only buffers the water - you still need to dump it. Similarly, we need to get carbon out of the cycle.

For reference, some googled numbers:

- The amazon rainforest holds about 123 billion tons of carbon in total.

- For the past decade, we've emitted about 35 billion tons of CO2 (around 10 billion tons of carbon) annually.

You'd need to plant a whole new amazon forest every 10-20 years to balance out our emissions. And that's assuming our emissions don't keep growing exponentially like they've done in the past - otherwise you'll run out of land to plant forests on in a couple of decades.

[euroderf]

Now that we have consumed so many oil & gas deposits, do we simply have too much carbon ? Could a space elevator start taking loads of carbon (in whatever state of matter) and dispersing them into space ? It would be a testbed for Venus, which most definitely has way too much carbon. Dispose of a few zillion tons and then terraforming becomes more realistic.

[renewiltord]

If we just build houses out of the trees we can keep the carbon out for a long time.

[MauranKilom]

That is an approach. Note though that, again, the total number of houses at any given moment is not going to exceed a certain number, and when we replace houses, we more or less set free the carbon in the previous one. So once again, this is more like a bucket than a drain.