[8474_s]

wouldn't it be much simpler to just mass produce more furniture out of wood, instead of keeping the same-equivalent biomass frozen infinitely?

[philipkglass]

There's not enough useful demand to tame CO2 this way.

Anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are currently about 37 billion tons per year:

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

That's enough CO2 to make 22.7 billion metric tons of cellulose per year, or ~2.8 tons per capita for Earth's 8.2 billion people. That's too much to to turn it all into furniture or even buildings.

[sqeaky]

Just for scale how tons of carbon are in an acre or hectare of corn, wheat, or other crop. Being able to say how many farms would need to do this to counter act our release could provide an interesting sanity check.

[jjk166]

The average house weighs 40-80 tons, so 2.8 tons per capita per year is a house every 14-28 years, which seems reasonable, plus infrastructure.

[scotty79]

Maybe horizontal surfaces too? Like roads and pavements? Let's become industrial elves.

[euroderf]

Didn't there used to be a "Pave the Earth" meme ? Maybe update it for log roads.

[laserbeam]

I’d wager the furniture industry is currently responsible for a significant % of anual deforestation, which as far as I know isn’t regrowing fast enough.

An approach like this could benefit from crops which are not productive for humanity otherwise, but which grows much faster and eats CO2 cheaper than trees.

Does that mean “stop replanting forests?” Absolutely not.

[edhelas]

2/3 of the CO2 stored in forest is in the ground, not the trees, it's accumulated when the forest grows and is getting generations of trees.

Cut those trees to do furniture and you'll release all this CO2, do a culture of tree decades after decades and you'll never store it back.