OK, so where would they be buried????  We can't get agreement on the nuclear waste repository, so why would we get one on a wood repository?  Sounds like a good idea, but the NIMBY realities would keep it from happening.

The only answer for global warming and for most other energy problems today, that's technologically proven, is nuclear fission power plants.

I recall a former head of the Sierra Club says the same.

France, Japan, and Sweden get much or most of their electricity from nuclear fission. Haven't heard of any significant problems.

Of course, there was Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island. And the US Navy's had eight or more killed in testing nuclear reactors.

But, acknowledging the risk to humans and animals from nuclear fission reactors, is this risk greater or less than the risk from petroleum, coal, natural gas, or biofuel?

Wind power cannot provide enough electricity to replace fossil fuel to any significant extent. Nuclear fusion, with distinctly less risk than fission, has never succeeded. And the present administration shut down Tokamak research, I think, after decades of futility.

Haven't seen the numbers for solar power. Perhaps it can replace all of fossil fuel. I doubt it. Certainly the technology has been "promising" since Carter's time. Hasn't fulfilled it yet.

Freeman Dyson said a problem with nuclear fission plants is that we're locked in to old tech that's proven, because better tech is too speculative. But even the old tech is ready, here and now.

I'd suggest moving the nuclear power plants to remote areas, away from population centers (like Harrisburg and Lviev), and wiring the electricity in. A few advances in superconductor tech and there'd be less loss of power. But if there are enough plants, the power loss isn't important. Site the plants near Yucca Mountain, and the risk of transporting waste is also reduced considerably.

Many of the concerns about nuclear power are valid. Many are ridiculous. Have to wonder whether anything's driving the opposition -- like the oil industry? Conventional wisdom opposes nuclear power. Always useful to question conventional wisdom, and wonder where it comes from.

So, we are looking for big holes in the ground that can hold a lot of carbon for a few million years.  How about old coal mines, especially those strip coal mines that put those huge holes in the ground?  We could turn the coal miners of yore into environmental engineers of the future (but the music probably wouldn't be as good).

It's an intriguing idea. It seems like the potential for unintended and unanticipated consequences is high, given the complexity both of the task (removal and burial of wood from vast forests) and of  the the forest environment (complex interdependency of soil, plants, animals, etc.) Reading the potential downsides discussed in the article gave me pause. It seems especially hard to foresee how much damage we'd be opening forests up to as a result of the roads/infrastructure needed to carry out wood burial on a large scale. (Isn't 'poaching' -- or whatever the logging equivalent is called -- a significant factor in deforestation in some areas? And the governments in places where this happens are often ill-equipped -- or unwilling -- to stop it.

Just read the blog on nukes. Cites the IAEA saying nuclear capacity _will_ merely double by 2030; not that it could not increase at a faster pace. Tho certainly the rate of construction deemed necessary, two to three a year, seems daunting.

-- I wonder how that compares with the rate of coal and petroleum power station construction?

I seem to recall that present wind tech can't pick up the slack, even theoretically. There aren't enough windy places in the world (even when I post something).

Even if wind is expanded to the maximum present tech allows, with every mountain pass populated with windmills, it's predicted that would only pick up the increase in energy demand. Would do nothing to reduce current levels of carbon-fuel use.

There are plenty of blue-sky ideas, like orbital stations, but these are entirely untested and likely to be really expensive to build. Even the R&D for these is likely to be very expensive and take quite a while.

$250 billion to bury trees? Without in any way addressing energy demand? That's even bigger than the blogging industry. And the inevitable wrenching changes to the ecology, deliberate and unintentional, make me really skeptical. Does Zeng suggest expeditions into the Amazonian rain forest? Forcing carbon reduction by force of arms on reluctant governments? Would a project of 1/1000th the scale be worth bothering with? Even at a mere quarter billion per year?

I assume Zeng has factored in the considerable carbon effect due to the heavy equipment and the commuting and maintenance of the laborers. If he hasn't, the equation, as with biofuel, may turn out very different.

Why not just truck the rotting logs and dump them in the sea? Make reefs out of them? Wouldn't this slow the release of carbon dioxide into the air?

Two solutions seem better to me. 1) Tight emission standards on all commercial trucks, buses and tractors in the the US and the developed world, soon, like within two or three years, with the same to follow soon in China, India, and Russia. Tax breaks to pay for the catalytic converters or whatever is appropriate to diesel. Seems this would be a win all around, regarding carbon emissions. Also re the general pleasantness of highways, acid rain, public health, and other externalities.

Oceanic plankton for biofuel. If it's harvested as rapidly as it's seeded, it may not do much harm to the oceanic ecosystem. Would require more research, I think, but the potential downside appears low compared to most other routes.

Isaiah Berlin was citing a Greek source (that I don't recall) referring to knowledge. I guess the metaphor can be applied to strategy as well.

Useful to learn from the blog that the US gets more in absolute terms from nukes than France does. It still can be expanded. Expanding it still appears the only realistic option. Filling the desert near Yucca Mountain, and a couple places in the southwest, with a bunch of reactors, still appears the least bad option both for energy and for carbon emissions.

Am I missing something here? How about instead of burying fallen trees, we send them to saw mills and turn them into 2' by 4's?

i'm with dkrieger: why not sequester via lumber production?  is the fallen tree wood not good enough material?  

I heard a piece on NPR a few weeks ago that weighed the desirability of deforestation as a way to  conserve fresh water -- on the principle that trees soak up many gallons of fresh water a day, which would be saved if the trees were felled.

And now it seems lumbering may be good for the ozone.

This stuff is so weird! Reminds me of that bit in Woody Allen's Sleeper where the futuristic doctors are  talking about the health benefits of smoking and consuming fat.

"Offsetting the world's manmade emissions would require about 2 million people to get to work"

What's the size of our prison population again?

Another plus: clearing the dry western rocky mtn forests of overgrowth would IIUC reduce the risk of fires there, which also lowers the cost of insurance and makes more land available for living, esp retirees cashing out of their million-dollar homes in California, AZ and elsewhere, which eases the strain on the nation's underfunded pensions.

Great blog, and nice to see the fact-based, intelligent, civil replies from Plumer and the gang to us plebes.

E&E is quickly becoming the best part of TNR. Nice work, guys.

$250 billion for a plan that might not work? I think that this won't be happening soon. This is one of those gigathink proposals that attempt to solve a major problem in one fell swoop. Sort of like solar panels in space, microwaving power to the earth. I have learned to be very sensitive to bite back effects and these exist to some degree with just about every human technology and coutertechnological cleanup move.

Except... plants don't just soak up carbon out of the air, they soak up essential minerals and nutrients from the soil.  In the natural environment, this isn't a problem because you have a closed loop.  Plants grow, animals eat the plants, animals poop and die, worms, bacteria, and fungi digest the dead plants and animals and poop and return essential minerals and nutrients to the soil again where the plants soak them up...

      So what about a system where the loop isn't fully closed, where essential nutrients can "fall out" and get permanently removed from circulation?

       Well, there are vast expanses of deep ocean in the tropics where that is true, and in spite of the presence of plenty of warm water, oxygen, CO2 and constant sunshine, vast expanses of the deep ocean are deserts, biologically speaking.

     At some point, by breaking the cycle and removing those essential nutrients from the soil permanently, following a plan such as Zheng's would do something similar on land.

      And yes, modern agricultural and sanitary practice has already broken this loop to a great extent.  We get away with it by dumping tons of potash, rock phosphate, and nitrogen fertilizers in our soils to replenish a few of the "most essentials" that we are depleting by breaking the loop.  Rock phosphate, however, is a totally non-renewable resource... and at the rate we are going we may have burned through all that's left in another 50 years (look up "Peak Weed Killer?").

     The terra-preta / bio-char idea seems more compelling and easier to implement, it doesn't break the loop where essential nutrients are concerned, and it might have the potential to reduce our use of fertilizers for agriculture, and stave off a phosphate crunch.

     With bio-sequestration, and to an even greater extent with bio-fuels, the trade off you are choosing is to burn through totally non-renewable resources at a greater rate, for the sake of postponing the need to migrate to truly renewable sources of energy.

That's like deciding to burn stacks of money in your fireplace because you're out of firewood and you're too lazy to get up off your butt and go buy some.  It's just plain stupid.

Another entertaining solution on the line of biofuels.  How much carbon output would be required to move this biomatter and to dig the trenches?  How much carbon is already temporarily sequestered underneath the the layer of biomatter that we're removing (which would be returnd to the biodegradation enhancng aerobic conditions of the surface)?  

Well it's great and good to throw out theories like this but it should remain just that. Brad, it might sound like a great idea to bury hectares of almost dead trees but the problem is you have to keep planting new ones to replace those you've just cut down and then wait 25/50 years to do what? Cut, bury, plant, repeat?

Not only would this theory not play any serious part in the idea of carbon sequestration but instead would accelerate critical habitat destruction, deforestation, impact ground water quality, riparian areas and watersheds. Not only that but burying "not dead yet" trees from forests...even managed forests doesn't address the fact that humans need to address their own behaviors through reducing per capita energy use and consumption and spending that $250 billion yearly "Tree Cover-up" on actual real word solutions and efficiency upgrades would do more good than Zeng's proposal. Zeng's proposal also assumes a constant rate of carbon emissions world wide versus actual regional impacts of doing this would do.

The stunning aspect about all these ideas is that many of the scientists floating these ideas don't seem to really take seriously the idea of fixing the source of the problem. They're trained to find a fix to the problem instead of rethinking how to address the source issue to begin with. We keep dreaming up ideas of how to bury our trash instead of thinking how to not have trash to begin with!

Carbon sequestering is fine if we were talking about holding current emission levels but that won't happen. If you want to take the plant a forest idea and make it work, bamboo would work better than planting deciduous and coniferous trees in that bamboo is more capable of rapid regrowth after harvest, it's a great structural material, it can be used for a multitude of products and can be planted almost anywhere. But this only goes so far.

The DOE predicts that by 2030 world wide electricity demand will double. Even if we go balls to wall after nuclear it would take until 2050 to bring enough plants on line to meet current electricity demands in the U.S. So while we wait in the mean time, existing renewable energy sources, like solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro are still getting underfunded because policy makers think they can't play a significant roll because they currently don't play a significant roll. Never mind the absurd irony of underfunded renewables not competing against heavily subsidized carbon-based and nuclear energy.

Until we start addressing the over consumptive use of our daily activities, retooling older buildings to be more energy efficient, replacing standard gas automobiles with high efficiency hybrids and reduce our electricity demand loads, no amount of carbon sequestering will make a dent in the problem. We need to address the inefficiencies of our activities instead of pretending we don't have to change how we do things if we just bury the problem in the ground.

There is a solution for global warming.  Make it so charlatans like Al Gore can't make $40 million dollars hawking this story.  This is the greatest boon to charlatans since TV evangelism.

"The DOE predicts that by 2030 world wide electricity demand will double. Even if we go balls to wall after nuclear it would take until 2050 to bring enough plants on line to meet current electricity demands in the U.S."

Can you provide a citation for this? Forty-two years sounds long.

In complex estimates such as these, a lot of things are assumptions, which can be varied as desired. The US was putting a freighter in the water at the rate of one every couple of weeks to counter the U-boat threat in WWII. I'd figure with some reasonable dialing of the starting premises, the US could be mostly nuclear in its electrical supply in a much briefer span. And as more nuclear plants go on line, the cheaper it may be to build the next one. A breeder reactor, for example, creates more fuel than it uses.

And with more nuclear, more US energy independence, less global warming, less strip-mining of forests and mountains for coal, less acid rain, and even less war in the Middle East, as the interest of the rest of the world in the Persian Gulf's main export dwindles. Even fewer oil spills. The challenges from nuclear power are there, but France, Japan, and Sweden have taken this route. If these states considered that renewable power could suffice, they probably already would have chosen those over nuclear.