Essay by Eric Worrall
I’m sure there was a time greens wanted to protect forests from bulldozers.
OCTOBER 16, 2025
5 MIN READ
Can We Bury Enough Wood to Slow Climate Change?
Wood vaulting, a simple, low-tech approach to storing carbon, has the potential to remove 12 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year—and some companies are already trying it.
BY SYRIS VALENTINE EDITED BY ANDREA THOMPSON
Humanity has only so much time to limit global warming and minimize the severity of future climate disasters. And with mostly tepid attempts to slash greenhouse gas emissions, researchers are scrambling for realistic ways to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. Flashy, high-tech proposals that promise to vacuum pollutants out of the sky, or to scrub them from smokestacks before they hit the atmosphere, have attracted attention and investment—but are falling far short of expectations. Now a growing number of scientists and entrepreneurs are trying a vastly simpler approach: collecting truckloads of logs, branches, wood chips and sawdust—and burying them.
…
“If we want to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,” says the study’s lead author Yiqi Luo, a Cornell University ecosystem ecologist, “we basically need to create new reservoirs in land, ocean or geological structures.”
Read more: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wood-vaulting-could-help-slow-climate-change/
…
The abstract of the study;
- Analysis
- Published: 25 June 2025
Large CO2 removal potential of woody debris preservation in managed forests
- Yiqi Luo,
- Ning Wei,
- Xingjie Lu,
- Yu Zhou,
- Feng Tao,
- Quan Quan,
- Cuijuan Liao,
- Lifen Jiang,
- Jianyang Xia,
- Yuanyuan Huang,
- Shuli Niu,
- Xiangtao Xu,
- Ying Sun,
- Ning Zeng,
- Charles Koven,
- Liqing Peng,
- Steve Davis,
- Pete Smith,
- Fengqi You,
- Yu Jiang,
- Lailiang Cheng &
- Benjamin Houlton
Nature Geoscience volume 18, pages 675–681 (2025)
Abstract
Limiting climate warming to 1.5 °C requires reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and CO2removal. While various CO2 removal strategies have been explored to achieve global net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and account for legacy emissions, additional exploration is warranted to examine more durable, scalable and sustainable approaches to achieve climate targets. Here we show that preserving woody debris in managed forests can remove gigatonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere sustainably based on a carbon cycle analysis using three Earth system models. Woody debris is produced from logging, sawmill wastes and abandoned woody products, and can be preserved in deep soil to lengthen its residence time (a measure of durability) by thousands of years. Preserving annual woody debris production in managed forests has the capacity to remove 769–937 GtCO2 from the atmosphere cumulatively (10.1–12.4 GtCO2 yr−1 on average) from 2025 to 2100, if its residence time is lengthened for 100–2,000 years and after 5% CO2 removal is discounted to account for CO2emission due to machine operation for wood debris preservation. This translates to a reduction in global temperatures of 0.35–0.42 °C. Given the large potential, relatively low cost and long durability, future efforts should be focused on establishing large-scale demonstration projects for this technology in a variety of contexts, with rigorous monitoring of CO2 removal, its co-benefits and side-effects.
Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-025-01731-2
Imagine bulldozing up to 12 billion tons of forest every year, just to bury it.
At least the biomass people want to use the wood, to produce ridiculously expensive power. But this idea is obscene – destroying vast tracts of nature, just to bury the wood.
How did we end up in a world where anyone could genuinely believe this is a good idea?
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“Imagine bulldozing up to 12 billion tons of forest every year, just to bury it.”
Commercial loggers are lucky to get even $30/ton of chips delivered to a biomass or pellet plant.
So, that’ll come to $360 billion dollars.
How could we end up in a World where there were so many total idiots, such as Syris Valentine, Andrea Thompson, and the others noted above?
No! Despit the hype, there is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on our global climate system. Adding CO2 to the atmospherew does not cause surface warming. The AGW hypothesis has been falsified by science.
No! Despit the hype, there is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on our global climate system. Adding CO2 to the atmospherew does not cause surface warming. The AGW hypothesis has been falsified by science.
Another double post. There must a bug in the system.
“It’s not a bug – it’s a feature.” Some software guy, many years ago.
Or how for that matter did we end up in a world in which a tenured philosophy professor could be paid to publish stuff like this:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
Judith Butler. There are pages and pages of this stuff, and she is taken seriously in intellectual circles and thought to be a guru on sex and gender issues.
I said its hysteria, but actually it reads more like dementia.
It all makes sense if you are paid by the word count !!
Prof. Benjamin Z. Houlton is ecologist in the Dept. of Ecology and
Evolutionary Biology.
The “South African Xhosa Cattle-Killing Movement of 1856–1857, an event in which the Xhosa people slaughtered their cattle after the prophetess, Nongqawuse, claimed it would bring about the resurrection of their ancestors and their livestock. The prophecy failed . . .
Have any of these idiots ever actually worked in forestry/timber industries? From what they are spewing here clearly not.
After sitting over the vents from which the meaning of the universe is diffused, the oracles have determined that Gaia wants full obedience in these things.
Question not the interpretations that the oracles pronounce, as only they are able to understand the ways and needs of Gaia…All Hail
Where I am located the forests are very over grown and over mature. Wildfire hazard is high.
I would certainly be in favour of more harvesting to produce useful lumber and wood products in the mills. The tree huggers constantly fight to stop harvesting on public and private lands.
I am proud to say I have a carbon sequestration structure to store carbon. Very proud of myself. My carbon sequestration structure conveniently serves as a house, garage and even a couple of sheds. It’s absolutely brilliant! Some parts have been storing carbon since the 1920’s. By regularly applying paint I have been successful in stopping rot that would release evil CO2 into the atmosphere.
I think I deserve an award!
It looks like climate scientists have discovered landfills. Every landfill is a “Carbon Capture Facility”.A lot of newer landfills also include methane capture and bill themselves as “renewables” too. Of course, academics are always the last to know.
And how much CO2 would be released by the massive amounts of machinery that would be required to cut, transport, and bury twelve billion tons of wood?
A remarkably bad idea, even for alarmists.