LOT’s mission is to help people reduce their carbon footprint, AND to give them opportunities to directly participate in projects that remove carbon from the environment.
Proactively removing carbon from the environment is a relatively new (decades old, perhaps) idea, but is absolutely logical and necessary. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution we have pumped carbon atoms into the air which promptly bond with oxygen atoms to form CO2. The CO2 has accumulated in the air and in the ocean, and isn’t going anywhere. We need to reverse it, a process that will probably take decades.
So far, carbon removal technologies are dominated by high-tech, high investment, highly industrial processes. I’m pretty excited about a lot of these technologies, but they will take a few years to really scale and make a meaningful difference.
Enter wood sequestration, which basically means keeping dead wood intact as long as possible, maybe thousands of years. Depending where you are on the earth, this might mean burying the wood–which works really well in clay soils–or preserving the wood aboveground–which works really well in very dry climates. There are some other situations that work well, like really cold environments (tundra), and some underwater environments.
The logic behind wood sequestration is sound, and its simplicity is pure elegance: Trees capture and store carbon as they grow, breaking the carbon bonded with two oxygen atoms and releasing the oxygen for us to breathe; Then, when the trees die, they rot, releasing the carbon gradually back into the air. Or the trees burn, releasing the carbon immediately into the air. Or some portion of the wood is made into furniture or 2×4’s, which keeps the carbon in the wood for awhile. The trunk portion of a tree is as much as 2/3rds carbon, a remarkable solid state carbon concentration, created naturally and freely! All we have to do as humans is to preserve this natural achievement the trees have given us as long as possible, and prevent trillions of tons of carbon returning to carbon dioxide, through fire or decomposition.
If there is a wrinkle to this scheme, it is that you have to do the wood storage right. If you do it wrong you might produce methane gas, which is way worse the CO2! The burial process–in the shallow depths of the earth but well below the topsoil, should be left to the professionals. Professionals should organize fully observable, large industrial sites–perhaps one per metropolitan area–where would should be sequestered.
Here is where I will make a very useful comparison but I hope you will not cringe; this is like a landfill, but exclusively for dead wood. I want to create a solid image of what’s going on, but an unfortunate side effect is that you may perhaps think of this as pollution. Resist! When the dead wood fills the hole, the land is covered and is reclaimed, for farming or recreation or anything else required in the community.
This is where a partnership between you and LOT comes in. LOT will create and sponsor projects throughout the United States for you to gather dead wood. LOT and its partners will do the burying. It’s pretty low tech, but collectively it can add up to gigatons of wood storage. And unlike the carbon capture schemes described above, you can play an active role in dead wood sequestration. You can claim reputational carbon offsets in these projects you do, which you can add to your carbon account and drive towards net zero. You can join with millions of others similarly inclined to do their part.
And it’s not hippy talk. Ning Zeng at the University of Maryland is probably the champion researcher, and his work is described in some detail here.
Others have taken up the banner. The folks at exaquest have pioneered above-ground storage methods in the American West, contained in recycled materials.
And the folks at Carbon Sequestration, Inc. have organized wood sequestration in the clay soils of East Texas, drawing on the plentiful pine forests in the area.
It’s a start. And for the record, these people are not hippies.
