One thing you could do is grow the trees, remove them and sequester them… bury them deep underground, weigh them down and let them sink into the deep sea, or if you want short-term sequestration, you can include them in a long-term structure.
But for real sequestration on the scale of centuries, burying deep underground or in the sea is the solution. Things kept near the surface will give their carbon back as they decompose.
Yes, but if you can grow the food where it’s needed that takes the transport problems completely out of the picture.
Well, it’s not a transport problem so much as the poor not having sufficient income.
My understanding is that CO2 fertilization will usually have mild effects because lack of CO2 is rarely a given plant’s limiting factor. Do you have a study that suggests otherwise?
Here’s my cite. The author found some sizable effects on pine trees, but discussed near the end of the article the reasons why other limiting factors would be expected to kick in. More research necessary, etc. http://www.environmentalreview.org/archives/vol06/vol6no10.pdf
You might note my note on the development of nitrogen and phosphorous fixing bacteria. Actually phosphorous unfixing bacteria and Nitrogen fixing bacteria.
Those two nutrients are the main limiting factors on plant growth and both are at the stage where biological supply can easily meet CO2 demands.
What I’ve read is consistent with what you’ve said. This study examines the effect on increased atmospheric CO2 concentration on tree growth. The TL;DR is that it only helped tree plots to which they also added nitrogen fertilizer (and the fertilizer was “used up” over the course of a few years). Considering that most forests don’t have great soil in the first place (land with good soil tends to be used for agriculture), we shouldn’t expect wild forests to benefit very much from higher CO2 levels. We might see a boost to water use efficiency, but increased CO2 levels will go hand in hand with higher temperatures, which will increase the rate of photorespiration (which is (mostly) a wasteful process); it might be a wash.
We’re likely to see some benefit in intensive agriculture where farmers can afford to irrigate and fertilize, though.
One of the options (which I think is very interesting) is to use renewable energy to make fuel from CO2. That solves one of the big problems with renewable energy, I think, which is that it’s not constantly and reliably available. Using fuel as an energy storage mechanism could make it much more viable.
I agree. This probably makes the most sense. The problem lies in that “use renewable energy” part. We need to have enough renewable energy coming in to make this economically viable. I could envision setting up a massive solar plant in the Sahara and to power this sort of fuel plant. That would be awesome, but hugely expensive.
While we can probably make fuel with it, trees long ago figured out what to do with extra CO2
Pro hint: plants evolved in an atmosphere much higher in CO2 than current values, which are very low from a plants POV
Plants still love high CO2 levels. All plants.