This is Gustaf from YC. I wrote the first Carbon Removal RFS.

Planting tree is actually a great carbon removal technology. Unfortunately most forest owners in the world don't know or don't have incentive to care the about the carbon impact the forest have on the climate. Biggest reason forests are taken down is to grow cattle for beef. If you are working on a startup to reverse this we'd like to fund it too

This is covered in the "Where We Are Now" section at the bottom that explains BECCS. The issue is really cost - to remove carbon semi-permanently with trees you have to grow a lot of them, and then bury them deep enough that natural decay processes don't just put the carbon back into the environment. Basically you have to do the exact opposite of what we've been doing with coal and oil for over a century.

I once started thinking through what we would want out of some kind of ideal carbon sequestering device. I thought that for the scale of the problem, they would need to self-replicate, and run on some natural energy source, like solar power. Then, I realized I had just invented the tree.

Trees ultimately burn or rot, releasing a large portion of that carbon back into the atmosphere. Cutting them down and burying them to grow more would be ideal, but takes additional work.

Someone want to engineer a tree with enormous, deep roots? Basically make the trees self-burying.

We already have carbon removal development. It's called regenerative agriculture.

Regenerative agriculture is about harvesting sunlight (free resource), utilizing plants photosynthesizing abilities. Plants are a part of a larger ecosystem including producers, consumers and decomposers.

Plants exudate sugars feeding the soil microbial life, sugars from the photosynthesis where atmospheric carbon dioxide is converted into sugars. Large herbivores eat the grass, holistic grazing keeps the animals moving mimicking predators and the defensive herding mechanisms for efficient animal impact. The timed regrowth will let the plant photosynthesize more carbon dioxide, while the walking sun powered compost machine (cow) decomposes the organic matter and leaves it for further decomposition and utilization.

We have huge areas where desertification is happening [1] because of wrong management. Holistic Grazing is a easy implemented, low tech, approach with great benefits for capital, social and ecological level.

Regenerative agriculture is also covering land management in less brittle environments, field production, notill, utilizing plants, the soil community and the only truly free available resource sunlight.

[1] https://youtu.be/vpTHi7O66pI?t=157

A set of forests that stays the same size, i.e. some trees fall down and rot or get cut down and burned while new trees sprout or get planted, so that the total amount of biomass in these forests is more or less stable long-term is not a carbon removal technology but simply a carbon store. To remove carbon, the amount of biomass needs to increase... so we essentially need to cut down trees and somehow store their carbon instead of releasing it back into air through decay or burning.

So this might be a dumb question, but if I landfill paper instead of recycling it, does it degrade? If not, is that a poor man's form of carbon sequestration? A cursory glance suggests this is correct [1], though you'd need to know a lot more to say that it was more carbon efficient than recycling.

[1] http://www.allaboutbags.ca/degradeinlandfill.html

At the timescale and costs needed to combat climate change, trees will be prohibitively expensive(land, fresh water) and slow. If reducing global carbon with plants was easy, governments wouldn't probably be complaining about protocols, solutions for almost 3 decades starting with Kyoto discussions. Can we stop mentioning planting trees as ultimate solution everytime carbon capture research comes up?

Important to add that plants are the only carbon removal technology with a successful track record.

As global warming devastates more of the biosphere, there will be perhaps less opposition to GMO plants engineered for maximum sequestration capacity. Also useful for Mars.

Trees will only absorb 1 watt of hydrocarbon emissions per square meter, on average, even before considering the cost of burying the woods so the carbon isn't released when it rots.

I guess trees could be planted more creatively. There is one particular situation where I think they should cut down / or move trees, and that is when trees are near power lines: it's basically a matter of time of when the tree falls down and the local power company has to fix the power line and the local population has to deal with the disruption in power.

Maybe there is a good business in finding a good way to truly move old trees, so that we aren't forced to cut them down?

Trees hardly make anyone any money (absent a carbon credits/tax system).

This. We need USDA money going to tree genetics for carbon sequestration. Pat Schnabble at ISU would be amazing at this. He has already isolated genes to thicken cell walls. He also has a novel technique of using time-lapse video to isolate lines that maximize solar uptake by cooperating with neighbors on how they grow. Almost all grain productivity in the past 20 years has been on cooperative solar coverage, not per plant yield. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXiV1dTlRSU

This is mentioned on the website under "Bio-energy with carbon capture and storage".

Trees don’t make money for Venture Capitalists.