Reversing global warming and removing carbon from the atmosphere with cold fusion

Quote from Dr Richard*

And JedRothwell why bury the Oak Wood rather than turn it into oak tables or indeed like in Japan make new buildings exclusively with paper or wood?

There is not enough demand for that. You would end up with a dozen oak tables in every house. Worldwide lumber production is 1.3 billion tons per year. This project calls for sequestering 15 billion tons of wood. The price of lumber is bound to fall, but there is a limit to how much lumber people can use.

I think it is better to carbonize the wood (turn it into charcoal) because wood has a lot of water and it may rot after a long while. When it decomposes, the CO2 goes back into the air. Also, carbonizing it saves space in the landfill.

Of course we should use all the wood we want for various purposes such as furniture, building construction, paper pulp, or carbon filament. But there will still be a lot left over. The only thing to do with it is bury it. If we find a use for massive amounts of carbon in the future, such as shipping it to Mars to make carbon filament structures there, we will know where it is. Just remove the cover dirt, dig up the carbon, put it on the space elevator, and ship it out.

I doubt the Martians will ever need carbon shipped from earth via a space elevator. C-Type (carbon) asteroids are the most common type. With those asteroids there must be millions of times more carbon readily accessible in space and easily transferred to Mars than you can get from earth, or extract from earth's atmosphere. Needless to say, there is also far more iron, gold, palladium and everything else readily available from asteroids than from mines, the atmosphere or oceans on earth. The total mass of asteroids is approximately the same as the moon, but they are in little pieces so you don't have dig holes to get to them. Just nudge them into a transfer orbit and wait for them to show up at your space elevator terminal.

A space elevator is a lot more doable in the near future than you might think. And much safer. It does not call for massive quantities of material. The first elevator capable of lifting a few tons would have a cable 40,000 km long about the width of a newspaper page, thinner than paper. (It is 36,000 km to geosynchronous orbit, but you have to have a counterweight some distance above that orbit.) If it broke, it would drift through the atmosphere and fall like a collapsing mylar balloon. Whoever was climbing it might fall and be pulverized but the elevator itself would cause no damage. We cannot quite make that material now, but we soon will be able with enough R&D. The benefits would be enormous. It would soon make shipping goods from Earth to Mars cheaper than shipping them from Beijing to New York.

After you build a small elevator capable of lifting a few tons at a time, you use it to bootstrap a much larger one with a thicker cable. The cable would still be light, and no great threat if it broke and fell to earth.

People often talk about shortages and crises and running out of this or that or the other. Running out of resources, or energy, water or farmland. None of this needs to happen. When you consider the prospects for making space elevators, and mining asteroids, the notion that we are "running out of resources" becomes preposterous. When you consider cold fusion -- or even benighted plasma fusion -- the notion that we are "running out of energy" is even more absurd. We could easily tap enough energy to melt the entire planet Earth. We could grow all of the field crops in food factories that take up very little space. In the US they would take up approximately the land area of greater New York City if they were made in very tall buildings. If we stop eating meat and grow it from cells, the product will be much cheaper, better for you, and it will probably taste better. It would reduce the need for agricultural land by approximately 80%. So the notion that we are running out of farmland is ridiculous.

All this talk about running out of resources, or that we cannot prevent pollution, or we are helpless to stop global warming -- it is too late . . . drives me crazy! It irks me to no end. Yes of course we can solve global warming. Learn some engineering. Use your imagination! Look at the numbers. Think about how we got into this mess in the first place, and then think of a way to undo the problem. If we can put billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere, then of course we can take billions out! The scale of the project is no larger than the project that moved the carbon from under the earth and put it in the air. That project took about 50 years. That is to say: mining, oil drilling, and combustion electric power generation. We can afford mining and power generation, so we can afford to do them in reverse, by one method or another. There is not one solution are two solutions to global warming: there are hundreds of potential solutions. Plus there are temporary, stopgap solutions such as reducing solar insolation by 2% with low orbit mylar sunshades. We just need to find the most profitable methods. The only thing we lack is intelligence and gumption. When you look back at what people accomplished in the past there is no doubt we have more than enough of both. In his book, "Profiles of the Future" Arthur C Clarke wrote:

The seas of this planet contain 100,000,000,000,000,000 tons of hydrogen and 20,000,000,000,000 tons of deu­terium. Soon we will learn to use these simplest of all atoms to yield unlimited power. Later—perhaps very much later—we will take the next step, and pile our nuclear building blocks on top of each other to create any element we please. When that day comes, the fact that gold, for example, might turn out to be slightly cheaper than lead will be of no particular importance.

This survey should be enough to indicate—though not to prove—that there need never be any permanent shortage of raw materials. Yet Sir George Darwin's prediction (page 85) that ours would be a golden age compared with the aeons of poverty to follow, may well be perfectly correct. In this inconceivably enormous uni­verse, we can never run out of energy or matter. But we can all too easily run out of brains.

Quote from Alan Smith

'There is not enough demand for that' is not a valid argument. Legislation to mandate the use of lumber wherever possible could end up by increasing the use of wood in buildings to as much as 10Bn tonnes per year

That would still leave ~5 billion tons. There is a limit to how many houses and buildings peoples want. The real estate market is not infinitely large. I do not think the population will increase much after 2100, because the youngest cohort (0 to 20 years old) is not increasing. The only increase is in people over age 40 in the third world. They will die in 40 years.

Anyway, I was talking about oak tables. As I said, we cannot use a dozen per house.

If there is any practical use for the wood, on earth, on Mars or anywhere else, of course we should make that the priority. Burying it is the last thing we should do, because it has no economic value. Charcoal may also have some economic value, perhaps as feedstock for carbon fiber.

As I said, if we put billions of tons of charcoal or wood underground, and then decide we need it after all, it will still be there. We can dig it up and use it. As you mentioned, in anerobic conditions, wood lasts a long time. Along the same lines, I predict that 20th and 21st century trash landfills will be a valued source of resources in the 22nd century. By that time we will have robots, molten metal disposal, and other advanced techniques to convert trash and garbage into raw materials without polluting the environment. A landfill is a concentrated source of metals and other valuable materials.

Quote from Alan Smith

Finally, it is not required to turn wood completely to charcoal to preserve it.

Not necessary, but it helps. It will last for millions of years in that form, the same as coal. Also, I think it takes up significantly less space, perhaps when crushed and compressed. Plus, we want the water and other chemicals in the wood. I see no point to burying billions of tons of water in abandoned mines. If there is water left in the wood, it might rot over a very long time.

Anyway, with cold fusion, the energy cost of baking it into charcoal would be zero, so we might as well.