Reply #37: There's still something fishy about this, kinda like ethanol

[HamdenRice]

So everyone now agrees that implicit in the proposal is that the trees (or biomass) would be grown first, then turned into charcoal, not that existing trees would be cut down and burned.

So imagine we had an aggressive tree planting program. Now its 40 years later (or if you think there are really fast growing varieties, 5 years later).

At this point we have locked up a tremendous amount of carbon in these trees. Do you really think that it now makes sense to half burn them to turn them to charcoal, releasing half of the carbon we have successfully locked up? At this point, our tree growing method of locking up carbon would work twice as quickly by simply stabilizing the wood and growing more trees in the place where we had just cut them down.

Most environmentalists at that point would say that from where ever we are now, carbon wise, it doesn't make sense to burn these trees and go halfway back to square one, just to create charcoal. If you are looking at wood as a carbon sink, we might as well cut the forest, dump the trees down abandoned and sealed mine shafts, or water log them and sink them into the abysmal depths of the ocean. There are still timbers in 500 year old European cities that have not completely decayed, so just stacking the wood in a dry area would be another way of dealing with it that would release the carbon dioxide much more slowly than we would be locking up new CO2.

Whatever method. I just can't see, even if it is wood from a a new forest, burning huge amounts of it just to make charcoal as a carbon sink for half of what we have already locked up.

BTW, I was in Singapore in 1998 when there were huge forest fires and slash and burn fires in Indonesia and there was a crisis because the entire region was enveloped in the smog produced by burning wood.

I just don't see it happening.