Can We Bulldoze Enough Forests to Prevent Climate Change? – Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

I’m sure there was a time greens wanted to protect forests from bulldozers.

OCTOBER 16, 2025

5 MIN READ

Can We Bury Enough Wood to Slow Climate Change?

Wood vaulting, a simple, low-tech approach to storing carbon, has the potential to remove 12 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year—and some companies are already trying it.

BY SYRIS VALENTINE EDITED BY ANDREA THOMPSON

Humanity has only so much time to limit global warming and minimize the severity of future climate disasters. And with mostly tepid attempts to slash greenhouse gas emissions, researchers are scrambling for realistic ways to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. Flashy, high-tech proposals that promise to vacuum pollutants out of the sky, or to scrub them from smokestacks before they hit the atmosphere, have attracted attention and investment—but are falling far short of expectations. Now a growing number of scientists and entrepreneurs are trying a vastly simpler approach: collecting truckloads of logs, branches, wood chips and sawdust—and burying them.

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“If we want to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,” says the study’s lead author Yiqi Luo, a Cornell University ecosystem ecologist, “we basically need to create new reservoirs in land, ocean or geological structures.”

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Read more: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wood-vaulting-could-help-slow-climate-change/

The abstract of the study;

• Analysis
• Published: 25 June 2025

Large CO₂ removal potential of woody debris preservation in managed forests

• Yiqi Luo, 
• Ning Wei, 
• Xingjie Lu, 
• Yu Zhou, 
• Feng Tao, 
• Quan Quan, 
• Cuijuan Liao, 
• Lifen Jiang, 
• Jianyang Xia, 
• Yuanyuan Huang, 
• Shuli Niu, 
• Xiangtao Xu, 
• Ying Sun, 
• Ning Zeng, 
• Charles Koven, 
• Liqing Peng, 
• Steve Davis, 
• Pete Smith, 
• Fengqi You, 
• Yu Jiang, 
• Lailiang Cheng & 
• Benjamin Houlton 

Nature Geoscience volume 18, pages 675–681 (2025)

Abstract

Limiting climate warming to 1.5 °C requires reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and CO₂removal. While various CO₂ removal strategies have been explored to achieve global net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and account for legacy emissions, additional exploration is warranted to examine more durable, scalable and sustainable approaches to achieve climate targets. Here we show that preserving woody debris in managed forests can remove gigatonnes of CO₂ from the atmosphere sustainably based on a carbon cycle analysis using three Earth system models. Woody debris is produced from logging, sawmill wastes and abandoned woody products, and can be preserved in deep soil to lengthen its residence time (a measure of durability) by thousands of years. Preserving annual woody debris production in managed forests has the capacity to remove 769–937 GtCO₂ from the atmosphere cumulatively (10.1–12.4 GtCO₂ yr⁻¹ on average) from 2025 to 2100, if its residence time is lengthened for 100–2,000 years and after 5% CO₂ removal is discounted to account for CO₂emission due to machine operation for wood debris preservation. This translates to a reduction in global temperatures of 0.35–0.42 °C. Given the large potential, relatively low cost and long durability, future efforts should be focused on establishing large-scale demonstration projects for this technology in a variety of contexts, with rigorous monitoring of CO₂ removal, its co-benefits and side-effects.

Read more: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-025-01731-2

Imagine bulldozing up to 12 billion tons of forest every year, just to bury it.

At least the biomass people want to use the wood, to produce ridiculously expensive power. But this idea is obscene – destroying vast tracts of nature, just to bury the wood.

How did we end up in a world where anyone could genuinely believe this is a good idea?

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