How is this for a business plan? Invest millions for a forestry process designed to provide thousands of years of protection to the planet.
But you’re not exactly sure of how the process will work. Or what the result will be.
Sounds like Nancy Pelosi saying a bill should be passed in Congress so we can find out what’s in it.
Yet, this is not a government project. Rather, a private company — Kodama Systems — wants to bury dead trees along with leftover wood from logging so the tree wastes don’t decay and warm the planet.
Kodama has raised $6.6 million for this offbeat project, including funding from Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures.
According to Forbes, the U.S. Forest Service plans on thinning out roughly “70 million acres of western forests, mostly in California.”
It’s another idea to control the weather for Christmas Day, 2099, give or take a day or a decade.
Bill Gates’ money, of course, is funding the idea of blocking the sun to perhaps ensure a white Christmas for Cleveland at the end of this century.
Haven’t we learned anything from all the tampering with nature and delicate world systems in the COVID lockdowns, social and economic disruptions?
And spending millions to put trees in a hole in the ground as though that will make a difference seems extravagant.
Yet, Gates is a smart guy. And as we’re increasingly seeing, smart guys with their smart ideas can be hazardous.
Kodama Systems has been quietly planning its planet-saving form of forestry in the small town of Sonora, California, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, according MIT Technology Review.
The idea is to use trees to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, which, of course, is how oxygen is replenished as the trees make the exchange.
But trees die and their decay gives off carbon dioxide so all their effort to save the planet is diminished, perhaps lost.
So Kodama Systems wants to harvest and sell lumber from forests, then, instead of the usual practice of leaving noncommercial leftover wood to rot and spoil Christmas Future, remove it and bury it, allowing the rotting to occur underground.
That will keep carbon out of the atmosphere for thousands of years, they say.
Great idea, right? Maybe not.
“Biomass burial has the potential to become a low-cost, high-scale approach for carbon removal,” according to Joanna Klitze of Stripe, a payments company involved in the project.
But Klitze added: “There is a need for further investigation into its long-term durability.” That comment coming from an individual in a company that has invested a $250,000 grant into the project.
And Carbon Direct, a company that helps businesses reduce their carbon emissions, has a scientist involved in carbon removal through biomass projects like that of Kodama Systems, Daniel Sanchez.
He, too signals caution. “We have to recognize that the science of wood harvesting and storage is still evolving,” Sanchez said.
“Most importantly, our understanding of what drives or doesn’t drive decomposition of wood needs to be refined.”
So this is an ambitious, expensive project to save the planet but there is doubt if it will even work.
Why are all these smart people pursuing dubious projects like this or, for that matter, foisting electric cars upon us or trying to take away our gas stoves and ceiling fans?
Is everyone having the same bad dream I am?
Meanwhile, Kodama Systems’ efforts may meet opposition from, of all people, environmentalists. Like Earthjustice, for instance, (motto: “Because the earth needs a good lawyer’). Earthjustice is opposed to commercial logging of old-growth forests.
Old-growth trees would probably be the targets of Kodama Systems, since such trees would have a shorter life sucking carbon dioxide out of the air. Earthjustice would have a problem with the felling of such trees.
And MIT Technology Review has asked: What about carbon emissions originating from cutting, transporting and burying large numbers of tree?
Also, would Kodama Systems be new planting trees? There have been incentives for companies to gain carbon credits by planting trees (my wife and I half-joked about planting a few trees on our property to cash in on the nonsense).
But like so many things with short half-lives in the wonderland of environmentalists, tree planting for credits is now looked at with scrutiny.
Because the made-up figures for carbon credits are showing evidence that they are, well, made up.
That’s because not all trees store carbon equally so if you get more credit than you should for the amount of carbon a tree stores, it’s not fair, according to a 2021 story by MIT Technology Review.
It’s further complicated by a differing number of angels known to dance on different types of trees, which, of course, I made up, but everything else seems to be, so why not?
Bill Gates and Others Who Know Best are spending millions to fight alleged climate change.
Because, we’re told, science definitely declares the planet is at risk.
But science — which is based upon observation — can’t say that because there are two overwhelming variables in the Earth’s climate that cannot be controlled for in observation — the seas and the sun.
Both — seas and sun — are going to do their thing even though Bill Gates’ money is working on fixing the latter. And that should be enough to make the angels laugh.