Geoengineering

Here’s the low-tech tool to reverse climate change

Have you heard of geo-engineering? People hope to use cutting-edge technologies to solve the problem of climate change.

For example, they could throw microparticles of silica into the atmosphere to bounce back the heat, or send special satellites to space to stop the sunlight. They could compress carbon into blocks and store it deep, deep underground, or make massive mirrors to reflect the Earth’s heat away.

These are all great ideas of humankind, but they are very expensive to put in place and not yet ready to be safely used. Today, I want to introduce to you a low-tech, safe and cheap tool we already have in our hands.

We don’t talk about them much, but that’s because we usually take them for granted. They’ve been doing their job for as long as we can remember, and more besides. In fact, if such a solution were man-made and invented today, it would be called a marvel of engineering and hailed widely across the world.

I’m talking about trees.

Botanically speaking, a tree is a special type of plant with a key structural component: wood.

Wood is made of big chains of carbon atoms, which form molecules like cellulose and lignin. Cellulose is the most abundant molecule in the living…