It is a historically unprecedented and utterly necessary project. Only a combination of all of the above can even get us close. It's way too late to be choosy.

Yeah, this is like the inventor that wanted to use floating booms to clean up the ocean... Totally impossible

I essentially just said the same thing in another reply before I read this one.

I don’t think growing more trees for sequestering is, alone, going to work, due to the sheer scale. Growing trees itself is great. We should totally do that. But for the purpose of sequestering carbon long-term, it’s not that great.

Best we could hope for is a method to discover some new building material that we could manufacture directly from captured atmospheric carbon. Then there is a downstream market for it and the carbon gets “sequestered” as part of our economy of durable goods. Like an alternative to wood, or copper, PVC/PEX, or cement, or steel studs, or rubber, or concrete, or plastic, or hell even girders.

That also would buy us a decade or two, at least, to figure out how to effectively recycle said materials, and be free of a lot of industrial sources of ancient carbon.

Then there still is still a need to expend tons of energy disposing it in a way to not have it re-release in a few hundred thousand years.

The scale is insane to comprehend. We would essentially have to manufacture the equivalent of every pound of coal that’s ever been burned to get to pre-industrial levels, while also consuming as little fossil fuels as possible. I do not think it is possible to do so with trees alone unless we have a lot of cheap green power. Because ultimately some entity, be it government or corporation or philanthropist, will have to pay for it.

And then there is the issue of land rights for where you’re gonna dump all of the captured carbon. That’s a problem either way. I hope we start discovering some new post-space-age reclaimed-carbon-based building materials. That’s probably the best we could hope for. Then there is a huge downstream market for captured carbon which means way less ancient carbon being pulled up into the cycle, and hopefully we can get start regrowing back some old-growth forests and continue to sustainably harvest old wood.

I’m not poo-pooing this technology. It’s super important for us to invest and scale up carbon capture methods. But it can’t be expected to be immediately economically viable. It’s still very immature. Thats not a bad thing. That just means it needs time (and funding) to mature.

The trees got buried in oxygen-free peat bogs where decomposers could not survive.