From seeds to skyscrapers, these wooden towers are eating CO2

[NNadir]

1. Nevertheless, it is useful to have a sense of scale for this sort of thing.

Currently, the world is dumping about 35 billion tons of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide per year.

This represents about 9.55 billion tons of carbon when corrected for the molecular weight of CO2 compared to carbon.

All of the straw left over from all the grain grown in China amounts to about 270 million tons, or about 3% of all the carbon dumped in the atmosphere in the form of CO2, and corresponding to about 670 million tons of straw, treated as pure carbohydrate.

These figures may be calculated in the paper found here: Controlling Air Pollution from Straw Burning in China Calls for Efficient Recycling (Bing Li†*, et al Environ. Sci. Technol., 2012, 46 (15), pp 7934–7936)

The link in the OP reports that a 22 story wooden building using this technology would sequester 3 million kilos of carbon, or roughly 3000 tons.

Thus in order to sequester the carbon dioxide released as dangerous fossil fuel waste, we would need to build 3.2 million 22 story buildings using this technology every year.

This calls into question what a "sustainable forest" is.

Three million kilos of carbon corresponds to 250 million moles of carbon

As the name "carbohydrate" implies - even if it is structurally nonsense - this requires 250 million moles of water incorporated into the wood, ignoring evaporation, transpiration, run-off etc.

This corresponds (again only water incorporated into the structure of the wood) to 4.5 million tons of water per building. To build 3.2 million buildings of this type would require about 14 trillion tons of water, never mind run off and evaporation, fresh water, never mind wood that is lost to disease, fires and heat waves.

I believe that future generations will need to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere because of our irresponsibility and airhead useless approaches to addressing climate change.

To the extent it is sequestered as wood, I'm for it, so long as the entire planet is not deforested Easter Island style.

But calculations of this type offer a caveat on how difficult this engineering problem is. There are no facile solutions; particularly when each person living shuffles on to generations not even born yet, the responsibility for addressing the crisis. We have no rational plan to stop using dangerous fossil fuels. None.

That's reality.