Timber cities ‘could cut 100bn tons of CO2 emissions by 2100’

“Set increasingly stringent standards for carbon emissions across the six biggest emitting sectors, and pretty soon you’re in carbon-negative territory and working your way back to 350.” “The six biggest emitters being?” “Industry, transport, land use, buildings, transportation, and cross-sector.” “Cross-sector?” “Everything not in the other five.

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The potential for hemp (a strain of Cannabis sativa) as a building material has been known for centuries, because it is a material that combines fast cultivation with strength.

But more recently its ability to capture more than twice its own weight in carbon – twice as fast as traditional forestry – has come into focus. By some estimates, hemp can c... See more

We can proceed fairly fast with the displacement of coal-fired electricity by natural gas (when produced and transported without significant methane leakage, it has a substantially lower carbon intensity than coal) and by expanding solar and wind electricity generation. We can move away from SUVs and accelerate mass-scale deployment of electric car

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For the trillion-tree project, something on the order of 3.5 million square miles of new forest would be needed. That’s an expanse of woods roughly the size of the United States, including Alaska. Take that much arable land out of production and millions could be pushed toward starvation. As O. Táíwò, a professor at Georgetown, put it recently, the

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