'I don't plant trees' says Bill Gates. Oh no — he buries them (this is not a spoof)

Do you bury your trees when they die?

Guyana, a small country in South America, is 91 percent rainforest. When the BBC's Stephen Sackur interviewed Guyana's president a few weeks ago, however, he wasn't interested in trees but in oil.

According to climate devotees, Guyana has been afflicted with the “resource curse,” ever since ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil reserves in Guyanan waters estimated to hold some 11 billion barrels. Sackur, apparently, would prefer that the oil stayed beneath the waves rather than contributing to “climate change.”

President Dr. Irfaan Ali was having none of it, countering that Guyana already achieves “net zero” due to its trees.

Sackur could have countered with, “But do you also bury your trees when they die?” He didn't, but then, he may not be one of the “science people” like Bill Gates.

This is not a spoof.

Some people really like trees; Bill Gates doesn't

Gates was recently interviewed too, not by the BBC but by the New York Times. He described some of the measures he takes to ensure that he, personally, lives a net zero life. Trees didn't feature except as objects of derision.

[Gates] I don't use some of the less proven approaches [of carbon dioxide offsetting].

[NYT] Such as… ?

[Gates] I don't plant trees.

[NYT] Uuuggh… There's a lot of people who are very enamored of trees … Some people would even say that if you planted enough trees, it would take care of the climate issue altogether.

[Gates] And that's complete nonsense … I mean are we the science people or are we the idiots?

Dying trees cannot be left to rot in peace

Scientists have been examining ways to reduce carbon dioxide emissions for decades. In the 1990s, some of those on the climate bandwagon realized that they could repurpose the carbon capture technologies already in existence (used to increase fuel production) to squirrel away the CO2, not for a rainy day, but ideally forever. This process is usually referred to as sequestration or CCS (carbon capture and storage).

In the early years of this century, the science took another twist when it was decided that not only carbon dioxide could be sequestered, but also the carbon itself. An article published in Springer Science describes the process:

A carbon sequestration strategy has recently been proposed in which a forest is actively managed, and a fraction of the wood is selectively harvested and stored to prevent decomposition.

The article envisions this method being used “on half of the world's forested land” in order to offset emissions. Apparently, while trees absorb CO2 during their growing stage, during their decaying stage they leach it back out. To prevent that from happening, scientists and interested others want to stop trees from rotting, which entails imprisoning them in “wood vaults” without air or water. The vault is covered with a geotextile liner and then with a layer of soil, upon which vegetation can be allowed to grow.

Reuters to the rescue

Kodama Systems, founded in 2021, is based entirely around the concept of burying trees so that they can't make problems for the planet. When the news broke recently that Bill Gates had invested $6.6 million in Kodama (via his Breakthrough Energy Ventures) and that acres of forest were under threat, establishment media hastened to clarify that it wasn't what people thought.

Gates isn't funding massive deforestation, Reuters Fact Check explained, conveniently latching on to one article that claimed that Kodama planned to “mow down millions of trees.” 

Reuters labeled the article “misleading" and explained that all Kodama was doing was “thinning” forests to prevent forest fires, and then “handling throwaway biomass” (by burying it underground). Reuters spends a while elaborating on how important thinning is, but if you persevere long enough, down toward the end of the article you'll find some interesting facts.

My tax money is being used to bury trees?

It's not (just) Bill Gates, it turns out. It's the United States government which is behind this massive tree-burying project.

The U.S. Forest Service announced it was granting Kodama Systems $250,000 for a Spring 2023 project, still in pilot stage, that will create a financial and legal structure to allow the “transport of biomass from forest thinning projects to engineered earthen wood vaults where the biomass is buried in arid environments, sequestering the carbon for centuries.”

The company has presented these vaults as a cheaper, carbon-beneficial alternative to piling or burning the leftovers of the thinning process that are not fit for sale.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service is quite open about what it's up to. They stress not the importance of thinning forests, but the supposed financial benefits of the process:

Financing Wood Vaults for Forest Resilience (Pilot) – California:

$250,000 to Kodama Systems Inc., in collaboration with Blue Forest and The Trust for Public Land, to pilot a new financial approach that leverages the carbon value of wood residue rather than burning it at a cost and emitting carbon, as frequently occurs...

The carbon removal credits generated from the avoided emissions will be sold into the voluntary carbon market to cover project costs, service debt and provide financial returns.

Gates isn't the only interested backer to see the potential. The payments company Stripe is also funding Kodama. Joanna Klitzke, procurement and ecosystem strategy lead for Stripe, told MIT Technology Review that,

… biomass burial has the potential to become a low-cost, high-scale approach for carbon removal, though there is a need for further investigation into its long-term durability.

Laughing all the way to the bank?

Kodama (the word means “tree spirits” in Japanese) insists that its mission isn't to make money for its shareholders (it's officially a non-profit) but to “restore forests for future generations.” They make no mention of the potential ecological risks of thinning forests and burying huge amounts of wood, although MIT Technological Review notes that dead wood rotting in forests provides important nutrients for the soil.

Kodama, like Stripe, prefers to focus on the good, and they are upbeat about how burying trees is good for everyone concerned, stressing that,

… there is a financial incentive in moving this material to storage facilities and preventing excess carbon emission into the atmosphere.

Just what is this financial incentive?

Now, how can we persuade people to fork out $1 trillion per year?

Ning Zeng, the lead author of the article mentioned above which describes carbon sequestration (that is, burying trees), estimates that the process can potentially cost as little (or as much, depending on your perspective) as $100 per ton.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration recently estimated that global energy-related CO2 emissions total 33,621.5 million metric tons per year. Burning one ton of carbon produces 3.67 tons of carbon dioxide, meaning that each year, 9,161.2 million tons of carbon are turned into carbon dioxide.

So, at $100 per ton, burying all that nasty carbon will only cost $916.12 billion, or almost $1 trillion. Every single year.

After detailing the various aspects of the entire sequestration process that make it so expensive, MIT Technological Review notes that,

… the climate emissions produced by removing, transporting, and burying wood will need to be carefully tallied and counted against the total carbon stored.

Ning Zeng, however, has another approach:

The economics of WHS [wood harvest and storage] or any other carbon sequestration strategy is inextricably linked to the price of carbon — how much is a ton of sequestered carbon worth. The higher the price of carbon, the less limiting are the costs of WHS.

It would be mere conjecture to suggest that what he is referring to resembles in any way what Bill Gates describes when he advocates steep carbon taxes. However, if companies (and private individuals) are ever legally required at some point in the future to offset their carbon consumption, services provided by companies such as Kodama might become more in-demand.

Hands off my trees!

So, if you thought you could plant a tree to offset your carbon footprint, think again. You might be better advised to bury your tree instead. But how many people are going to want to bury their trees?

Luckily for the U.S. government, they own almost a third of America's forests, so they don't need to ask anyone's permission to condemn lots of trees to death. Also luckily for the U.S. government, they have lots of money (yours) to pay for all those burials. However, it appears that this time around, at least, American citizens won't be footing the majority of the bill.

This is because of the nature of U.S. forests as opposed to forests in other places around the world — such as Guyana. Ning Zeng's research paper notes that there are,

… constraints [that] will limit the potential of WHS to only a fraction of its theoretical potential.

Practically speaking, neither Kodama nor anyone else is allowed or able to just turn up in a privately owned or government forest in the U.S. and start burying trees. Some forest land is “protected for biological diversity,” Zeng writes. Other tree-rich land is very hilly or hard to access, pushing the cost of felling and transporting way up. Kodama and other tree-burying companies may also face competition from lumber companies or paper manufacturers who want to use the wood, not bury it.

To make this easier to understand, Zeng presents the challenges in pictorial form.

Tropical forests are identified as the most promising areas for tree-burying investment, and even when problems such as being unable to grab trees from grazing land or from protected regions are taken into account, tropical regions are still the most attractive proposition for Kodama and fellows.

Where are those desirable tropical forests? Most are situated in places like South America and Africa, whose forests are the most likely to be targeted by companies seeking to make a profit from carbon sequestration projects. The United States, Canada, and Europe will remain relatively untouched. As Zeng writes,

The potential is high in the tropics: South America could sequester 32% of the world total, while Africa can contribute 21%, Asia 16%, North America 12%, Oceania 10%, and Europe (including Russia) 8%. 

Made in China, Buried in Africa

For centuries, the developed world has been acquiring the natural resources of poorer, less industrialized nations. If carbon sequestration takes off as Bill Gates intends, many of these resources will be not acquired but rather buried. No one really knows what this will mean for the environment, for farming, or for the people who live in, near, or off the produce of these forests.

However, climate hysteria has effectively silenced the voices of those who speak out in the West, to the extent that 29 hectares of ancient, biodiverse forest are currently being felled in Germany with nary a protest from the environment groups — and why? Because wind turbines are to take the trees' place.

And if even this doesn't help?

Professor Bill McGuire is a climate scientist. But lately, he hasn't been focusing on trees. Instead, he's focused on people.

If I am brutally honest, the only realistic way I see emissions falling as fast as they need to, to avoid catastrophic #climate breakdown, is the culling of the human population by a pandemic with a very high fatality rate.

McGuire deleted this tweet following the backlash. But perhaps we should be happy that Bill Gates & Co. are investing in burying trees, rather than people.