Midjourney generated image of seedling with circuitry and sparks

We Have The Right Carbon Drawdown Technology & It’s All Natural

Pulling excess fossil carbon out of the air is required and nature is the only scalable technology for it

Michael Barnard

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Published in

The Future is Electric

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5 min read

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Oct 10

There’s an amazing nanotechnology carbon-capture solution. It comes in a tiny, dirt cheap package. Strew hundreds of them across open ground and a few find moist, mineral-rich soil. They use internally stored energy to send threads questing down and up.

The upward threads make little solar panels that take energy from the sun. The ones going down seek out necessary water and minerals for growth. The packages on deeper soil that get sunlight press ever upward and downward, drawing more energy, water and nutrients from the air and soil.

They build stiff, load-bearing structures with complex molecules of hydrogen, oxygen and carbon. They get the carbon from the air. Some of it goes through their downward seeking filaments and connects to mushroom networks underground. The mushroom networks put it into long-lasting chemical structures.

When they get big enough, they make more of the tiny packages that they come in and spread them without us having to do a thing. The tiny nanotechnology packages that make these huge, carbon-capture solutions are free to us.

The carbon-capture solution has a great name. We call it a tree. That’s why planting a lot of trees is one of the short list of climate solutions that will work.

The earth used to have about six trillion of them, per a Swiss-led study published in the journal Science in 2019. We’ve cut down about half of that number. We continue to cut them down unnecessarily in many places in the world.

Not only do trees cheaply draw excess carbon out of the air, they provide many other benefits.

China has planted well over 40 billion trees since 1990 in an area larger than the size of France, and has pledged to plant or conserve 70 billion by 2030. Why? For a few reasons. In some of their less forward-looking periods, they revered subsistence farming peasants and forced a lot of people into the country side. In order to survive, the people stripped the land of calories for heat and food to keep their families alive. There is a lot of…