>Soil is extremely good at absorbing Carbon Dioxide. Isn't it why there is so little CO2 in the atmosphere (0.04%)? We just need to make sure the process does indeed happen.
Nonsense hand waving. Nobody has a coherent plan for how to "just" make that happen. The people who think they have a coherent plan haven't opened up excel or a napkin to do some preliminary math about the scale involved.
One of the major problems we have is that this amazing carbon sink is being destroyed, there have been quite a few years where slash and burn in rainforests has competed with the burning of fuels as the major source of carbon emissions. We face a major challenge to halt that, but to actually reverse it entirely and aim for a radical recreation and expansion seems ambitious. My understanding was that rainforests take hundreds, perhaps thousands of years to develop.
The problem is that by focusing on rainforests, we also unfairly target some of the poorest countries on earth. Coming from westerners, who essentially deforested an entire continent (Europe) and chopped down and replanted another one (US/Canada), this message is highly hypocritical. If you're a poor farmer making $3000/year in Brazil or Indonesia you don't give two shits about what some latte-sipping American thinks about the rainforest, you're worried about feeding your family and getting your kids a good education.
The solution is to actually subsidize these farms out of chopping down the rainforest. If you pay the farmer $5k to not slash and burn the rainforest so they can plant their crops there, they won't because that income is almost as much as they would make anyway. The problem is, this doesn't really work at scale. But that's economics; if we truly valued the rain forest as much as we said we did, we would be willing to pay to keep it around (like Norway actually does).
Hire 1 billion people to do the remediation work. Hire another 100 million people to do the science to figure out what proper remediation work looks like. Hire another 100 million people to design video games that walk the 1 billion workers through the process, and can accommodate differences in IQ, learning style, and work life needs. Then hire an additional 100 million people who will document the workers lives, and create media experiences to fund the effort. The work can also be funded by creating eco-resort experiences, selling food byproducts, etc.
No need for advanced technology, just very detailed instructional games paired with good quality basic tools and 1 billion people worth of labor.
Seems perfectly actionable to me. You just have to start with four people: the worker, the scientist, the game designer, and the media producer, and iterate until it's working well and then infect the global population virally.
I'd agree with you if it was 1950, we'd have a very difficult time of it going through traditional political/social channels. But it's 2017, and with software the problem seems very tractable.
Nonsense hand waving. Nobody has a coherent plan for how to "just" make that happen. The people who think they have a coherent plan haven't opened up excel or a napkin to do some preliminary math about the scale involved.