Give a Hoot: Write a Book
If carbon emissions are really hurting the environment, then trees are cleaning up the environment, and just writing a book can help the environment. So can building houses and furniture.
Trees breath in carbon dioxide and sunlight and breath out Oxygen. In the process, the tree takes water and using photosynthesis it creates the building blocks for a tree. This is how the tree grows taller and wider. This is how it also produces leaves.
Now, if that tree falls over in the forest, it just rots, releasing a lot of that carbon back into the atmosphere. Some of it gets trapped underground as dirt piles up on top of it, but most trees stay very exposed after dying. If the tree stays upright after dying, it is taking up space that a new tree could be using to grow. If that tree dies in a forest fire, all that carbon gets released back into the atmosphere and it takes a long time for many forests to get back to where they were in carbon content before the fire.
But if that tree is chopped down and then replaced with a new seedling (like modern American lumber corporations do), the chopped-down tree represents carbon that is trapped indefinitely. Why indefinitely? Because people generally care for wood products very well. We coat them in paints that help show their natural colors while keeping the wood from ever decaying because Oxygen can't get back into the wood to break it down (think kitchen tables). We also take shavings from creating our wood products and turn them into more wood products: particle board is just glued-together wood chips that we use to make cheaper book shelves. Ans speaking of book shelves, we typically take care of books, even when they are dime-store paperback romance novels (basically garbage from the outset). And when we are done using our wood products, we typically do not burn them, but instead bury them in landfills, thus trapping that carbon underground.
By burying these products in landfills, that carbon gets trapped underground from now on. Some of the weirder ideas I have heard for carbon scrubbers on power plants is to just pump the carbon dioxide into underground aquifers. These aquifers are a couple miles underground and will not be disturbed for a long time. However, all we are doing is creating underground soda water. How is burying our wood products any different.
By the way, the title for this blog is a bastardization of a phrase I got from "The Simpsons". In the early seasons of the show, Krusty the Klown had a reading program titled "Give a Hoot: Read a Book". Which, of course, is a bastardization of at least one other program: "Give a Hoot: Don't pollute". I found that my adjustment to this phrase to be very fitting for this topic, so I used it.