CO2 emissions from Canada 2023 on the same order of magnitude as all North American fossil fuel CO2 emission. (Nature Magazine) The effect on U.S. air quality of recent fires was pernicious (“Air quality: 1980s Ponderosa smoking section”).
How about a solar-powered robot that can go through a Canadian forest, pick out every fourth tree, cut it down, and bury it? The idea has sort of been explored, but without the robot angle, in a different Nature Magazine article: “Optimal spatiotemporal thinning schemes combined with wood vaulting could maximize the forest biomass carbon sink in China” (2025).
ChatGPT suggests some improvements to the scheme:
It also says that simple burial isn’t sufficient. One must construct a “vault” that minimizes infiltration of oxygen and water.
Here’s a July 28 map of “out of control” fires in Canada (constantly updated source):
The idea is dumb, you say? How dumb is it compared to building millions of robots to somehow terraform Mars into a livable planet? Speaking of Mars, let’s have a look at SpaceX stock:
Who bought at $202 based on I am buying a lot of SpaceX stock; what will it be worth? and SpaceX is worth $63/share according to the most expert experts?
Finally, what about the fires in the Islamic world? The New York Times says that the burning is unprecedented. Could forests in the Dar al-Islam reasonably be thinned? My impression was that the pre-Islamic (“legacy”) Europeans already did as much cutting within what used to be their forests as was conceivably reasonable to do. It’s not a Canadian-style situation where there aren’t roads into the forests, right?
We could ask my ex and her much older Boomer husband (AKA the Evil Queen and Cooked Prince Charming, complete with matching skin flaps on their arms) to stop driving a Class A RV, would probably make a measurable drop in the concentration of CO_2 in a couple years. She took a similar trip to Phil’s this summer to the Pacific Northwest (you might have seen them in Olympia NP Phil, they look like giant demented flying squirrels and drove a rig larger than Bon Jovi’s tour bus). Probably took 600 gallons of fuel (more than Neo Hippy has used in 20 years) back and forth from their charming village in Florida.
Hard to live happily ever after darlin’, with planet roasting fools at the helm. (Greta, we need you back. I forgive you, but imma have to run a background check on you again with your latest antics.)
First Elon should bring intelligent life to Canada
Just chop down all the trees in the world & build highrise condos. That’ll get rid of all the CO2 by getting rid of that pesky carbon fixation process. The $billion trillion large language models say this is the way.
Elon isn’t colonizing Mars anymore. Now, the future is large language models.