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red_pepper OP wrote

The article is somewhat more optimistic than I am.

BECCS at the scale required to fight climate change is completely unsustainable. The amount of water, land, and fertilizer is mind boggling and would put us over other mass extinction tipping points. As this article discusses:

BECCS at such a scale would lead to millions of square miles of forest loss and large pressures on biodiversity, the study found. Meanwhile, the huge plantations would require tens of millions of tons of nitrogen fertilizer that would alter flow of this chemical around the Earth, and huge amounts of water — over a trillion tons of it each year.

“We would increase freshwater consumption by biomass plantations by an amount that more than doubled agricultural uses currently,” said Heck.

Assisted migration, the more sustainable cousin of BECCS, does not have the chops to actually fight off global warming. It's still worth saving biodiversity and making our forests more resilient against climate change, but at best it can just ensure that forests don't become net carbon emitters in the future. I worry that carbon removal is a pipe dream.

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