I’m not sure I agree. There’s efficiency gains to be had in the tech, but I think it’s better not to count your chickens before they hatch. In arid climates where trees struggle to grow it makes sense to deploy carbon capture tech, but I think there’s a also a profit motive that muddies the best practices. Nobody gets rich by replanting forests and leaving them alone, but there’s a lot of money to be made in these power hungry facilities.

At the core trees are just a more advanced technology in many ways. They have biological processes that don’t only remove the carbon but build it into useful timber; plus they’re entirely solar powered by default.

There’s also the potential to combine high tech solutions with our existing flora, either through genetic modification or specialized sensor based agriculture. Something isn’t low tech or backwards just because it involves plants, they’ve been scrubbing carbon for millions of years and are valuable tools.