THE idea of capturing the carbon dioxide from fossil fuels and then storing it out of harms way is well established, and has been strongly supported by the coal and gas industries, though they've still to develop it on a large scale.

Even if it worked it could only apply to an intensive source of CO2 production, such as a big coal fired power station, and all UK research was scrapped in 2015 with the Yorkshire White Rose and Peterhead schemes abandoned.

The sensible alternative would be to prevent the problem arising initially, and that means encouraging the ways to lock away CO2 that already happen naturally, and there are a number of opportunities.

A healthy, organic, microbially rich and deep soil contains up to one hundred times as much CO2 as the atmosphere above it which is why we really must revise some of the farming practices that are dependent on chemical fertilizers and enthusiastic machine use.

However, without noticing we're faced with captured carbon every day, already removed from the atmosphere for a century or more. We're surrounded by examples, and they're called trees. I can see a monster of a sycamore out of my window; it was large over fifty years ago, and it's now about eighty feet high and still doing its job.

Half of such a tree is carbon, 650 kg of carbon in every cubic metre, with harder woods, like oak, up to 1,000 kilos. One per cent is in the leaves, 11 per cent in the branches, 62 percent in the trunk, with the roots having a surprising 26 percent.

The fact that a CO2 molecule has oxygen atoms as well as a carbon one means that one tonne of carbon as wood is made from almost four tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere, so it's an excellent way of locking it up so it can't influence the climate.

Rather than spend billions on complicated energy consuming technology planting millions of trees is a sure way of taking CO2 out of the atmosphere for years to come. India will plant over two billion fruit trees alongside its roads by 2030, and we would do well to pay farmers to re-plant the moors and hills and return them to the wooded state that was normal before man cut them down, and sheep nibbled young ones to death. A bonus would be reduced flooding.

Not only are schemes like the Forest of Bradford helping, on the way to a million trees, but the floorboards, stairs and roof timbers in my house are over a century old and going strong, so all future houses and furniture should be made from wood, as in Scandinavia.