To be fair, corn is much faster to regrow than trees if we’re talking about this vs. paper.
Hemp as well. I’m certain we could make some sort of plastics with hemp, we can make practically everything from hemp. The added benefit of hemp is that it stores 85% of the excessive amount of carbon it consumes in its roots, so we can do whatever we want with the rest of the plant, harvest the roots, compress them into a cube much denser than water, drop them into the Mariana Trench, and not worry about that carbon for a few hundred million years.
I like cannabis sativa for it’s medicinal and psychoactive properties, but I love cannabis sativa for its material, ecological, and agricultural properties. It’s a damn fine plant
I’ve done the math, and we could totally reverse anthropogenic climate change with a reasonable amount of hemp production. It could be done in as little as a decade with an unreasonable amount of production. Something like 5 billion acres of production per year, but if we got just 500 million acres into production, and threw away the excess carbon, we would wipe out the excess carbon we’ve put into the air over the last 12,000 years in just over a century.
At that point we could scale back production to use the hemp as a global thermostat, slowly adjusting the average temperature by a hundredth of a degree every decade or so.