Yea, I hate generation wars, but it seems to be increasingly true that most of the economic value created in the last, say, 50 years, was currently either 1. captured by a few extremely wealthy individuals, or 2. locked up in the retirement accounts and real estate of people over 60 years old.
I feel like we (the younger generations) are all sitting here holding our breath in this stasis, waiting for that generation to die, and hoping those portfolios somehow get magically spread across the population. I don't know what mechanism is available to do that spread, but if it doesn't happen, where will all that locked up wealth go?
I'm sure a lot of it is already spent in the form of reverse-mortgages on homes.
Off the top of my head, for a given amount of wood biomass, you can get about a 70% ratio of product to fuel if you use a high-efficiency wood fire to cook the wood itself.
Then you can take that carbon, bury it in decommissioned open pit mines, or use it as a soil additive (biochar), where it will sequester the carbon for thousands of years and act as a fertilizer.
You could also pair the biochar with a fast-growing swamp tree (willow?), re-incorporating the char into the areas around the willow plantation to create a sort of artificial peat bog which could also be useful for water storage and filtration.