A leading idea to fight global climate change is to permanently remove some of the carbon dioxide building up in the atmosphere.

Here’s one way to do it: deep-six much of the world’s agricultural waste.

Plants remove CO2 from the air through photosynthesis, incorporating the carbon in their tissues. So dumping corn stalks, wheat straw and other crop residues into the deep ocean, where cold and lack of oxygen would keep them from decomposing, would in effect sequester atmospheric CO2 on a time scale of millennia.

Image Crop waste burial may be a more efficient means of carbon sequestration than other methods. Credit... Aaron Packard/Bloomberg News

In a world that celebrates high technology, the idea sounds too simple to succeed. But Stuart E. Strand of the University of Washington and Gregory Benford of the University of California, Irvine, concluded that crop waste storage would make more sense than other proposals for carbon sequestration, including gas storage, sequestration directly in the soil, planting of more forests to take up more CO2, and fertilizing the oceans to foster more algae growth. Their findings are published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.