Rather than burn coal to smelt steel beams, we could start opting for more timber frame construction and growing more trees, capturing carbon out of the air and turning it into housing.
A very rough ballpark estimate is that you'd need to use at least as much timber as we've mined coal. Probably a lot more since coal has a higher carbon content than timber and we've also burned plenty of oil and gas. That's a mind boggling amount of timber.
