Ah, the famous “plant trees” distraction scam, although a trillion may be closer to the right scale of an initiative than usual.
Reforestation is more of a solution for biodiversity loss than climate change, although the mistake that can be made is a quick fix of just one or a few species of trees, which are not going to succeed in the long term. It seems reproducing nature is a lot, lot harder than destroying it was.
Planting trees is not a substitute for weaning the world off burning oil, coal and gas, the chief cause of global warming, Crowther emphasized. “None of this works without emissions cuts,” he said. Nor is it easy or realistic to think the world will suddenly go on a tree-planting binge, although many groups have started , Crowther said.
That guy is ‘Crowder’.
Ah yes! thank you
well that’s just greenwashing. Along with techno-solutionnism it’s the next step right after denial for these people. 1. pretend there isn’t a problem, 2. when 1. doesn’t work anymore, pretend younre going to solve it
Trillion just sounds like an outrageously large number an eight year old would use in an argument. Why not a zillion trees? Why not infinity trees?
A babaduptjillion trees.
But Dr. Evil, such a number doesn’t exist!
You have my demands…
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People in here whinging about the U.S. govt not doing anything about climate change now bitching when they finally do go along with something. 🤦 Take your blessings when you get them, people
If you read the article, you’ll see how that’s not actually a solution, let alone a good faith proposal.
I think the term you were looking for there is “good faith”.
Thanks. Stupid autocorrect.
No worries, I figured that was probably what happened but you never know. Haha
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Sounds socialist to me?
surely they would arrange for billions in funding, arrange some scheme/scam where a bunch of different people could embezzle as much of it as possible, then pay a for-profit company an excessive amount to do the planting.
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Look, I’m all for reforestation efforts, and if Rs are willing to start a large environmental project like that, great. But, it’s really not a solution for climate change on a global scale. At best it’s a repair effort for the damage already done.
Even if they get the scale right, and somehow manage to plant and cultivate a trillion trees successfully, trees are more of a short-term carbon sink when you’re talking about a geological time scale. They die, they burn, they get chopped down. When that happens, the carbon is liberated again. Sure, you can plant more trees, but all you’re doing is changing the equilibrium point for atmospheric CO2. With each gallon of gas burned, more CO2 enters the cycle that would have otherwise remained in the ground long term. Trying to solve climate change by reforestation is like trying to fill a leaky bucket with water. No matter how much you pour in there, at some point you’ll have to stop the leak.
The answer to climate change is the same, yesterday, today, and forever: long term carbon sinks (fossil fuels and chemical weathering) cannot liberate CO2 at the rate we’re currently running. Reduction is the only real answer.
“Just think of all that lumber our donors can produce!”
Good idea maybe
Grow a trillion fast growing trees, and store the lumber someplace where it can’t release its stored carbon, climate change solved.
Let’s do the math.
Crude oil is 85% carbon. Dry wood is about 50% carbon. Average oil production worldwide in the last 20 years is about 73million barrels per day or 26.6 billion barrels per year.
So just in oil, we produced around 26.6*20 = 532 billion barrels of oil. At a weight of 136kg/barrel, that equals 72billion tonnes of oil. Because it’s 85% carbon, that equals 61.5billion tonnes of pure carbon.
Converting this into wood would require 123 billion tonnes of wood. At an average density of 650kg/m3 for Oak, which grows reasonably fast, that equals 189 billion cubic meters of wood. That’s a solid 1 meter thick square of wood with an edge length of 434km that we would need to STORE indefinitely to offset just the crude oil of the last 20 years. That’s 53% of the surface area of Germany in 1 meter thick wood and every year we’d additionally need to grow, harvest and store enough wood to cover 46% of Wales in 1 meter of solid dry wood.
Seems doable 🤣
Yikes. All at once? That’ll never work.
