If you look at his further posts, his positions are fabricated worst case scenario. For example he suggests that there is no point in planting trees because you're going to drive there in your SUV and then come home and run your AC. This might be true for some people, but it's not for me as my house doesn't have AC and I don't own an SUV. I car pool or drive a prius to plant trees. Also we're not planting trees in places that are then harvested.
When I see people who are anti-tree planting, I wonder if there is some authoritarian predilections at play and anything that doesn't result in central control or provide some mechanism for rent seeking or corruption is going to get down played.
The reality is that if you go and work with your local land management folks who can give you guidance on the types of trees and where to plant them, then going out and spending a weekend putting fifty trees in the ground, will give you quite a nice reduction for the CO2 emissions necessary to plant them. What's more is trees reproduce on their own. If you get a tree into the ground it will likely produce two additional trees over its lifetime if not more.
Where do you go to plant trees such that you can be certain the trees won't just be cut down in a few years, and also don't simply displace other trees that would otherwise grow?
Also, do you keep track of the trees to make sure they actually grow? Just planting the seed or even a sapling is far from sufficient to ensure that carbon sequestration occurs. Young trees are food for a variety of animals and insects. Do you know what fraction of the trees you plant actually reach maturity? I've seen estimates that far fewer than one in five do.
So... no where? Where I live you either live in an apartment or in a house that is 5 feet away from neighboring houses in all directions. What percentage of the population is rich enough to own empty land that they can plants trees on?
Maybe sounds too much like spouting from the climate change denier camp?
Which I am the opposite of.
There are a lot of flower & daisy soft solutions to C02.
Drive to the suburban forest in your SUV, plant 100 trees that will inevitably be cut down long before they have a carbon negative impact, come home and run your AC.
You're still running 1000/1 in negative C02 balance.
Vs finds ways to dramatically cut use, double down on investigative hard solutions like nuclear and major infrastructure projects like mass transport, car banning, new taxation on major freight (sea and road) to force efficiency adoption etc.
Lots of hard solutions are readily available to solving the problem, but by definition they're hard.
We've gotta get past the argument pattern of "don't reduce consumption; sequester!" and "don't sequester; reduce consumption!" A lot of both are needed.
I agree with the point that planting 100 trees should not leave anyone feeling they've done their part. Repeating the math until we're blue in the face is what helps there I guess.
But convincing the entire population of the world to set their thermostat 1 degree higher during the summer months would have a 1000x multiple impact on a 40x shorter time scale than if every one of those people planted a tree.
The spirit of my comment is that in general people LOVE the path of least resistance.
Ask the average person about combatting climate change and their response is "plant more trees".
Because that's easy, shit you can pay the gardener to do it or donate $10 to a plant the tree collective and feel instant gratification with no sacrifice.
Vs the highest possible impact solution which is cutting personal consumption - even a little bit!
You can easily plant 1000 trees to cover some of the people who won't bother, but setting your thermostat 1000 degrees higher in the summer won't do anything more.
This is all well and good, except that you cannot easily plant 1000 trees and ensure they continue to exist in mature form forever. At least, you cannot for most values of "you." Maintaining 1000 mature trees is not a trivial matter.
I wonder about this too - all these charities for planting trees or renting carbon scrubbers or buying carbon offsets, they all have a certain level of capacity after which they'd be sold out. So buying carbon offsets don't really offset all your carbon.
> But convincing the entire population of the world to set their thermostat 1 degree higher
This confused me for longer than I'd care to admit, but now that I get it, I'd just say that a much smaller proportion of 'the entire population of the world' - even the developed world - has AC than it might seem to an American perspective.
Trees can keep running for 40-100 years using your figures. Governments can compulsory purchase and designate regions as wilderness or reserve, and require region appropriate planting. Perhaps to resemble former natural forest.
You can't ask people to set their thermostat 1 degree warmer every year for that 40-100 years. You can expect there to be scope for continued tree planting for decades.
Neither is a sole solution, but both are part of a holistic, reasoned and coordinated journey to carbon neutrality.
"Drive to the suburban forest in your SUV, plant 100 trees that will inevitably be cut down long before they have a carbon negative impact, come home and run your AC. You're still running 1000/1 in negative C02 balance."
So do 1000 times that, and don't plant them in a suburban forest but one that will stay around longer. Or contribute money to tree planting initiatives who do it right.
Each apple, each year, for the last 40 years, that somebody grow in their garden, is an apple less that must be moved burning gasoline from Idaho or Colorado to a market near you, one piece of fruit less that must be waxed and wrapped in plastic and put in one-use wood boxes, before to be moved again to your house, probably burning a litte more gaz.
I didn't downvote, but I suspect those counterpoints are second-order and very minor compared to the sequestration rates of a tree itself. I can't bring myself to believe that because of those counterpoints, every new tree on average sequesters zero carbon. The important stat is on average, how much carbon does each new tree sequester; that's what drives the models.
I'm pretty confident OP up there also loves trees. But we're at a point where we need to calculate efforts and allocate resources wisely. Maybe we need fewer forests and more nuclear. idk.
I know for a fact every tree I can plant with my bare hands would be carbon negative, because I did the math.
