Trees for a Complete Solution to Extra CO2 and Climate Change

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A new study of trees from the journal Science indicates that added trees could store 830 billion tons of CO2. The world has room for 900 million hectares of trees. This would be over 1 trillion trees added to the existing 3 trillion trees.

The additional trees could be cut down in 20 years and the wood stores the CO2 unless they decay or are burned. Another batch of trees could be grown. If a breed of faster growing trees are used then every 12-15 years a batch of a trillion trees would offset all of the CO2 produced by civilization.

The best (non-drone) tree restoration projects are restoring billions of trees at 30 cents a tree. This means 1 trillion trees would be $300 billion. Drone planting of trees can use 4000 drones, and 2000 people to plant 10 billion trees per year at about $1 billion per year.

It might be triple this amount to cut down the trees and to use the wood. The value of the wood could offset the cost of cutting them down. A very rough estimate would be $450 billion every 12 years to cut plant and cut down some faster-growing trees to offset all human CO2 and greenhouse gas production.

The researchers claim it is not a complete solution. However, if we stabilize the growth of CO2 production which is affordable and then cut down the trees every 12-20 years to sequester a fresh amount of CO2 then it is a complete solution.

The three other solutions that scale are regenerative agriculture to restore top soil, iron fertilization of the ocean and mass production of kelp at 1000 times current levels.

Most of the land suitable for restoring forests trees is in six countries —
Russia (151 million hectares),
USA (103 million hectares),
Canada (78 million),
Australia (58 million),
Brazil (50 million), and
China (40 million).

The potential for global forest cover

The restoration of forested land at a global scale could help capture atmospheric carbon and mitigate climate change. Bastin et al. used direct measurements of forest cover to generate a model of forest restoration potential across the globe (see the Perspective by Chazdon and Brancalion). Their spatially explicit maps show how much additional tree cover could exist outside of existing forests and agricultural and urban land. Ecosystems could support an additional 0.9 billion hectares of continuous forest. This would represent a greater than 25% increase in a forested area, including more than 500 billion trees and more than 200 gigatonnes of additional carbon at maturity. Such a change has the potential to cut the atmospheric carbon pool by about 25%.

The researchers used Google Earth to see what areas could support more trees, while leaving room for people and crops. Lead author Jean-Francois Bastin estimated there’s space for at least 1 trillion more trees, but it could be 1.5 trillion.

They mapped the global potential tree coverage to show that 4.4 billion hectares of canopy cover could exist under the current climate. Excluding existing trees and agricultural and urban areas, they found that there is room for an extra 900 million hectares of canopy cover, which could store 205 gigatonnes of carbon (3.67 times this weight to get CO2. CO2 molecular weight is 44 versus 12 for carbon) in areas that would naturally support woodlands and forests. This highlights global tree restoration as our most effective climate change solution to date. However, climate change will alter this potential tree coverage. The global potential canopy cover may shrink by ~223 million hectares by 2050, with the vast majority of losses occurring in the tropics. The results highlight the opportunity of climate change mitigation through global tree restoration but also the urgent need for action.

74 thoughts on “Trees for a Complete Solution to Extra CO2 and Climate Change”

  2. The silver maples have a symbiotic relationship with golden rod. The maple prings water from below with its deeper roots; the goldenrod protect the base of the tree from any encroaching competitive trees. A little genetic engineering could teach that trick to other trees. The symbiote could be a nitrogen-fixing plant such as alfalfa. Then, the alfalfa could also be forage for livestock or collected by robotic harvesters for feed concentrate. The alfalfa would provide most of the nitrogen compounds needed, and a good soil ecology should also pull some of the phosphorus needed from the dirt and rocks below.

  3. danielravennest@danielravennest at the beginning of this thread alluded to commerce flowing from the trees. Indeed, it also goes the other way in that people who plan to reap some profit from the trees will protect them from wildfires, firewood snatchers, those damn deer, and random drug-horticulture operations. That was the way it worked for the pre-Columbus native Americans, for medieval Europe, and for present-day Madagascar forests. Air dropping orphan seedlings and expecting them to survive might well be an exercise in futility.

  4. Sure nuclear can do it and the green revolution is amazing. The point is that we have yet another solution that can single-handedly do it. The right use of farmlands and forests can vastly increase the rate of bio sequestering. In this case it almost decouples population concerns from environmental concerns because people and their farming and forestry becomes the ecological solution when they are often considered the problem.
    Let us agree that we seem to be tripping over solutions at a time when people are certain the world is coming to an end. No doubt we will have to apply many solutions, including nuclear, to solve the problem. The same thing was said about the population bomb in the 70’s but the very green revolution that you mention (that involved the confluence of many technologies) defused it. Here it can happen in another way. Also biochar is usually a way to increase nutrients in soil not decrease it.

  5. ‘..8 foot high stalks in one summer..’
    The green revolution involved breeding crops to have short stems. That way they can put their energy into making food, not inedible stalks. They only grow that high to stop from being shaded out by their competitors, and we make sure that doesn’t happen. Short, sturdy stalks not only waste less energy to grow, they can carry much heavier seed-heads without breaking.
    We’d be much better off just reducing our farm areas by using high productivity techniques, and letting nature get on with sequestering the carbon undisturbed. Gathering corn stover or lumber waste for power is taking away nutrients that should go straight into the soil, for very low energy return per acre. Nuclear can supply our energy without having to scrape up every twig.

  7. We live on a thin skin between hard vacuum and molten rock, but it’s solid bedrock – even faulty California – compared to my namesake’s orbiting terraria. More ways for sudden catastrophic carnage than a coal mine. But on the less sudden, more chronic, side, have you calculated how much rock it takes to approximate the radiation shielding of a magnetosphere and a hundred miles of atmosphere ? If you put that mass on the outside of your rotating can the size of Switzerland, it will either rotate with the cylinder- adding hugely to the engineering problems – or stay stationary outside it, with potential for contact at any time. Contact = loss of atmosphere and rapid unplanned disassembly.
    You could leave all the habitats orbiting below the Van Allen belts, but then it seems kind of pointless. Instead of conquering the universe, you’ve just paid a fortune to move onto the roof of your old place.

  8. The areas where the pines are spreading are mostly tussock. Maybe they used to have native trees before the Maori burn-offs, or before the last ice age, but at the moment they’d just be replacing low density sheep country, with a few invertebrates. The main reason people don’t like them is because they’re used to the current landscape. I like that too – I spent twenty years hang gliding over it, and the lack of trees on potential landing areas was another plus – but if the climate is changing to make trees the natural biome for the area, and we have to do some heavy lifting in carbon sequestration, we might have to rethink our priorities. People say that overseas tourists won’t like it, but they’re all carbon criminals for flying here anyway 😉

  9. For really invasive stuff, do people armor their foundations if they are in an at risk area? I vaguely remember reading some people used 2mm sheet steel welded as an armor bucket as well as part of the forms for their foundation that they don’t remove, for defense against bamboo. I suppose if you wanted to avoid the corrosion, use sheet plastic and epoxy?

  10. Continued
    At the same time the remaining charcoal from the biochar process is pure carbon (the stuff that makes wood and coal burning so bad in regard to CO2 production) 

    This can be worked into the soil in order to sequester it for longer and to help the next growth cycle but it can also just be dumped in old coal mines, replacing the carbon/coal that was removed from there decades ago. The nice part about charcoal is that it does not rot.

    This type of high harvest rate forestry is essentially farming and certainly this same biochar can be done with normal farming where corn fields have much higher carbon sequestering per year than forests. Not sure of that actually but with 8 foot high stalks in one summer it is hard for a forest to compete.

    The second largest vector is carbon going into the ocean and this is where Brian’s iron fertilization comes in. Again, with such a large vector it is hard to imagine why it will only produce a one percent difference in carbon as some studies suggest.

  11. Great article. Looking at the carbon cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle It is clear that the largest vector on the cycle is carbon being sucked out to the air by land based plants, over ten times larger than man made CO2. This is good news since we are very much in control of a large portion of land based plants through forestry and agriculture. So it is good that some credible studies show that this has the potential to be a game changer. By preventing most of the carbon sequestered each year by trees from returning to the atmosphere by turning them into houses instead of having them rot on the forest floor (being burned through respiration of bacteria and termites, with a lot of methane being produced) then we have a sequestering system that is almost too powerful. We would have to be careful not to deplete the CO2 too much.
    Counter intuitively, the best way to deal with the extra wood is burn it in a biochar process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar where all the hydrocarbons get cooked off in the same process used to produce charcoal, which is a similar process to how oil is refined. You get the same refined products of tar, diesel, gasoline, propane, etc. so this could be sold to cover costs and would prevent crude oil (which is old sequestered carbon) from being pumped out of the ground and desequestered. Essentially we would be powering our cars from solar power derived from the forest.
    Continued

  12. Most of the forests that are not growing back is because of sheep farmers and other agriculture replacing the forests. Stop that and the neglected fields will return to forest on their own in a few decades. Happens all the time in New England, USA, where agriculture has almost ceased. This is why you see so many farmer’s stone walls going through the forests there, old farms returned to the forests from whence they came.

  13. The wilding pines are crowding out the native trees. Same as in the Marlborough Sounds. If we dont rip them out they’ll take over. No more native forests = no more native birds = no good.

  14. When everything is a conspiracy then life has no solutions but the quiet of the grave. At least then the talking in ones head will stop.

  15. If we are going to, as a society, not do things because God may disapprove, then Genetic Engineering is probably #55756869 on the list.

  17. Though you are assuming that there are sources of seeds in the first place.

    Once an area is totally deforested, it takes a long time for trees to make their way back from the remaining forests to cover the now available ground.

    As a classic example, England was originally heavily forested. It was largely deforested back when it was first heavily farmed back in the bronze age. England was more heavily farmed back then than any time since, I think because bronze age farming was so much less efficient that it required far more area to support a much lower population.
    Huge areas of England, now called “the moors” and so forth, are STILL largely tree free. Where will seeds come from if the nearest forest is 100 km away?

    Another issue is that you can have bistable states. Heavy forest might be stable. AND open grassland might be stable. Going from one to another might mean it won’t go back again. The area I grew up in has this behaviour. The thick forests were fairly resistant to fire. But once replaced by grassland fires were much more common, and the regular fires stop the forest from growing back. (Note: just planting seedlings doesn’t help, they’ll get burnt in the next fire.)

  18. People talk about “survival” and “the extinction of humanity” because talking about “prolonged economic hardship” and “mass refugee problems”

    1. Is far less dramatic and doesn’t sound as cool as a video game or movie
    2. Is really problematic if the rest of the time you are agitating against economic growth and saying that mass refugees are a good thing.

  21. Exactly. And incentives need to be smart – if the government starts talking about paying people to grow trees on their unforested land but not incentivizing people who already have trees – guess what happens? People cut down the trees on their forested land because otherwise how else do you get paid?

  22. $72 per tonne is still a useful metric. It shows the alarmists on both sides of this issue are being immature. A 65 cent per gallon of gasoline carbon tax to pay for tree planting won’t wreck the world economy, nor is there a reason to go full chicken little when there is such an enormous carbon sink available at a $72 per tonne CO2 equivalent.

  23. I think of them as covering different scopes, climate alarmists and environmental czars. Both are pretty good on the science, but have the wrong things to do in response. It is just that overpopulation is not directly a climate change concern, for example.
    I like to say that such concerns, each real or imagined, are sufficient but not necessary reasons to go to Space NOW. There are also other sufficient reasons, so lets do it!

  24. Just imagine the cost of a rocket if it was spend on planting drones…
    We put more in space and military then we do in nature.

  25. In San Diego county pepper trees pop up everywhere and are very difficult to kill. Any root at all left, and it pops up again. They also grow very fast. They always find a spot against a fence, wall or foundation of a house. Best chance is to pull it the instant you recognize what it is. If you remove every leaf and sprout for 5 years you might win.

  26. Don’t listen to the environmentalists, listen to the climate scientists. Unfortunately the science is saying similar things. Feel free to ignore the science but realize you are a luddite.

  27. There are other things you can do with the trees than simple storage. If you turn them into properly made buildings and furniture, they can last several centuries. Biochar (carbonized plant material, including wood) can be worked into soil as an amendment. It has a very long residence time in the ground. People are working on how to convert woody materials into replacements for fossil chemical feedstocks.

  28. I feel your pain about the trees that won’t die. I have a Magnolia stump that was cut a few years before I bought the house. When I moved in it had a ring of ~4 inch saplings sprouting from the edge of the stump. I cut those down, because the tree is in a bad place. That’s probably why it was cut the first time. It sprouted again, so I cut it a second time, and now it is sprouting *again*, though each time is is fewer stalks. This time it is just one. Maybe Roundup will kill it for good.

    This was originally a farm (near Atlanta), then about 60 years ago it was cut up for some houses. My three acres now has 60-year old pines and hardwoods all over the property. Forests will reclaim any suitable land, given a chance.

    The small part that is lawn I don’t do anything but mow. It’s mixed grass and clover, which maintains the soil fertility. I figure anything that survives repeated mowing is what deserves to be there. A grass monoculture is too hard to maintain.

  30. For some, or even many, you are right. Thus the incredible importance of O’Neill(Bezos). Not even Musk offers much real hope, just a lifeboat.
    Power is an addictive thing. Fear based environmentalism is a perfect trap for the power addict, as the *promised* consequence of not obeying their dictates is so dire. *Unless* you go O’Neill. Which drives them nuts!

  31. Much of the world is already below replacement fertility. Given enough time, we would reach that half billion. Africa is the main holdout. Their fertility is also declining, but a generation or so behind the rest of the world.

    On the time scale it would take for that to happen (200 years), other changes could alter the fertility rate again. If robots could take over child-rearing, people might have more children, and enjoy the fun parts without the work parts. Robots could also drastically lower the cost of raising children.

  32. Those are ideal temperate woodland numbers. Reality for world scale afforestation as described in this article is less than that by quite a bit, 1/3 of that is a better number.
    Still yes it shows a GHG policy or GHG price scheme that doesn’t take into account land usage or carbon sinks is very flawed.
    Further to maximize usage as a sink, you need to concentrate on actual 20 year growth span numbers. Ideal numbers include 100+ year old forests.
    EDIT: link to url containing IPCC numbers on tons of carbon per hectare https://jancovici.com/en/climate-change/ghg-and-carbon-cycle/cant-we-just-grow-forests-to-compensate-for-our-co2-emissions/

  33. Sure it will. In a world with 10 billion people (late 21st century) trying to live a modern lifestyle, there will be plenty more consumption. Remember, those trillion extra trees won’t be harvested for decades after you plant them.

    There has been work to use heavy wood framing as a replacement for steel and concrete in taller buildings (more than 3 floors). Since steel and concrete emit a lot of CO2 to produce them, that’s another climate strategy.

  34. Basically that’s what they want. They want to reduce the human population to half billion or less to reduce the load on Earth. Barring massive genocide moving to space is the only optioin

  37. We had turtles in northern Europe, birch 700m above the current boundary in the mountains at the beginning of this intermediate time.

    Less temperature differens => higher global average temp => more life friendly global climate, but that has nothing to do with greenhouse effect from CO2 above 300 ppm, when it cant be measured.

    Hope you learn that some day?

    We live in the best om times, but so many want to create some sort of global power beyond the reach of the people of free states through democratic election.

    What about UN and ten thousand other tax funded non governmental organizations?

  38. Thank you, very interesting and relevant reply. And you may actually be entirely right.
    However, I wasn’t discussing the necessity of tree planting as a compensation for CO2 emissions, just the feasibility of it.

  39. Thanks, yes, obviously any CO2 absorption by trees would contribute. As is already shown by forests around the world growing faster as a result of The CO2 fertilizing effect.
    But as a sustainable long-term solution, I think not.

  40. Thank you for your reply, good question.
    Well, maybe a vague answer, but that also depends on the soil (fertility) and the tree species (how demanding it is).
    But generally speaking, logically, with the wood removal from the land one would also export an amount of nutrients, like any crop. How much can rather easily be calculated.
    Luckily, wood itself is relatively nutrient poor, so leaving the leaves, bark and twigs behind would already help a lot.
    Plus fertilization, if needed.

  41. Climate change could also increase the area suitable for growing trees. We could plant trees higher in altitude and latitude.

  42. Even if a pollution/resource use tax replaces all other taxes? I don’t know. A carbon tax has always been presented as an additional tax. What if it replaced all the others?

  43. Good point about land costs. Most land that sells for $1,000/acre won’t sustain trees (or much of anything else). That is why it is worth $1,000/acre.

    Our State and National Parks and Forests could make a good start by managing the lands the public already owns as biological sequestration assets – i.e. by sustainably lumbering them. Other landowners might be encouraged or required to partially participate at reasonable cost.

  44. But would it work as a one-time absorption of 200GT? Just grow the forests to maturity and leave them in a steady state after that?

    That’d buy us some time to decarbonize our energy infrastructure.

  45. Yes, but they’re only buying the amount of trees that meets market demand. Demand for an extra trillion trees’ worth of wood is not going to magically appear.

  46. I just made a couple simple calculations using the figures from here and came to a questionable result:
    Assuming a CO2 valuation of 30 €/hectare and 800 tons CO2/ha woodland (as taken from the figures here), I arrived at 24,000 € worth of carbon per hectare woodland. This exceeds the average agricultural land price in Germany and is almost twice the price of agricultural land in East Germany.
    https://www.topagrar.com/management-und-politik/news/situationsbericht-preise-fuer-agrarland-weiter-kraeftig-gestiegen-9598543.html

    So WTF? Carbon pricing at 30 €/ton is not outrageous, current pricing is at 26 €/ton.
    http://www.eex.com/de/marktdaten/umweltprodukte/spotmarkt/european-emission-allowances

    So either I made some severe error in calculations or biological carbon sequestration would be hugely profitable if current carbon emissions trading pricing was applied to sequestration.

  47. You forget that the so called treat from higher level of CO2 i scientific rejected, and that we live in an ice age since 2,6 million years.

    3,5 degrees over preindustrial average globalt temperature is just like the interglacial before and 6 C below the much more life friendly global climate before this ice age.

    In the beginning of this interglacial it was 2 C warmer globally than now and 6 C on Svalbard.

    Then the north hemisphere was nearest the sun during its summer.

    That gave 7% higher summer effect and the south hemisphere has more temperature regulating water.

    For that (and other effect no one fully understand) there was no arctic sea ice in its summer and more rain on Sahara.

    A green Sahara gave 2 C higher global average temperature with a more life friendly climate.

    Why have so many forgot that out radiated energy increase with the power of four to the temperature when every one know that kinetic energy increases with the power of two to the speed?

  48. New Zealand’s new government has a ‘ billion tree programme ‘ pledge to fulfil, but they’re having trouble finding people to do the work. It pays ok, but it’s hard yacka. Meanwhile the greenies down the south of the country go out weekends and rip out self-seeding pine trees. They don’t want the the open tussock landscape replaced by a carpet of pinus contorta – which it pretty soon would be, if left alone.

  49. Once a new gene is inserted, you can breed crops normally. Maybe we should fund the subsistence farmers in Peru and Mexico, though, to keep toiling away like their grandfathers, and keep a wide variety of potato and corn cultivars handy for selecting genes from.

  50. As a forest ecologist, how do you rate the prospect of getting multiple tree crops off the same land ? I’ve been told that after a couple of generations of monoculture timber ( pinus radiata ) the productivity drops right off.

  51. Any I mention earlier, any mention of funding this via government (e.g taxes) is a non starter in the US. Ideology trumps survival.

  52. Part 2:

    Ok, so, summarizing:

    1) 9 million km2 (which is about 7% of the ice free land area of the earth !) could store about 200 GT of carbon.

    2) Global human carbon emissions are about 10 GT per year (i.e. the carbon weight in about 38 GT of CO2).

    3) Mentioned area would be enough to offset 20 years of human CO2 emissions (ignoring further emission growth).

    4) When the trees reach maturity, a similar area would have to be forested, which seems unlikely to be available.

    5) So, better: when the trees reach maturity, everything will be cut down and the wood would have to be stored *indefinitely*. That is about 400 GT of wood or, for ‘average’ wood, very roughly 800 billion m3 (800 km3). That’s a lot of space.

    6) If we want to absorb 2/3 of the carbon released since Industrial Revolution, as the paper states, AND absorb future emissions, we will have to plant double: 18 million km2, or almost 15% of land area. Highly unlikely to be available.

    My conclusion: theoretically it could be done, but it requires an enormous and improbable amount of land, just to absorb most of future emissions. And with expected future (tropical) deforestation, as mentioned in the paper, it seems to me like the proverbial ‘mobbing the floor with the tap open’.

    Serious note: the wood must NOT be burned or left to decay, because this would release all the CO2 back into the atmosphere!

  53. I love this! And I am highly amused as well:

    Just until this study (I read it yesterday), there were plenty of other studies, even very recent ones, stating emphatically that planting trees won’t be nearly enough to offset our CO2 emissions.

    In fact even this week there was another paper stating that even massive reforestation will only offset about 1% (!). And another one storing that storing wood won’t do.

    Ok, so let’s get things straight here (I may say I am a (tropical) forest ecologist by training, and I did read the study, plus many others);

    This paper says:

    “Ecosystems could support an additional 0.9 billion hectares (= 900 million hectares or 9 million km2, or about 3.5 million mi2) of continuous forest. This would represent (…) more than 200 gigatonnes of additional carbon at maturity. Such a change has the potential to cut the atmospheric carbon pool by about 25%.”

    And from a review of this paper:

    “Once mature, these new forests could store 205 billion tonnes of carbon: about two thirds of the 300 billion tonnes of carbon that has been released into the atmosphere as a result of human activity since the Industrial Revolution”.

  54. It is excellent despite the fact that the carbon dioxide threat is scientifically rejected.

    No one have ben able to find higher greenhouse effect as function of higher lever carbon dioxide.

    If there was a higher greenhouse effect from higher level than 300 ppm it would have been easy to detect when the wavelength 15µm just affects from CO2 as greenhouse gas and the level CO2 varies widely globally between regions and seasons, so a cheap satellite would receive a signal in the wavelength that follows the level of CO2 in the atmosphere below, if it was.

    We live in an ice age, and the interglacial before was 2,5 C warmer globally and 8 C warmer during 6000 years on Greenland.

    Early in this interglacial the global climate was 2 C warmer 6 C on Svalbard.

    Sahara was green then and desert radiate much mor energy than forest, for example radiate Sahara now 16% more energy than if it was covered with thick forest.

    My hope is that we plant forest in all war desert and I believe that we will now when freshwater from seawater is down to 2,5kWh/cubic meter with is cheaper than in Scandinavia with is a region that is covered of clean lakes and river.

    This is a simple calculation that climate alarmists (science denier) should learn.

    In Kelvin:

    Temperature A and B and C the result if temperatures differences reduces to zero.

    A^4+B^4=2(C^4)

    That´s why no ice age theories have changed greenhouse effect but changed temperatures differences.

  55. The dust bowl was caused by intensive farming before modern fertilisers were invented. Stop being disingenuous.

    I know you like to think you’re smarter than other people, “seeing through lies”, but that’s exactly what the denial conspiracy plays on. Same with anti-vaccination movements, or flat earthers. It all preys on the smart but wasted mind, offers an exclusive “truth” so that you can all feel smug in your little club. Scientology’s a good example too, actually.

  56. Something is wrong with your equation when you talk about having “room for a trillion trees” at the same time as forests are being burned naturally, or by farmers to make room for crops all over the world. The natural wildfires are at least partly due to leaving forests overly-dense, which means there are too many trees for the available participation already, or too much global warming/pine beetles, whatever. Where is this great soil that isn’t naturally sprouting trees already and needs drone seeding?
    This probably can’t work unless carbon sequestration is incentivized through a major carbon tax, maybe offset by a decrease in taxes on wages, sales, capital. Then, there’s motive.

  57. “GMO crops are usually clones so there isn’t any genetic variation even within a single variety unlike traditional crops. A monoculture is more vulnerable to a devastating failure from one disease, one cold snap, one heat wave, one drought. As more of the world grows the same few crops, the whole global food supply becomes increasingly fragile. Foods also become increasingly boring. Look at the difference between a thriving farmer’s market and the produce section of your local Wal-Mart.”

  58. Oh the poor ticks and mosquitoes! Let them feast in peace. So a few people die of disease, who cares as long as it’s not in my neighborhood.

  60. A lot more than that. Land in the USA suitable for becoming fully a forest runs $4000 an acre. It would sequester about 5 tonnes of CO2 per year for 20 years. $360 per year for taxes and mortgage payments on a 20 year loan. $72 per tonne of CO2. Starting out with (a limited supply of) $1000 an acre land that can do 50% forested cuts that in half. Similarly you’re going to need to incentivize people with already existing wooded land not to cut down trees.

  65. Unfortunately, it is also the climate alarmists (whom I largely agree with) that can fight actual solutions. Some have become addicted to having “the” solution, which happens to include their having great power over you. Just try telling such people we should leave the planet, as G. K. O’Neill proposes, and many will flip out!

  68. As long as government is supposed to fund this tree planting then no matter how cheap, the current US political climate prohibits this on an ideological basis. Ideology of course comes before survival.

  69. The planet does not need saving, it has survived ~8000ppm CO₂ in the deep past without a problem. Might be a different story for flora, fauna & people without the financial means to adapt.

  70. No it’s no deal because climate deniers won’t vote for anyone that promises to do ANYTHING to save our planet cheap or expensive.

  71. Planting trees, I suspect, is another job US citizens will prefer not to do. I base this on doing it for 3 days. What actual labor will people be conducting with drones? A green infrastructure program could employ a lot of unemployed coal workers.

  72. Better is to focus on trees that harbor ECM fungi in the roots which is the type that stores CO2 and not to cut the trees but to prune them. The thicker the roots become the greater their ability to sequester CO2. This kind of forest management will also help in sequestering more CO2.

    This lady also has an amazing idea for sequestering more CO2, by crops. The only problem is that she wants to use genetic engineering. Improvement of the suberin levels in roots can also be achieved by selection. This also can be done in non cultivated plants as a way of forest management and planting.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyFcr2WcOyo&list=PLtHWLvUowpcR-3F-DT2-eQKGdzSsZvpGa&index=94&t=0s

  73. So , 50c per ton of carbon?

    No deal. Only expensive solutions are allowed. We can’t justify massive subsidies for special interests if we acknowledge cheap solutions exist.

  74. > It might be triple this amount to cut down the trees and to use the wood.

    As a former tree farmer, that’s not how it works. Loggers pay *you* to cut down the trees and take them to the sawmill. They then sell the logs for a profit to the mill. The mill sells the lumber and wood waste to other people and make a profit. The home-builders and furniture makers buy the lumber and sell their products for a profit. Nobody loses money here.

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