Kind of low-hanging fruit, since it's the cursed orange website, and even they will soon vote it down to the negatives, but it was such a fresh flavor of unhinged that I had to share it.
Full text: (in response to "Per capita CO₂ emissions Over Time")
Let's count trees per capita.
Planting more trees is commonly regarded by leftists/communists/morons and "science" people (that don't know a method from a hole in the ground) as a dumbass solution.
If you want to reduce carbon dioxide in the air, it's simple. Plant more. Why dipshits from the left are against planting trees and carbon sinks shows me they only care about politics.
Countering desertification with tree planting seems to have yielded significant benefits to China.
Desertification isn't climate change, and tree planting can help. Planting trees to temporarily contain some carbon before they die and release it back into the atmosphere does not undo releasing carbon that was previously sequestered in a coal bed.
Can't we then cut down the trees, then make houses or throw them in a deep lake?
You can, wood products are a carbon sink.
We could start using wooden boxes instead of plastic for cheap disposable packaging, start building wooden skyscrapers, etc. It's a neat vibe, I like it. But it wouldn't put a dent in just how much wood we'd end up producing if we were trying to mitigate climate change with wood strats.
Yes, but now you're factory farming trees and requiring petrolium fertilizilers to counter the long-term soil depletion and runoff from planned deforestation events.
There's lots of good reasons to (re)plant forests to help slow climate change, but carbon storage is mostly a nice side bonus.
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but does contribute to climate change.
I actually think that mass tree planting is a highly underrated component of climate change mitigation.
But the context here is some guy ranting about how nobody's talking about planting trees in response to a post about per-capita CO2 emissions. And no number of trees* will catch up with the continued use of fossil fuels.
*Okay actually I napkin mathed this years ago, and using an area about the size of the USA for CO2-optimized lumber production would be enough to keep pace with CO2 emissions. But the sheer scope of that is absurd, and it would be an ecological disaster of its own right.
Oh sure. You'd need a command economy committed to actually planting new trees, rather than just running scams where you try to quadruple count trees already in the ground to make that kind of progress.
Damn shame the US doesn't have that.
I brought that up as example with a few friday for future people, who didn't know their history (which is understandable). One of the students was like: "I thought socialists do only mine coal and increase industrial production." which is easy to think when you aren't aware of the multitude of people trying stuff under the label.
The problem with trees is that they're a temporary carbon sink so you need somewhere to go with the wood if you don't want to end up with a marginally lower steady state. It remains more energetically favorable to keep the genie in the bottle than chase it down and stuff it back in once it's loose.
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How could you just turn our natural resources over to Putin like that
So restore about ⅔ of what we've lost. let’s zoom in on the last 300 years. The world lost 1.5 billion hectares of forest over that period. That’s an area 1.5-times the size of the United States
I wonder how does that compare to the size of the Sahel Green Belt?
Restoring that amount of forest would not be anywhere near enough. Trying to keep up with CO2 emissions by planting trees would require constantly cutting those trees down to make room for more trees. In an area the size of the US.
what
Trees sequester carbon as they grow, not just by existing.
Also, trees are nice. Of course saying that we can solve climate change by planting trees is wrong, but also - plant more trees!
What happens if we're wrong and we create a better world for nothing!
😏
But yes. Like most carbon capture schemes, I'll concede it is not a panacea