Seriously, even if AGW is a total hoax, you have taken a positive approach to address other problems that exist for us. Planting tress is an great plan for us and for the planet. It is a baby step forward, but you have not fallen on your posterior with these steps.
Planting more trees is a worthwhile pursuit. The problem is, it is just a baby step. Trees cannot take in all of the CO2 we emit each year. Trees do not grow in deserts, in higher altitudes and higher latitudes. Trees also expel CO2 during the night hours when photosynthesis shuts down. Trees also release their sequestered carbon when they die. However, using trees as a building material delays this process for the time they are used as a building material. Still, this is a positive step, Kano. I have just one question for you concerning this. I side with you with this plan for more trees, but would you still be as eager to do this if it required more taxes to proceed with this plan?
The only thing that would actually make a difference is to end our use of fossil fuels now. We must cease our compounding of the problem. With this being said, I am not foolish enough to believe that this will happen tomorrow or even 10 years from now. So, as you have made the suggestion already, doing enough of the small things will at least offer us some help. The more small things we do now, the more it benefits us later.
I also have some small steps we can take that will help, but will not succeed by themselves to resolve the real problem.
1. Consume less.
2. Conserve what you consume.
3. Recycle what you discard.
4. Buy locally, whenever possible.
5. Plan your trips to be as productive as possible in one trip instead of making several trips to accomplish the same thing.
6. When it comes time to replace your car, do so with a more fuel efficient vehicle than the one you are replacing.
Here is another advantage to doing what I suggest. Not only do you save yourself money, but you have the potential to make some money when you recycle. Who could be against doing this? When enough people begin to do enough of these small steps, then we are on a path that helps us to gain the time needed to put into place alternative energy sources before fossil fuels have become too cost prohibitive to use and still grow our economies. ... I am all for taking the small steps now since we cannot take the big step tomorrow.
Are you willing to look for other positive steps we could take, Kano? You will become richer, in so many ways, for doing so.
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I am of the thought that your abandoning a car for the use of a bicycle and public transportation has more to with your location than a strong desire to do so otherwise. But, that is neither here nor there. The point is, you have done so. I will even agree with that taxes collected for the planting of trees should be restricted to that sole purpose when it is spent. I wish more tax collections were based on this principle, such a SS taxes. Taxes are a necessary evil for any functioning government unless it has a sufficient revenue source from internal resources. Very rarely does any country divide its natural resources among the citizens of that country, even if they take some of it back in taxes.
You're right that trees can be a good carbon sink, it's a really big undertaking and at best would only buy society some time to reduce emissions some other way. The main complications are:
1) Trees generally don't live 1,000 years. A few species do, such as coast redwoods, but they have very specific habitat requirements. To get to a billion, you'd have to plant multiple species in different areas. 150 years is perhaps a more realistic estimate for how long they'd live.
1) Where do these trees go? A full-grown tree might have a canopy area of 500 square feet, which means at an absolute minimum you're talking about 10 to 20 million acres, probably a lot more once you account for all the microsites in a large restoration area that can't grow trees. Obviously, this land has to be acquired somehow since there has to be long-term protection to actually let the trees grow to size. Moreover, that land has to be capable of growing trees (ie not desert/tundra) and cannot currently have significant vegetation/trees (since the whole point is a *net gain* of carbon sequestration). Most likely, this means you're looking at farmland, and taking 10 million acres of farmland out of production might have other effects.
2) What happens after the trees reach maturity and stop sequestering? (along the same lines, they will at some point decompose or burn, releasing their carbon again). If you haven't reduced emissions during that 100-200 year lifespan, the climate will just start warming again.
3) Is 1 billion enough? An average tree maybe stores 5-10 pounds of carbon per year (2-4 kg), so over the lifespan of these trees you're sequestering at best 750 million tons. By contrast, the world emits about 29 billion tons of CO2 per year.
In conclusion, tree planting is a great idea for sequestering carbon (plus reforestation provides a huge amount of other environmental benefits if done well) but must be done alongside policies that reduce society's carbon output.
Planting trees would help absorb much of the excess carbon, but you would have to plant as billion trees and it would take time for them to grow enough to absorb much CO2
Ignore bozos that think AGW stopped, it is just wishful thinking. 2013 is expected to be in or near top 10 warmest years
All non solids that rise into the upper atmosphere separate into nothingness and have been doing so for thousands of years/ only changes of fear on earth is people's ways of doing things, but if the environment was to be changed by man. then all life will die. Nature has been protecting earth's environment so the suns rays can warm our planet so that greenery grows and releases oxygen for all species to breathe and live. Gases, co2, exhausts, smoke, etc. separates into nothingness. Global Warming was turned off in 2012. If people would ignore presidents that dont know what their talking about then there would be less problems in our world. Mike
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Why not just plant more trees, really it would not be that difficult to plant a few more billion trees worldwide, it would not cost that much and think how many jobs would be created.
On a geo-engineering point of view, we know this is safe, because it happened before, England, Europe North America used to be covered in forests until we cut them down.
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Okay this may look like a naive simplistic idea, but is it stupid? how much carbon does an adult tree contain (perhaps many tons) how long does a tree grow (hundreds of years) how long does timber last when used for construction, artifacts etc.
So perhaps a billion trees would be a carbon sink for several billion tons of CO2 for up to a thousand years, no artificial carbon storage scheme could ever hope to match that.
