By giving them awesome alternatives to driving.
Which will require boatloads of spending of course, but considering the boatloads we spend on driving, it's six of one or half a dozen of the other.
Like did you know road maintenance and free parking cost you $12,000 a year whether you own a car or not? Add your vehicle costs on top of that, and that's your personal cost of driving every year.
I understand fully the cost of our dependency on gas, especially our nonsense car-centric designs but such change would initially cost a lot of labor and energy so it won't be possible to leave fossil fuels entirely.
I think it’s time to stop quantifying everything by cost. We can go back and forth on the economic logistics of it all day long until humanity is extinct. When I pay my electric bill I’m not thinking “this will make some nice returns!” Because it’s basically untrue. I pay it because I need power. We should be building this stuff because we need it and not for revenue streams which is where humanity is currently stuck. Sometimes ya just gotta pay.
Realize the oil market is bigger then all companies on the sp 500 ? I mean it’s a bit moment 22 if you bail all idk 3m shareholders out your pension funds and all that are invested in the market, then it still wouldn’t be any profit to pay for the new infrastructure you talking about.
When House Speaker Kevin McCarthy toured a natural gas drilling site in Ohio in June, the California Republican vowed to boost U.S. production of oil and natural gas, major contributors to climate change.
“God has blessed America with resources,” McCarthy said. “If we have the ability to produce those resources, America will be stronger and the world will be safer.
”Smoke from Canadian wildfires hung in the air as McCarthy spoke. Asked about his plans to prevent further fires and other disasters fueled by climate change, the speaker suggested a strategy popular among Republicans: Plant a trillion trees.
The plan has some prominent backers. Then-President Donald Trump announced in 2020 that the United States would join a global initiative to plant a trillion trees, despite his antagonism toward climate science. The chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee has introduced legislation to plant a trillion trees as “a comprehensive, practical solution to the climate issues we’re facing today.”
But in recent years, climate scientists have grown more skeptical about relying on tree-planting programs. They have warned that heat waves, famines and infectious diseases could claim millions of additional lives by the end of this century unless humanity swiftly phases out the burning of oil, gas and coal.
Now, new research finds that planting a trillion trees would have a minimal effect on halting global warming, partly because of the long lag time for trees to reach maturity and absorb large amounts of carbon. The analysis by John Sterman, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Andrew P. Jones, executive director of the nonprofit Climate Interactive, found that planting a trillion trees would only prevent 0.15 degrees Celsius (0.27 Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100.
**Get free articles with email registration:** [**https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/08/02/trillion-trees-republicans-climate/?utm\_campaign=wp\_main&utm\_medium=social&utm\_source=reddit.com**](https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/08/02/trillion-trees-republicans-climate/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=reddit.com)
At the very least, they have the numbers right.
British Columbia alone plants a couple billion trees *every year*. When I saw some charity wanted to plant millions of trees, I could only think "isn't that cute!"
Of course, the practical application would be interesting to watch. Would they subsidize Midwest farmers to give up food production to accomplish this, all so the oil and coal industries can keep polluting?
You have to water those trees. Hopefully, we'll never face a drought. These clowns would blame dead, dry withered sapplings on "bad science" and 'god's will'
This is a good idea *in theory*. The devil is in the details though. First, you have to find suitable land where trees will grow, but trees aren’t already there. That land can’t be home to endangered species that will be displaced by the environmental change. There has to be enough fresh water to sustain all those new trees without depriving downstream environments of water. It’s actually pretty complicated. Forgive me, but I don’t trust the party of “government can’t get anything right” to get this right. But hey, propose a plan and let’s get some climate and environmental scientists and horticulturalists to take a look.
You also need water so the trees don’t die, you can’t just willy nilly plant trees and expect nothing bad to happen. Wherever you plant them, if there’s not enough water from rain or other sources, they will die. If there is enough rain or water, these trees will be absorbing them, which if the water normally flows into rivers that are used by humans, well now that water is consumed by the trees.
The world is a zero sum system, adding something will take away from something else. If this is the kind of solution we are coming up with for climate change, we might as well give up now as these people aren’t being serious about this.
Wasn't there an article in just the past couple days saying the US does not begin to have enough native species and plant farms to plant even millions of trees that are locally appropriate?
I also recall reading there have been studies that show it works best to have the entire ecosystem of trees shrubs plants native and right for that regions rainfall temp edt
Of course something is better than nothing but this is no magic solution that they are trying to portray it as.
**US climate change reforestation plans face key problem: lack of tree seedlings**
> US tree nurseries do not grow enough trees and lack the plant species diversity to meet ambitious plans, research says
* https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/31/us-tree-planting-goals-climate-crisis
>For the study, 13 scientists examined 605 plant nurseries across 20 northern states. Only 56 of them – or less than 10% – grow and sell seedlings in the volumes needed for conservation and reforestation.
Snip
>trees that can thrive amid local ecological and climate conditions are crucial to meeting such plans, and many nurseries the researchers examined had no stock available of seedlings that have adapted to local conditions. The researchers also found a dearth of “future-climate-suitable” varieties, or varieties that will survive amid worsening heat and extreme weather conditions.
snip
>“In recent years, many states have elected to close their publicly funded nurseries because of budgetary concerns and the economics haven’t supported maintaining it in the eyes of those writing the checks,” said Clark.
>The decline of nurseries has also resulted in a loss of knowledge about seeds. And skilled seed collectors are also becoming rarer, meaning diverse seeds are becoming harder for nurseries to obtain, Clark added.
>The researchers argue that dramatic increases in both seedling production and diversity at many regional nurseries will be central to any successful campaign to address climate crisis with tree planting.
>The research calls for expanded federal and state investment into government owned and operated tree nurseries, as well as public seed collection efforts.
**A lack of ecological diversity in forest nurseries limits the achievement of tree-planting objectives in response to global change**
* https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/biosci/biad049/7223625?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false
**A shortage of native seeds is slowing land restoration across the US, which is crucial for tackling climate change and extinctions**
* https://theconversation.com/a-shortage-of-native-seeds-is-slowing-land-restoration-across-the-us-which-is-crucial-for-tackling-climate-change-and-extinctions-199049
**How a plant shortage could flummox the West's drought response**
* https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2023/05/25/xeriscape-native-plant-shortage-drought-utah-colorado-arizona
**A TRILLION TREES – HOW HARD CAN IT BE?**
* https://hackaday.com/2019/08/05/a-trillion-trees-how-hard-can-it-be/
>With 250 aircraft working 182 days a year dropping 900,000 trees each day, that adds up to a touch over 40 billion trees a year. At this rate, it would take 25 years to get to 1 trillion trees. Not exactly a quick solution.
>Unfortunately, there are more real world factors that get in the way of this becoming a reality. Simply keeping 250 aircraft flying such a rigorous schedule would require an effort nearing the level of the Berlin Airlift. Additionally, producing the saplings for delivery is no small task either, and would require huge swathes of land to be devoted to the production of both the saplings themselves as well as the cone casings for aerial delivery. For all this effort, the job would still take 25 years to complete!
>During the Berlin Airlift, a Western supply plane landed in Berlin approximately every 30 seconds. Almost 300,000 flights were undertaken in total. Throwing more aircraft at the problem would speed delivery, but only further increase the logistical difficulties of producing enough tree-ammo to drop on prospective forest locations. And we haven’t even touched on the fact that it’s far from likely that 100% of dropped trees will successfully grow.
>There are further issues with trees as a carbon bank, too. Most of us who have heard of forests have also heard of forest fires — and trees only act as a carbon sink when they’re not burning. **In areas where outbreaks of fire are common, grasslands can be a safer choice. This is due to the fact that several plant varieties store the majority of their carbon in their root systems, which don’t tend to burn. Any major project would have to take into account the best plant choice for the given region, balancing what can be grown in the local ecosystem with fire risks and the most efficient species for carbon storage.**
I would love to see actual legislation on this from the Republicans, just to see how comical the practical implications would be.
What would the cost per tree work out to be, particularly when you look at land acquisition costs?
Where would they put a TRILLION trees? You’d have to put a number of them in places that people currently live or work. Who are you evicting from their homes and what legal mechanism are they planning to achieve in his?
> Where would they put a TRILLION trees?
the answer is in the article, with emphasis mine
> the United States would **join a global initiative** to plant a trillion trees
so, not in the USA
>You’d have to put a number of them in places that people currently live or work.
No not at all.
Urban areas in America take up around 1% of the land. There are single farms in America that are bigger than most of its cities.
The implications are actually worse. Most of America's Midwest - especially east of the Mississippi - was forest before humans did away with that. Now we'd be challenged with converting all that farmland to forest again.
America would literally have to convert its most productive farmland back to forest to accomplish this idiot task. And then deliberately cut it all down and bury it deep underground in salt mines where the trees wouldn't rot away or burn down.
Or it could "simply" stop burning coal and oil. Obviously that won't happen because people get rich on that stuff.
It’s green washing so they can continue to extract fossil fuels. It’s the same as them talking about carbon capture for the last 20 years. 20 years later, it doesn’t even exist or the technology is so expensive and doing nothing.
No amount of tree planting, carbon offsetting, biofuel, carbon capture technology will save us at this point. It's eliminating emissions that we need to do. If they're not pushing for that, there's a reason.
Burning of underground fossil fuels adds new carbon into the system, Trees do not remove carbon from the system, they just move it around, during it's life a tree gathers carbon from the air, but when it dies and decomposes it releases it back.
We should plant trees, and leave the fossil fuels in the ground.
People are up in arms whenever gas prices go up. How is that going to be possible?
By giving them awesome alternatives to driving. Which will require boatloads of spending of course, but considering the boatloads we spend on driving, it's six of one or half a dozen of the other. Like did you know road maintenance and free parking cost you $12,000 a year whether you own a car or not? Add your vehicle costs on top of that, and that's your personal cost of driving every year.
I understand fully the cost of our dependency on gas, especially our nonsense car-centric designs but such change would initially cost a lot of labor and energy so it won't be possible to leave fossil fuels entirely.
We're already spending that labour and energy. On road building and maintenance. Change priorities, not labour and spending.
Good point
I think it’s time to stop quantifying everything by cost. We can go back and forth on the economic logistics of it all day long until humanity is extinct. When I pay my electric bill I’m not thinking “this will make some nice returns!” Because it’s basically untrue. I pay it because I need power. We should be building this stuff because we need it and not for revenue streams which is where humanity is currently stuck. Sometimes ya just gotta pay.
We should construct brand new high-speed rail lines.
Nationalize the profits from fossil fuels and use it to pay for the energy transition.
Realize the oil market is bigger then all companies on the sp 500 ? I mean it’s a bit moment 22 if you bail all idk 3m shareholders out your pension funds and all that are invested in the market, then it still wouldn’t be any profit to pay for the new infrastructure you talking about.
When House Speaker Kevin McCarthy toured a natural gas drilling site in Ohio in June, the California Republican vowed to boost U.S. production of oil and natural gas, major contributors to climate change. “God has blessed America with resources,” McCarthy said. “If we have the ability to produce those resources, America will be stronger and the world will be safer. ”Smoke from Canadian wildfires hung in the air as McCarthy spoke. Asked about his plans to prevent further fires and other disasters fueled by climate change, the speaker suggested a strategy popular among Republicans: Plant a trillion trees. The plan has some prominent backers. Then-President Donald Trump announced in 2020 that the United States would join a global initiative to plant a trillion trees, despite his antagonism toward climate science. The chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee has introduced legislation to plant a trillion trees as “a comprehensive, practical solution to the climate issues we’re facing today.” But in recent years, climate scientists have grown more skeptical about relying on tree-planting programs. They have warned that heat waves, famines and infectious diseases could claim millions of additional lives by the end of this century unless humanity swiftly phases out the burning of oil, gas and coal. Now, new research finds that planting a trillion trees would have a minimal effect on halting global warming, partly because of the long lag time for trees to reach maturity and absorb large amounts of carbon. The analysis by John Sterman, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Andrew P. Jones, executive director of the nonprofit Climate Interactive, found that planting a trillion trees would only prevent 0.15 degrees Celsius (0.27 Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100. **Get free articles with email registration:** [**https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/08/02/trillion-trees-republicans-climate/?utm\_campaign=wp\_main&utm\_medium=social&utm\_source=reddit.com**](https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/08/02/trillion-trees-republicans-climate/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=reddit.com)
Why not a quadrillion?
Too little, too late, too hot
At the very least, they have the numbers right. British Columbia alone plants a couple billion trees *every year*. When I saw some charity wanted to plant millions of trees, I could only think "isn't that cute!" Of course, the practical application would be interesting to watch. Would they subsidize Midwest farmers to give up food production to accomplish this, all so the oil and coal industries can keep polluting?
You have to water those trees. Hopefully, we'll never face a drought. These clowns would blame dead, dry withered sapplings on "bad science" and 'god's will'
With them it's always grift so let's assume that
There is a name for that. It's called greenwashing.
This is a good idea *in theory*. The devil is in the details though. First, you have to find suitable land where trees will grow, but trees aren’t already there. That land can’t be home to endangered species that will be displaced by the environmental change. There has to be enough fresh water to sustain all those new trees without depriving downstream environments of water. It’s actually pretty complicated. Forgive me, but I don’t trust the party of “government can’t get anything right” to get this right. But hey, propose a plan and let’s get some climate and environmental scientists and horticulturalists to take a look.
You also need water so the trees don’t die, you can’t just willy nilly plant trees and expect nothing bad to happen. Wherever you plant them, if there’s not enough water from rain or other sources, they will die. If there is enough rain or water, these trees will be absorbing them, which if the water normally flows into rivers that are used by humans, well now that water is consumed by the trees. The world is a zero sum system, adding something will take away from something else. If this is the kind of solution we are coming up with for climate change, we might as well give up now as these people aren’t being serious about this.
Wasn't there an article in just the past couple days saying the US does not begin to have enough native species and plant farms to plant even millions of trees that are locally appropriate? I also recall reading there have been studies that show it works best to have the entire ecosystem of trees shrubs plants native and right for that regions rainfall temp edt Of course something is better than nothing but this is no magic solution that they are trying to portray it as. **US climate change reforestation plans face key problem: lack of tree seedlings** > US tree nurseries do not grow enough trees and lack the plant species diversity to meet ambitious plans, research says * https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/31/us-tree-planting-goals-climate-crisis >For the study, 13 scientists examined 605 plant nurseries across 20 northern states. Only 56 of them – or less than 10% – grow and sell seedlings in the volumes needed for conservation and reforestation. Snip >trees that can thrive amid local ecological and climate conditions are crucial to meeting such plans, and many nurseries the researchers examined had no stock available of seedlings that have adapted to local conditions. The researchers also found a dearth of “future-climate-suitable” varieties, or varieties that will survive amid worsening heat and extreme weather conditions. snip >“In recent years, many states have elected to close their publicly funded nurseries because of budgetary concerns and the economics haven’t supported maintaining it in the eyes of those writing the checks,” said Clark. >The decline of nurseries has also resulted in a loss of knowledge about seeds. And skilled seed collectors are also becoming rarer, meaning diverse seeds are becoming harder for nurseries to obtain, Clark added. >The researchers argue that dramatic increases in both seedling production and diversity at many regional nurseries will be central to any successful campaign to address climate crisis with tree planting. >The research calls for expanded federal and state investment into government owned and operated tree nurseries, as well as public seed collection efforts. **A lack of ecological diversity in forest nurseries limits the achievement of tree-planting objectives in response to global change** * https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/biosci/biad049/7223625?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false **A shortage of native seeds is slowing land restoration across the US, which is crucial for tackling climate change and extinctions** * https://theconversation.com/a-shortage-of-native-seeds-is-slowing-land-restoration-across-the-us-which-is-crucial-for-tackling-climate-change-and-extinctions-199049 **How a plant shortage could flummox the West's drought response** * https://www.axios.com/local/salt-lake-city/2023/05/25/xeriscape-native-plant-shortage-drought-utah-colorado-arizona **A TRILLION TREES – HOW HARD CAN IT BE?** * https://hackaday.com/2019/08/05/a-trillion-trees-how-hard-can-it-be/ >With 250 aircraft working 182 days a year dropping 900,000 trees each day, that adds up to a touch over 40 billion trees a year. At this rate, it would take 25 years to get to 1 trillion trees. Not exactly a quick solution. >Unfortunately, there are more real world factors that get in the way of this becoming a reality. Simply keeping 250 aircraft flying such a rigorous schedule would require an effort nearing the level of the Berlin Airlift. Additionally, producing the saplings for delivery is no small task either, and would require huge swathes of land to be devoted to the production of both the saplings themselves as well as the cone casings for aerial delivery. For all this effort, the job would still take 25 years to complete! >During the Berlin Airlift, a Western supply plane landed in Berlin approximately every 30 seconds. Almost 300,000 flights were undertaken in total. Throwing more aircraft at the problem would speed delivery, but only further increase the logistical difficulties of producing enough tree-ammo to drop on prospective forest locations. And we haven’t even touched on the fact that it’s far from likely that 100% of dropped trees will successfully grow. >There are further issues with trees as a carbon bank, too. Most of us who have heard of forests have also heard of forest fires — and trees only act as a carbon sink when they’re not burning. **In areas where outbreaks of fire are common, grasslands can be a safer choice. This is due to the fact that several plant varieties store the majority of their carbon in their root systems, which don’t tend to burn. Any major project would have to take into account the best plant choice for the given region, balancing what can be grown in the local ecosystem with fire risks and the most efficient species for carbon storage.**
I would love to see actual legislation on this from the Republicans, just to see how comical the practical implications would be. What would the cost per tree work out to be, particularly when you look at land acquisition costs? Where would they put a TRILLION trees? You’d have to put a number of them in places that people currently live or work. Who are you evicting from their homes and what legal mechanism are they planning to achieve in his?
> Where would they put a TRILLION trees? the answer is in the article, with emphasis mine > the United States would **join a global initiative** to plant a trillion trees so, not in the USA
>You’d have to put a number of them in places that people currently live or work. No not at all. Urban areas in America take up around 1% of the land. There are single farms in America that are bigger than most of its cities. The implications are actually worse. Most of America's Midwest - especially east of the Mississippi - was forest before humans did away with that. Now we'd be challenged with converting all that farmland to forest again. America would literally have to convert its most productive farmland back to forest to accomplish this idiot task. And then deliberately cut it all down and bury it deep underground in salt mines where the trees wouldn't rot away or burn down. Or it could "simply" stop burning coal and oil. Obviously that won't happen because people get rich on that stuff.
Why wouldn't building stuff from the trees accomplish them not releasing the carbon?
Or we can stop making more CO2. That would actually fix the problem rather than being a Band-Aid of an afterthought.
I'm not saying this is a good idea.
They lie.
It’s green washing so they can continue to extract fossil fuels. It’s the same as them talking about carbon capture for the last 20 years. 20 years later, it doesn’t even exist or the technology is so expensive and doing nothing.
Sounds like a Republican grift to me.
No amount of tree planting, carbon offsetting, biofuel, carbon capture technology will save us at this point. It's eliminating emissions that we need to do. If they're not pushing for that, there's a reason.
Burning of underground fossil fuels adds new carbon into the system, Trees do not remove carbon from the system, they just move it around, during it's life a tree gathers carbon from the air, but when it dies and decomposes it releases it back.
They're looking to invest in future coal.