It’s an all-natural TreeHugger-approved carbon capture and storage plan.
After recently publishing the most negative “OMG we’re stuffed” post about climate change ever, it is a pleasure to write that we really can cure this, with carbon capture and storage – in trees. According to research published in Science
That’s enough carbon dioxide stored to suck up two-thirds of the emissions from human activities. Scientists
call this “mind-blowing.”
The calculation of how much land can be afforested (about the area of the USA and China combined) doesn’t include land currently used by cities or cropland. But it does include grazing lands, so we will all have to eat less beef.
Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) Enrollee Crew Planting/ National Archives/Public Domain
It all seems so simple. Crowther says tree planting is “a climate change solution that doesn’t require President Trump to immediately start believing in climate change, or scientists to come up with technological solutions to draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. It is available now, it is the cheapest one possible and every one of us can get involved.”
National Archives/Public Domain
There are also many opportunities that present themselves in a reforested and afforested world, including the transformation of the construction industry to wood (continuing to store the CO2 in buildings as well as trees) and forest farming, which promises “abundance, as well as the kind of resilience a changing climate demands.” Governments could create a modern version of the Civilian Conservation Corps, which trained unemployed men during the Depression to plant 2.3 billion trees, half of the trees ever planted in the USA.
There are skeptics quoted in the Guardian who say that these calculations are not accurate, and of course we are actually losing forest to grazing and monoculture farming. But we have seen the effects of massive reforestation before; Oliver Milman writes in the Guardian that after 1492, when 90 percent of the Native American population died,
Perhaps we can re-run that experiment, without millions dying. The idea certainly is “mind-blowing.”
See more at Crowther Lab.
