From The BBC.
By Matt McGrath Environment correspondent
Image copyright MARTIN BERNETTI Image caption Campaigners hope to plant enough trees to offset the climate impact of President Trump
A campaign to plant trees to compensate for the impact of President Trump’s climate policies has 120,000 pledges.
The project was started by campaigners upset at what they call the president’s “ignorance” on climate science.
Trump Forest allows people either to plant locally or pay for trees in a number of poorer countries.
Mr Trump says staying in the climate pact will damage the US economy, cost jobs and give a competitive advantage to countries such as India and China.
The organisers say they need to plant an area the size of Kentucky to offset the Trump effect.
Based in New Zealand, the project began in March this year and so far has gained pledges from around 450 people based all around the world. In the first month, 15,000 trees were pledged – that’s now gone past 120,000.
Some people have paid for trees to be planted in forest restoration projects in Madagascar, Haiti, Ethiopia, and Nepal. Others have simply bought and planted a tree themselves and sent a copy of the receipt to the project.
Image copyright Sean Gallup Image caption President Trump has moved quickly to undo the climate policies of his predecessor
The organisers, who are long-term climate campaigners, say they have tapped into a global sense of frustration with the president’s climate change policies.
Mr Trump has ordered a review of Obama-era climate regulations and he has also declared that the US will leave the Paris climate agreement.
“We’ve met some of the people on the front lines of climate change in Bangladesh, Mongolia and in other countries, and we found it extremely upsetting that Mr Trump’s ignorance is so profound,” said Adrien Taylor, a co-founder of Trump Forest.
“So we started to do something about it. Only a small percentage of the world voted him in, but we all have to deal with the consequences of his climate ignorance.”
The organisers estimate that they will need to offset 650 megatonnes of CO2 equivalent by 2025 to compensate for the president’s policies, which translates into more than 100 billion new trees. Despite the massive scale of planting needed, the campaigners believe it can be done.
Read the rest of the story here.
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trees are a marvelous idea. we cannot have enough of them. in the end the Donald’s legacy may become huge Trump forests all over the world.
Why bother? Trees plant themselves. Cleared land returns to forest once mowing/plowing stops
+1
True. Vast swaths of land in New England which were cleared for farmland have returned to forest. Much of it is still young-growth forest, of course.
I can testify to that, my property was grazing land for horses before I bought it. 27 yrs later and its a forest.
Yes, just look at Detroit. 😉
I Came ==> Faster if we plant nursery started whips in 20 dollar holes and care for them the first year.
dsone it in the DR — fabulous successes when properly supervised by local people with self-interest at heart.
Planting trees because of climate is dumb on steroids. There are of course plenty of good reasons to plant them. The problem is that many if not most people don’t know how to plant them, or where, and how to care for them. Even the “professionals” sometimes do it wrong out of ignorance, laziness and/or greed (cutting corners). They’ll plant it with the root ball still bound with burlap and wire, for example.
I’ve done my part – I planted 250 trees this year! This can be verified using the same process everyone else worldwide is subjected to – ie no verification at all! But I’m starting to feel good about myself! Am I now qualified as an ecofreak?
If you let the squirrels, raccoons, and wood ducks alone, they will do the deciduous planting job for you in the NH Except in coniferous forests requiring fire to release their cone seeds.
Squirrels help with coniferous forests too. They gnaw pine cones to get out and eat the seeds. Some of them invariably fall to the ground and do their thing.
No, not an ecofreak, just another good person making a better world.
I planted my NZ citizenship gift just north of Wellington, just off state highway 1 in a nature park. The gift was a native Totara tree. They take 100 years to get to maturity and grow for about a further 650+ years. I think I have made my contribution to TOTALLY removing my carbon emissions over my lifetime.
I hope these trees wither are not planted or are cut down and burned quickly. We need all the CO2 we can get to grow more food … and trees are not food.
More trees equals fewer people … just what the greenie’s want.
Our Interstate highway system uses on average, 160 acres per mile of highway, for medians and the broad right of ways. Most of that is mown regularly throughout the growing season, nationwide.
If the mowing were limited to perhaps 20 feet of the shoulder, then nature would take care of forestation of the highway system and $Millions spent on mowing contracts could be used for highway maintenance.
I’m not sure if the soil along those right of ways would sequester more Carbon over time from the constant mowing, which builds topsoil, or from allowing trees and woody plants to grow.
Any trees that get too big and become a possible danger to motorists could be removed. The wood would always be useful for something.
We’ve all seen rutted and eroded slopes along the nation’s highways where the edict to mow has been followed regardless of weather or ground conditions. That slope mowing practice should be stopped, at the least.
Speaking of cities and useful wood, most US cities are also forests, which generate much wood waste each year, which is for the most part, taken to the local landfill.
“Any trees that get too big and become a possible danger to motorists could be removed.”
Darn trees that jump out and hit innocent motorists!
What’s taken them so long, I’ve planted ten times that since George Bush won in 2001, and learned Al Gore was a liar soon after. I’ve even cut plenty down, too they are a great resource.
Darn Green nitwits.
What these doofuses don’t realize is that trees produce water vapor, a ‘green house gas’…
Congratulations on your 120,000 trees. That amounts to 300 acres, or about half a square mile of trees if planted at the same density that timber companies do. For comparison, Weyerhaeuser plants 100 million trees a year, but they do it to harvest them someday. Funny how a for-profit private enterprise with a vested interest plants roughly a thousand times more trees than self-righteous activists. Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand at work making the world a better place. You won’t hear about it from environmentalists because it doesn’t fit their humans-and-corporations-destroying-the-planet narrative.
stinkerp
My late father in law was a senior UN forester in the 50’s & 60’s. He managed tropical rainforest projects then and the commercial loggers were the first people to advocate tree planting on a massive scale for their own self interest.
And the much maligned ‘illegal loggers’ who are presented as exporting timber for furniture etc. is almost a myth as they merely meet demand for local fuel needs as there are few coal fired power stations to provide energy. Nor are we talking villages here, whole towns and cities are reliant on timber for fuel. Farmers move into the cleared land and cultivate it for 3 years until the soil is exhausted of nutrients, but with insufficient energy to manufacture fertilisers, they are forced to follow the illegal loggers for new land whilst the abandoned land turns to dust.
This is not a failure of loggers, farmers or consumers, it’s a failure of government policy and foreign aid. They would rather virtue signal by giving these people silly solar stoves and dig wells for water instead of providing reliable electricity and irrigation/sanitation.
I wonder if they’re going by the effect of pulling out of Paris, 2015 or if they’re adding in Copenhagen, 2009 too? Copenhagen was confusingly subsumed into the Paris NDC’s despite being largely implemented. The Economist and MIT assume the US will meet its Copenhagen commitments of 17% emission cuts (below 2005 levels) by 2020 despite pulling out of the Paris Agreement. That leaves the extra 9-11% they actually agreed to at Paris i.e. the 9-11% the US agreed to add to the 17% to arrive at its 26-28% NDC (Nationally Determined Contribution).
They can plant a lot fewer trees if they admit to the fact that the impact of the Paris Agreement is not the impact of the NDC’s agreed to at Paris but only the small extra impact over and above Copenhagen. If the US pulls out of Paris, it’s only the 9-11% that’s under threat.
In global terms, the extra commitments actually agreed to at Paris amount to the 0.2°C impact on 2100 surface air temps that Trump cited in his Paris Agreement speech. The rest of the NDC’s are attributable to Copenhagen and furnish another 0.45°C. That’s why the Paris Agreement was oversold. It appears to furnish a 0.65°C reduction (0.2 + 0.45) when really it furnishes a 0.2°C reduction.
So the Paris NDC’s have a 2100 SAT reduction impact of 0.65°C of which 0.2°C is valid as being what was agreed at Paris. The 0.2°C global contribution of Paris to the 0.65°C 2100 SAT reduction is probably a similar proportion to the US’s own Paris impact/NDC impact because the US emission-cut percentages are a similar ratio:
9%/26% = 0.35
0.2°C/0.65°C = 0.31
This would suggest they don’t have to plant 100 billion trees. 100 billion times 0.2/0.65 = 30.8 billion trees. Should we tell them this?
Or perhaps the tree planters are going by the 1°C impact for the Paris Agreement as boldly claimed in the MIT statement that took the administration to task on the use of the ‘0.2°C’ research. That 1°C spirits 0.35°C from future modelled scenarios and vague (in terms of implementation) long term plans that weren’t agreed at Paris or Copenhagen or at any other time. That’s 35% of the claimed 1°C or a 54% hiking-up of the actual 0.65°C (0.35°C + 0.65°C = 1°C).
Again, the US impact on the 2100 SAT would be hiked up by a similar proportion because they supplied a vague long term scenario that was immediately called a “pledge”, linked to the Paris Agreement and touted as being part of the 2100 SAT reduction impact of the Paris Agreement. Since the actual impact of the Paris Agreement is 0.2°C, this constitutes only one fifth of what is being claimed. That would mean they’d only have to plant 20 billion trees.
The MIT statement assures us that its claimed 1°C impact doesn’t include the long term plans (called post-2030 strengthening) while including them anyway. MIT is misleading us.
MIT’s own research shows the NDC’s (Paris-plus-Copenhagen) furnish the 0.65°C. Their source for the 1°C, Climate Interactive, clearly states that they include the long term plans. They chop and change at will, depending on who their audience is. If it’s the UNFCCC, the 0.2°C or 0.65°C figures are used to show how much further we need to go. If it’s the tax paying public, the hoped-for future plans get included to bump it up to 1°C. That way the Paris Agreement is sold to the public as a resounding success. All the details, fully researched and referenced are here:
https://investigativeanalysis.wordpress.com/2017/07/18/on-trump-and-mits-on-the-order-of-1-degree-celsius/
How about give credit where credit is due? How many trees did Weyerhaeuser plant in the recent past? Answer > 160 million !
Talk about large-scale help for the environment.
And a lot of that wood is sequestered in homes and other buildings.
If it is have these guys plant a bunch of trees or the US send billions to other countries for doing nothing, I’m glad for these guys to plant trees.
I like trees. I may even plant one. I’ve planted them in my yard before, so I know how to do it so they don’t die. Maybe they will send me some money.
Will the trees coexist with windmill and photovoltaic farms?
Also, what is their value when the sun sets?
The trees will reverse production and the photovoltaic farms will just sit there like ecological mass disruptions.
In higher latitudes (think winter), trees are dark — wood fence posts too — and intercept solar energy that might otherwise hit snow and be reflected.
A dozen or so years ago this was studied and the idea of preventing global warming with tree planting faded from public interest.
I suspect a search could find a reference, but I’m not about to start looking.
I do plant a few trees each year (3 – 30) but, honestly, trees and shrubs have been growing faster than I can cut them back.
There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and plenty of scientific rational to suport the idea that the climate sensivity of CO2. So in terms of CO2 causing climate change, the President’s efforts will have no effect on global climate and the planting of trees will have no effect on global climate as well. However: planting more trees is a good idea and the wood that trees produce is a good renewable fuel.
Planting trees is a wonderful thing. Until they catch on fire.
I wonder how many of the promoters of this bit of silliness have ever been in a major bush fire.
I’ve been in several as a volunteer fire fighter. It’s not much fun.
Well, you don’t want them to catch on fire. To prevent that, we need to turn them into furniture, houses, and other useful things.
Am I wrong or was nature there first and adopted this idea without anybody telling it or paying for it. What was it again? Record increase of wood volumes in the forest of North America and Asia.
The planet planted a 14% expansion in its forests over a decade plus fattened the existing stock. Apparently (google) there are 3trillion trees on the planet so to match the planet on this Trump Forest, they would have to plant 420B trees and maybe double this to account for the ‘fattening’. How much did the planet bend the carbon curve down with its plantation work? It hardly seems noticeable.
The real thing here is, the climaticians don’t want a period of do nothing as they fear it could prove the theory wrong (after the dreaded Pause). It’s part of the flopping and leaping of chicken with head lopped off. They want to say they saved the planet. They didn’t think this through, though:
1) if planting a few trees would solve the problem, then they are admitting that cheap mitigation was possible all along and the hype, anxiety, pain, de-education, trillions already wasted, destruction of economies, institutions, science, the energy poverty, millions of deaths was totally unnecessary.
2) Trump Forest would memorialize the guy that really saved the planet and its people and their progress when this turkey has gobbled its last. It wood become a gathering place for the sensible and the grateful and even for the once delude to heal.
3)It would be a ‘never again’ reminder for similar schemes that might be dreamt up.
I have decided to help all trees grow, all one trillion of them, by burning coal and putting that CO2 back into the atmosphere where it came from. Any tree that wants it can have as much of it as they wish.
Here in Bishkek I have lots of willing partners in this venture.
“Campaigners hope to plant enough trees to offset the climate impact ”
That’ll make Drax power station happy !
Trump Forest allows people either to plant locally or pay for trees in a number of poorer countries.
Carbon Offsets anyone?
Why not just pay poorer countries to use less energy, stop burning wood and coal and oil i.e. remain poor?
100 billion trees and the area of Kentucky is 1.1265E12 square feet. That gives 11.265 square feet per tree, which is a plot about 3.4 feet by 3.4 feet. Seems like pretty dense planting, or pretty small trees. A typical pine forest planted for harvest has 95 square feet per tree and a Christmas tree farm uses about 100 square feet per tree. Sounds like either their area estimate is far to low or their estimated tree numbers are way to high.
It all depends on density of the final forest. The smaller the tree is at planint time, the greater the number of plants needed per acre. Seedlings have a huge mortality rate. Thus:
Kentucky has 40,409 sq. miles which works out to 25,861,760 acres. Most of the folks that plant trees will need to plant seedlings or those no more than four feet tall. Between 10,000 to 16,000 seedlings are needed per acre. Larger plants require fewer per acre. For example, 3 foot trees used for plantings may only require 400 per acre and likely is the largest tree these folks will use for transplanting (a three foot tree requires a fairly large hole to be dug) with seedlings requiring only a dibbit for planting.
Crank the numbers: From 413,788,160,000 (seedlings) to 10,344,704,000 (3 ft). Suppose they do plant 120,000 3 ft. trees a year. About 86,000 years from now, buried under hundreds of feet of ice from the next glaciation, they’ll complete their task.
All in all, this is merely a political stunt. The smart ones will not send money but only send receipts. . . anonymously.
This actually makes a lot of sense, so occasionally the global warming nuts have good ideas.
But it should be taken further, here in Canada we should get credit for our huge areas of forests. Even with logging our land mass sustains more forests than most countries.
Matt MaCrath
As with other BBC presenters pays himself through his own private company that is payed by the BBC
Thereby only having to pay lower rate Corporation Tax avoiding Income Tax and is not subject to Freedom of Imformation regarding the earnings of Public figures working for the Government sector .
Matt Mc Grath he don’t earn as much Chris Evens and Gary Lineacre but a lot more than Emily Maitless and Jane Hill.