By Greg Walcher
In 1989, the U.S. Forest Service published a 13-page booklet (Program Aid No. 1442) titled “Trees are the answer… to America’s growing environmental concerns.” The Society of American Foresters turned it into a bumper sticker, and by the end of the 1990s, cars across the country proclaimed, “Trees are the answer.”
During that same period, the global warming movement escalated, heightening worldwide concern about CO2, so the link between the two was inevitable. Human activity moves CO2 into the atmosphere – trees absorb it. A 9-year-old German student named Felix Finkbeiner started Plant-for-the-Planet, proposing that he and other kids plant a million trees in their own countries. He came to the UN, which had proposed a “billion trees program,” and Finkbeiner’s group turned it into the “Trillion Trees Initiative.” The group now has 30 employees, affiliated groups in eight countries, and has planted 100 million trees. An affiliated program on the Yucatan Peninsula has planted 17 billion.
The Trillion Trees Initiative caught the attention of world leaders, and President Trump, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2020, committed the U.S. to participation. His State of the Union message promoted the idea to Congress, touting the effort by both government and the private sector in planting trees across the U.S. and around the world.
Congress’s only forester, Rep Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), introduced the Trillion Trees Act to finance tree planting and provide tax credits for sustainable wood products. He cited an American Academy for the Advancement of Science report suggesting that a trillion trees could capture 205 giga-tons of carbon, two-thirds of all manmade carbon in a century. Sixty-seven congressmen of both parties cosponsored the bill before a heavily publicized committee hearing.
Trump held a White House tree-planting ceremony on Earth Day, calling the tree the first of the trillion, “a very big deal.” Two days later, his Arbor Day message again cited the Trillion Trees Initiative. That fall, an executive order created the One Trillion Trees Interagency Council to coordinate federal participation through 2030. It never convened.
The 2020 election intervened, and the initiative was scarcely ever mentioned again. President Biden refocused the entire conservation agenda, mostly on climate change. Planting trees around the world was never part of his program. Nor has the idea been mentioned again since Trump’s return to the White House in 2025. No new speeches, executive actions, or press releases mentioning the Trillion Trees Initiative.
The issue also lost momentum on Capitol Hill. The 2020 hearing was the only one ever held on Westerman’s bill, though he is now the powerful chairman of the Natural Resources Committee. He has demonstrated the capacity to move substantial forestry legislation. The committee has held hearings and markups and reported numerous measures dealing with forest management, wildfire prevention, reforestation, and the federal forestry workforce. Yet Westerman has not even reintroduced his signature Trillion Trees Act.
What happened to an initiative so universally lauded just five years ago? It’s simple – groups determined to stop the use of fossil fuels figured out that the tree initiative could become a strong antidote to their CO2 alarmism, so they needed to shut it down. First, some scientists challenged the math on how much CO2 a trillion trees could absorb. They said planting that many trees would destroy grasslands that are ecologically valuable precisely because they aren’t forests. The environmental industry said promoting new seedlings would detract from saving old growth. They said Westerman just wanted to promote logging, and Trump just wanted to protect polluters. They called the idea “greenwashing,” a “fig-leaf solution” that allowed policymakers to sidestep the “fossil-fuel problem.”
That’s all politics – nothing to do with trees. Experts may differ on how much CO2 a trillion trees might absorb, but does it matter? The U.S. Geological Survey says 91 million metric tons of carbon are naturally stored every year, mostly by trees.
A trillion new trees is not an outlandish goal. The earth already has roughly 3 trillion trees, 300 billion in the U.S., 11 billion in Colorado alone. Americans already plant 2.5 billion new trees annually, and if we doubled that, the U.S. would meet its share of the global goal within 30 years. U.S. wildfires have burned perhaps 100 billion trees in the last 20 years, so imagine the benefit of simply replacing those.
All the environmental regulations, conferences, summits, and studies have failed to convince people to stop using energy to enhance their lives. Imagine all that time and money spent planting trees. Trees are the answer.
