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.
I’m 82 and I don’t remember any “Trees are the Answer” bumper stickers.
Planting more trees may not be a bad idea, but anyone naive enough to think such action will have a major effect on reducing emissions and slowing whatever warming is occurring needs to give his head more than just a shake. The major emitters will continue their steady fossil fuel consumption to accelerate their economic growth and the well-being of their populations well before they take any of the hit-or-miss climate control steps recommended by the environmentalists.
Planting a trillion trees = more future forest fires.
Another problem is a lot of these tree planting programs have resulted in fields of dead saplings because no provisions were made to water them until they grew large enough to create their own water condensing micro climate – or the tree species planted were unsuitable for the local climate.
Botanists who actually know things about what’s being planted are good people to have involved. Case in point, Henry Ford, seeking to expand his vertical integration of owning every part of the manufacturing process for his vehicles. Rubber for tires and other parts was a large flow of money going out of the company. So he decided to establish his own rubber tree plantation in South America, with no rubber tree experts nor any kind of botanists involved. He had rubber trees planted in close rows as one would fast growing trees like poplars being grown for paper pulp of fast stands suitable for milling to 2×4 boards.
The trees grew poorly then died. The rubber plantation was an expensive failure. Even back then. there were people who knew that jungle trees of the same species don’t do well in close proximity to each other. They naturally sort themselves out into a mixed growth of trees and other plants that are mutually beneficial because they don’t compete directly with other plants of the same species. A more spread out planting, interspersed with other plants producing commercially exploitable fibers, wood, or fruits, could have been a success. Imagine Ford brand bananas, grown amongst the trees producing rubber for Ford Tires. But of course people who knew these things were routinely ignored, banana trees were planted in large monoculture stands, which caused the spread of damaging fungi that nearly made the Gros Michel banana extinct.
There are different rules regarding taxes depending on whether you’re planting trees as a crop VS planting them simply to forest some land. In Washington State, if you allow your tree crop to grow long enough the State may decide it’s “old growth” and those trees you were growing to mill some massive timbers from might be impossible to cut down.
Justin Trudeau promised to plant 2 billion trees across Canada.
Which is a major part of the Taiga.
More informed foresters than Jussie naturally asked –
“where are you gonna put them?”
I am in favor of the idea of planting trees, lots of them but primarily to be logged for lumber. We can plant trees most suited for lumber in areas that would be easy to log and replant. It is a win win solution and if the CAGW activists want to brag about how much CO2 the trees are removing I’m okay with that.
In my long but geographically limited experience, trees can plant themselves without much of the envisioned human help.
On my Uplands Wisconsin dairy farm forest hardwood pasture margins (mostly various oaks, hard maples, and hickories), we have had to mow them down inside miles of pasture fence lines for over 40 years—6 foot diameter Bush Hog three point hitched behind the 4wd 27 hp compact haying tractor. Now on its third set of ~1 inch thick sharp swinging blades, with one 1/8 inch steel deck crack electric arc welding repair near its PTO gearbox in my shop (yah, like all farmers I can weld well enough).
At my daughter’s mountain home in Evergreen, Colorado, different softwood tree species (mostly firs) would similarly take over their smallish couple acre yard if not also mowed every couple of years. Don’t need to mow the grass—the elk herd coming down the creek from nearby 16000 acre Elk Meadow State Park does that regularly. But they leave the firs to grow unless occasionally weed whacked (using steel, not nylon ‘strings’).
I seem to remember the joke about the “tree-huggers”…
“Well, if all else fails…we can always eat the damned trees..!”
Plant a trillion trees. Dig up the solar panels to make way for them.
Living in the forested CO Front Range , my question is : Where ?
There are massive burn scars in the region , and they damn well should have been replanted literally decades ago in any case .
But just spouting ” plant a trillion trees ” raises the question : Where ? Reduce agricultural land which is record GREEN anyway ?
The whole notion is based on the idea that 4 molecules of CO2 per 10k of air is somehow too much .
Just like everything else ideological, it’s a wasted effort. Trees planted where they don’t grow naturally will not propagate without artificial assistance. It’s like subsidizing manufacture of products people don’t want; the instant the subsidies stop, consumption will return to normal levels. EVs provide a good example.
And in the meantime we are chopping down deciduous forests in North America to burn them in East Yorkshire to boil water to make steam to drive electrical turbines. We are not serious people.
The bumper-stickers practically wrote themselves:
— Try-Tree-Trillion(s), a Trumpian-Triumph
— Replant Arbor Day; Incinerate Earth Day
— Planet re-Plant-It, for the Planet
In [our] paperback copy of Small is Beautiful, by E. F. Schumacher, its Foreword included an interview in which the Author which answers the LeninesQuestion ‘What Then Shall Be Done?’ with the simple advice: ‘If I were you, I’d plant a tree’
In EFS’ classic essay ‘Buddhist Economics’, he quotes Mahatma Ghandi as urging that every Citizen should plant, in each new year, a Seedling, and then nourish it into a Healthy New Tree.
Noted this Humble Arithmetic expression-of-interest:
10-Billions-of-Population X 100-yrs (Human Life-Span) => One-Trillion-New-Trees a-growing
Having just now covered, over these last four (4) days, some 2,000-miles,
… up from San-Antone,
… to Amarillo-by-Morning,
… onward to Limone-Colorado (think NCAR-over-Boulder),
… past the Devil-Tower-of-Mephistopheles Wyoming, and
… from Billings-on-the-Yellowstone
… to Lethbridge, on the [we]-be-Oldman-River, Alberta
[we] can assure you that …
There is not one single mile of that endless North-American-Prairie-Land that would not be improved by healthy re-foresting for {windbreaks, shady-shelter, treehouses, nuts-&-fruits}
There was not one single solar-panel that could not profitably be replaced by a healthy young tree!
Thanking you for your serious attention to this ever-more-pressing matter, [we] remain
most gratefully yours
(signed) IIT-Madras’ Prof Dr T. Pradip, aka Doktor Faustus, as channeled thru one Mephistopheles-RLW-efarmosmeni khimia εφαρμοσμένος,
[they] are never qAnon, rather manifestly [our]selves & assiduously AI-Free, forevermore
Oh dear oh dear. When a tree falls and is eaten by mushrooms or is burnt, it yields its CO2 to atmosphere. So a forest is carbon (dioxide) neutral . Oh dear
Seventy years ago when I was seven years old, for my birthday I planted a S. Sempervirens that now approaches 200 feet tall, 36” ABH and sequesters about 20 tons of carbon. This tree is from the same clone that once beautified the San Jose campus of California State.
Neither natural climate variability nor natural approaches to mitigation of potential damage from CO2 are consistent with the anti-human / anti-economic progress that are the true goals of the Net Zero crowd. China and their fellow travelers are happy to glom onto an effort that will propel them to dominance in manufacturing and in international political power.
The really big sink for CO2 is the oceans. Plants ranging from alga to sea grasses and weeds fix large amounts CO2. Since the pH of the ocean is 8.1 most of the CO2 is converted bicarbonate and carbonate anions. These are used by mollusks to form their shells. Corals use these anions to form their rigid structures.
The cocolithophores and the foraminifera construct their outer envelopes of calcium carbonate from the bicarbonate and carbonate anions. When these organism die they sink to the ocean floor. After many million of years deposits of fine-grained limestone is formed. The surface limestone formations were once under water. The aforementioned microorganisms are a source of calcium for many animals in the oceans.
The oceans are Mother Nature’s main carbon capture and storage system. This system is so efficient that a cubic meter of surface air contains only a mere 0.84 grams of carbon dioxide.