Although planting trees creates many benefits.
Trees are but one way to biologically store carbon.
As water makes up about 71% of the Earth’s surface, there are plenty of other biologics that sequester carbon (heck, everything on this planet is a carbon-based lifeform). So… water:
Increasing photosynthesis at the global scale by intensification of crop production was found to be the most effective mitigation option and is a prerequisite for preventing further areal expansion of agriculture.
Ok that’s harder.
And… that’s a lot harder… since a significant portion of (U.S.) voters seem to be really ok with voting against their own best interests.
Would love to see that happen, we need it desperately.
The problem with storing carbon biologically is that you need to create storage in a place not yet being used as storage (grow a forest or seagrass meadow where not exists yet) and then maintain it perpetually or else you’re back to where you started.
Your article notes the challenge with this approach:
If you repeatedly grow trees, harvest them, convert them into charcoal and bury them in the ground forever then you’d be continually removing carbon from the atmosphere. But using the wood products for just about anything else means that whatever product you make with it would eventually degrade and get back into the atmosphere
You can in theory also store CO2 more permanently by converting it to carbonate shells. Things like coral might be good for that, except that warming and acidifying the oceans happens to kill them.
I can’t remember who the guy was, but years ago I heard some financial titan say in a radio interview, “A nonprofit corporation is simply a for-profit corporation with special tax benefits.”
