It’s almost one of those “I did Nazi that coming” jokes
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Pretend to reverse the authors of the two comics and see if you reach the same conclusion.
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It’s pithy, but “just plant trees” isn’t really the solution. In some cases, the result has actually been harmful. A forest is more than just a bunch of trees together; it’s a whole interconnected ecology. If the trees planted aren’t appropriate to the climate, they can also displace other things that are better, more ecological carbon sinks.
So, in this case, consider tree planting sprees in England that displaced peat bogs, which are actually really phenomenal carbon sinks and ecological wonders. We essentially ripped out a forest’s worth of ecology to plant some mediocre trees.
But, seriously, can we get local governments to convert their empty medians and greenspaces into carbon-capture focused local flora? It’d cut down on maintenance costs, emissions, and generally generate an immediate carbon footprint improvement that’d be widely beneficial. People’ll go on about the private lawn, but public lawn space is acheivable now.
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The authors don’t matter. The second strip fails to land. It just happens to be by Scott Adams.
“It’s an invention that could spread like wildfi… Oops…”
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There is a right wing reading of the Dilbert comic which “makes sense”…
Remember, Adams isn’t Dilbert. He’s the PHB. The PHB is the voice of reason in the comics, not Dilbert.
Dilbert is Adam’s idea of what a leftist is.
In this comic, Dilbert has invented the machine that the leftists want: a device to remove carbon from the air and create something useful with it that will sequester it away.
Obviously, there is a hole in the Left’s plan that is so obvious even Asok the non-white idiotic intern can see it; and he spouts a reich wing talking point about removing so much CO2 from the air that there isn’t any for the plants to use; and how this will cause starvation.
The PHB realizes that he can make a ton of money with this, and the downsides won’t affect him because they are long term, so he does the wise thing and ships the product anyway, but Dilbert (who has seen the light at this point and realizes that he hasn’t saved the world but doomed it) is now upset that his project is shipping. And after all, the right always profits from the left’s mistakes.
Of course, this isn’t funny and doesn’t make sense because we’re not reich wing assholes. We know the entire premise is flawed.
And that’s the problem with Dilbert, and why it’s fairly much dead to me now. On the surface, it’s a cartoon about the absurdity of office life. But he hides a whole lot of dog whistles in there.
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Forests are more than trees. It’s not just about the carbon of the tree it’s the long term sequestration in the soil, itself, and all the related . The trees are just the most identifiable macroflora.
If you just replanted the largest trees around a river, you’d not recreate the Amazon.
At the global level, 19 percent of the carbon in the earth’s biosphere is stored in plants, and 81 percent in the soil. In all forests, tropical, temperate and boreal together, approximately 31 percent of the carbon is stored in the biomass and 69 percent in the soil. In tropical forests, approximately 50 percent of the carbon is stored in the biomass and 50 percent in the soil (IPCC, 2000).
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Maybe a stopped clock but definitely not right here. Because Adams’s joke isn’t actually about how trees help with global warming, it’s about how carbon dioxide is something the plants need…in other words the “life-giving gas” bit that deniers like to say.
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Or I could have just googled: What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing? - Wikipedia
To follow up with some of the other commenters on this, I’m kind of stunned. That’s actually an (almost) insightful observation from Adams. Of course I know he mostly just harvests jokes that have been sent to him, so maybe he didn’t quite get it?
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