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Comment by samcday | Hacker News Reader

You're kinda just stoking my paranoia here. I hadn't dug too deeply into whatbuying "carbon offsets" for flights (as a eco-conscious consumer, that is) actually entailed. But I suspected it was basically just planting N trees to offset the carbon emission.

To play devil's advocate, is it possible that planting the trees at least helps in the short to mid-term? So let's assume we don't run out of viable land to plant more trees on, and we keep planting enough trees to offset a big chunk of our carbon emissions. Doesn't that buy us, say, 100 years to figure out the technology to economically capture excess carbon and put it back underground again?

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> But I suspected it was basically just planting N trees to offset the carbon emission.

No, this is not what happens. Check Wikipedia for "carbon offset" and "carbon credit" to learn more.

Please stop with the reddit comments. You can so so so easily post the information here instead of being pompous about it.

No, it doesn't. First of all, you have to account for deforestation which is already happening in unprecedented pace. So while you'll go around planning trees, in some other part of the world people are chopping them down to provide more land for agriculture or to support the demand for wood. So the overall net effect might be zero.

Aside from that, the fact is that you need a shit ton of trees to negate climate change. Planting 1.7 billion acres of trees would remove only 8% of yearly carbon emissions. Where will we find the land to plant all those trees? We simple don't have the real estate.

You seemingly just argued for planting more trees, in that if we did not try and replace the trees being cut down, we would have a negative growth rate of trees, which seems much worse than 0 growth rate. I’m not sure why you dismissed out of hand the argument, as it only took a hot second do deduce that it’s actually a good thing.

You misunderstood. I'm not arguing whether we should plant trees or not, but whether that is enough. The answer is that it's not. We have to do much more things than just plant trees.

Just in case anyone else was curious about the numbers that removes 8% of carbon per year for 30-40 years.

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