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Comment by danuker | Hacker News Reader

Because 20 million trees planted would offset US emissions by 2 days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqht2bIQXIY

But I can’t tell if 20 million trees is a lot or a little.

The amount of effort required for 10 million trees a day would require everyone in the US to plant a tree each month. This would likely also require people to care for enough saplings to plant a new tree each month.

It's not an insurmountable level of effort per person, but if you try to do it on a large scale you inevitably end up with logistical problems, and it would require quite a lot of space.

I am not sure I understand your math here. Let’s say every adult in the US, 300M, plants a tree each month for 12 months, 3.6B trees planted in a year. Or are you factoring in saplings that fail to grow or something? Is it that bad that for every 160 trees planted only one survives?

Edit: strike that I see what you meant there with the a day. I just should have actually read what you wrote before I commented.

US adult population is around 200 million.

Also, they can't even get people to wear a mask or take a shot. Getting all these people to plant trees seems like an insurmountable task.

I did some quick googling and the first figure I found was that Americans plant around 1.6 billion trees every year. That is around 4.4 million every day, almost half of what is required for the carbon offset claims by GP.

Actually 20 million trees every 2 days doesn’t sound that ridiculous. Especially as we build more green infrastructure and reduce the daily emissions.

https://www.greenandgrowing.org/how-many-trees-are-planted-e...

I wonder if there's any legs in algae or seaweed. Wouldn't take up valuable land to grow and is fast growing.

Seaweed is great - it also pulls excess nitrogen out of the water, can be co-cropped with bivalves, can be fed to cows for decreased methane production, can be eaten directly in many forms…

If we had an actual price on carbon seaweed production would be a boom industry.

Couldn't you use it in large tanks to suck out CO² directly from the air? What makes this more expensive than currently proposed alternatives? Even if you don't use the seaweed in the end, you could just dry and bury it I guess?

EDIT: After some research I found an interesting article addressing this: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/19/1035889/kelp-car...

That is an interesting link, thanks.

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