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Comment by whimsicalism | Hacker News Reader

> The tree planting thing is embarrassing. That needs shot down and it can't be used by any corporate body as a green credential surely!

Why not? If a company can credibly plant enough trees to offset, say, a century of their facilities carbon impact - that seems pretty good to me.

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"Planting trees" is an ESG scam.

You cannot "offset carbon" by just planting trees.

You also need to wait until they grow, chop them down, and not burn them but burry them underground instead.

Not completely accurate, you can harvest and use the wood too, but true you cannot burn it.

https://www.fs.usda.gov/ccrc/topics/carbon-benefits-wood-bas....

But what happens to the wood you use? e.g. in buildings

(1) building burns (2) building is torn down and wood rots (3) building eventually collapses and wood rots

i.e. if you don't bury it, it eventually returns into the carbon cycle

Where are these trees being planted though? Are they saying they are paying to have 1 million trees planted in the Amazon where nobody can actually verify, then that's pointless. The trees should be planted in an area around where the company is located. A million trees around datacenters or fullfillment warehouses would be impressive.

credibly

How does that offsetting work? Facebook is going to maintain a growing forest for the next few 100k years?

This is one common strategy to fool people. Fool people by saying they will plant more trees etc., and when push comes to shove they will simply turn their head and probably claim for bankruptcy. These sort of Shenanigans happens so often I really don't trust big companies.

Well, if 100k years is what is needed to offset, then obviously FB can not do that credibly.

Do you have a source that that is the requirement? It's not my understanding.

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