Bill Gates Says Planting Trees to Solve Climate Crisis Is ‘Complete Nonsense’

Yeah I think it's a pretty open secret that a lot of carbon offsetting is just straight up greenwashing. How do you actually account for the CO2 that a tree offsets? Well let's take the most conservative approach, you start with a deficit - you account for the CO2 emissions involved in clearing the land and delivering the tree. You then account for wasteage - not all these trees will surive. Then you account for how much CO2 it soaks up, but until the tree is atleast close to maturity that's basically nothing.

Oh no wait not that - we shove a tree in the ground pat ourselves on the back and assure ourselves it will capture CO2 for the next hundred years so we'll just go ahead and count that all now. What do we do now though? You can't plant more trees on the same land, so let's just sell that off- we can get a good price I know a guy who wants some land I hear he's got a plan for doing some sort of tree planting project.

According to this article Bill Gates seems to reduce solutions to the climate crisis to actions that reduce the CO₂ contents of the atmosphere in the short-term fast enough. Let's say one, two, or three decades from now. Under that assumption planting trees may be complete nonsense.

But planting trees has other effects than capturing CO₂ from the atmosphere. It can be an effective measure to counter secondary effects of the growing CO₂ contents of the atmosphere. Forests do protect against soil erosion, i.e. against growing deserts. Forests provide shadow to the soil, i.e. they help keeping water in the ground. Dense forests create their own micro-climate. Thereby they help mitigate the effects of climate change. Projects that plant new forests in Africa can provide hope that not all is lost, compared to just let the deserts grow.

So, claiming that planting tree is complete nonsense to combat climate change is complete nonsense to me. But on its own it isn't a panacae either.

Well, yeah. It's like trying to handle an overflowing bathtub by throwing sponges at it. You'll quickly reach the point where you can't just keep adding sponges and you need to do something about the inflow or outflow.

He regularly downplays alternatives to his specific investments. So much so that it's not immediately clear to me that he's had a net positive effect on climate change with all his spending, which is somewhat tragic.

The biggest black mark in this regard is of course his continual downplaying of PV and wind as energy sources. And time has placed him squarely in the "stupid people" camp on that issue.

On tree planting, he might technically be correct if you give him the benefit of the doubt about exactly what he's talking about, but rewilding is going to be a substantial part of addressing climate change.

It's useful to realise that humanities yearly CO2 production is greater (by weight) anything else we make. by far.

So yes, if we don't stop producing industrial quantities of CO2, we'd need to plant about 1 USA sized forest/year to compensate (and keep it away from fire etc). Obviously Complete Nonsense.

Also a strawman argument. We need to stop producing industrial quantities of CO2. Then reforestation can help (a bit, perhaps).

He's probably not wrong but he also makes more money from a company compared to a forest. So it's not like his statement is 100% science.

Always interesting to have the opinion of a public healthcare expert like Bill Gates on other topics like environmental policy.

I mean it can't hurt can it?