The Canadian government's plan to plant two billion trees
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
About two years ago, I invested some money to map the area, satellite images, drone and on-ground footage (videos, photos), etc. Greenhouse with lots of tree sapling and convinced a local relative to give me a large area of farmland for me to experiment. I was building a project to attract investment and make it an investible asset, and I can monitor that region.
This will help plant a lot of varieties of trees, employ the locals, and hopefully earn money. Unfortunately, communal un-rest broke out last year (2023) and was shelved. This year, I'm trying to start slowly, again.
In my last calculations, there is a potential of over ~128,000 Carbon Credits that can be generated at its final avatar. Anyone interested to see if you want to work with me, feel free to connect. I'm hoping I can do something interesting and useful with the idea.
While avoiding monoculture, it might help incentivize locals if you integrate (if not focus on) trees with economic value that should grow well in that region, like the rubber tree hevea brasiliensis, the quinine-producing cinchona, and garcinia species like garcinia kola and garcinia mangostana. If there's a certain density of such trees per acre, the locals can surely earn some extra money by harvesting them from time to time, in a substantially non-destructive way.
> But many 2BT projects are planting on private land — and in places like Southern Ontario, there’s not enough of that land to go around, experts told The House.
I heard them discussing this issue on the radio and they went on to describe in more depth how they were giving farmers tax breaks to plant forests.
Canada is a big country, but the reality is that all the space is already being used. Either it's used by agriculture to export food all around the world, for cities (we have a housing crisis), or it's already forest.
And logging companies that chop down trees were already obligated to replant the forest, well before this 2B trees promise.
So we're left with replacing farming and pasture land with forest. There's not a lot of good opportunities for that.
An interesting choice.
It's pretty clear that Ontario's housing problem is directly related to its farmland problem. Southern Ontario farmland values have risen 900% since the United States changed its farm subsidy policies in the 2000s, which allowed farming in Canada to be much more viable.
Farmland being 900% more expensive means that urban areas can't sprawl cheaply like they once were able to, placing much more pressure on existing urban boundaries, thereby seeing the cost of urban housing rise.
If this successfully takes even more farmland out of the equitation, farmers will just pay even more[1] for the remaining farmland, and then urban areas will have to pay even more to sprawl, putting even more pressure on existing urban boundaries, making urban housing even more expensive.
[1] Supply managed diary and poultry producers are effectively given a blank cheque from the government. There is no end to how much they can spend.
Can you elaborate on this? It seems the dairy farmers I grew up with in Southwestern Ontario were living just above poverty.
> It seems the dairy farmers I grew up with in Southwestern Ontario were living just above poverty.
Sure. Such is the life of owing a business. I mean, why take for yourself personally when you can buy another farm instead?
While not dairy or poultry, I operate a grain farm in Southern Ontario – along with involvement in tech – and I also live in near poverty. Not because I have to, but because the money is better spent on growing and improving the business. That's the name of the farming game.
If you wanted to live a comfortable personal life, you'd get a regular day job instead. That's a perfectly reasonable choice – nay, the most reasonable choice – but once you catch the farming bug...
> Either it's used by agriculture to export food all around the world
Simple. Produce and export less food. People will clear mature forest elsewhere to meet make up for that food, but that is someone else's problem as far as this scheme is concerned.
> And logging companies that chop down trees were already obligated to replant the forest
Take that obligation away from them, and plant the trees on the freed up land under this scheme instead.
This is what happens with most tree planting and carbon offset schemes. As others have said the most important thing is to preserve existing ecosystems, but there is no money in not doing things.
There are vast suburbs where developers planted a single tree on the front lawn and moved on. Allow any landowner in the country to get as many trees as they want for free along with instructions on how to maximize the likelihood of success. Allow every farmer to install windbreaks of free trees. Plant trees up and down the rural roads to prevent blowing snow whiteout conditions, etc etc etc. Nearly every farm in the country could stand to lose a perimeter of 20 ft for trees.
What's kind of surreal is that people aren't doing already planting them on their own. Even if we completely ignore any potential long-term climate benefits from urban/suburban trees, planting trees around your house is basically just a big bundle of benefits with some relatively minor maintenance costs (dealing with leaves if you so choose, pruning, etc.). They increase property values and personal satisfaction, provide shade that makes activities outside more pleasant and can decrease your HVAC bills by shading your house, help control water runoff, decrease urban heat island effects[0], and more.
Street trees (closely lining the street) are even better because they can serve as traffic calming measures. When big tree branches overhang a road, they force drivers to slow down and pay more attention to their surroundings while simultaneously reducing driver frustration.[1] There's also growing evidence showing improvements to pedestrian safety.[2] Stick a sidewalk on the other side of the trees, and besides being more pleasant to walk under, those same trees will do a great job of shielding pedestrians from any errant automobiles.
Beyond that, street trees can decrease noise and increase the aesthetic quality of a neighborhood. If you look at old historic housing areas in cities and towns across North America that were built before the rise of the automobile, you'll generally find lots of mature trees that contribute to the "charming " atmosphere (or whatever adjective people want to use to describe them).
At least seven or eight of my parents' neighbors have cut down their mature trees in recent years (most being least 25+ years old). I'll give them every benefit of the doubt and assume that there was a problem with the trees (disease or severe damage, etc.) even if I couldn't notice anything from afar, but I every time I go past those houses now, I so desperately want to ask: "ok fine, maybe it had to go but why the fuck aren't you replacing that tree?" Do people honestly think it looks better? Do they like mowing the grass under the hot sun without a tree in sight to give them even a modicum of shade? Those parts of the neighborhood now clearly look like something is missing.
0. https://www.epa.gov/heatislands/using-trees-and-vegetation-r...
1. https://depts.washington.edu/hhwb/Thm_SafeStreets.html
2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00014...
Having no clue of the actual number, I suspect I now own thousands of trees. Last week, I owned zero trees.
Thankfully this US state offers multiple forms of conservation easement, which will allow me to keep trees on 99% of the land (building two tiny homes on dozens of acres). Perhaps I might even generate some authentic carbon offsets?
We donate to a Shirley Heinz Land Trust which buys up decrepit lots around where we live in Gary, IN and around there, and restores them into preserves. But it's nothing on the scale of what you bought, it sounds like.
I despair. The only thing left for “nature” is the land we've run into the ground, poisoned and shit on.
Turning them into preserves is laudable, except they'll never, ever be as good as whatever was there before the land was cleared. The biodiversity will be gone. The complex interactions of thousands of species will be gone. Restoring the land also inevitably requires fossil-fuel inputs.
100 years? 500 years, 1000?
But I doubt even after 1,000 years you'll get anything close to the complexity or richness of whatever original ecosystem was there in the first place.
Was listed on Zillow for less than a few hours. Our bid wasn't the highest, but we have conservation plans for majority of the land.
>where we live in Gary, IN and around there, and restores them into preserves.
What an awesome effort in quite tumultuous histories.
They're not authentic at all. Forest fires are irrelevant to that though.
We've planted thousands of trees. Do we get any of those credits? No. Do you know what does? The massive bluegum monoculture down the road that they are going to harvest in ten years with big fossil-fuel machines and turn into paper with a lifetime of about a week.
It's basically fraud, another “business as usual” green-wash, another way for companies to get free money from mates in government, and people being able to feel good that “we're doing something”.
I was actually interested in how OP thinks that a carbon credit could be authentic though. Especially one where the landowner is paid for ecosystem services previously provided by nature for free, now being compensated for the land they already want to keep as a forest.
We need to be acting like this is an emergency, because it is, and not rely on the market to produce a quality offset where no one cares about the quality. Tax emissions over the cap to pay for the externalities. Put a hard cap, like we do on vehicles, and the market will adjust. Stop tax benefits to oil production -- I know we still need petrochemicals for plastics, but not this much.
Carbon offsetting is the exact opposite of cap and trade, since it raises the cap by issuing more certificates.
Step 2: Don't clear it.
Step 3: Look after it. Counter intuitivively, this step might involve setting fire to bits of it, depending on where you live.
There is no monetary “profit” step. Given our current trajectory and terminal velocity with regards to climate change and biodiversity loss, it probably will make no difference in the broader scheme of things, but the local animals will be happy to have their homes and food supply while it lasts.
There are possibly some conservation organisations that will enable you to put the land under some kind of lasting “covenant” to protect it.
This actually does exist, in certain locations. In mine's US state, I plan to install beehives and get an agriculture exemption, which prevents me from developing 99% of property (minus driveways / logging roads)... but also cuts property taxes massively.
You can then get additional conservation easements (10yr contracts) that then allow you to offset essentially all of a DINK household's W2 income.
Despite all the loopholes, this does keep the trees alive and generating oxygen / habitat.
Commercial beehives, or even hobbyist level bee-keeping, displace native insect populations. They're very aggressive insects. Pollen and nectar seem like limitless resources; they aren't. Swarms can take over bird-nesting hollows, and drive out native mammals.
I have hives. Yeah, I don't feel great about it, but there are compromises baked into everything.
Sell "preservation credits"
So if your goal is direct carbon offset, your best bet might cut a clearing and use it to build your house --- possibly even intentionally cutting a larger clearing than you otherwise would. Unless your land was cut recently, in which case letting it grow the way you plan might be just fine.
If your new land is in the Northeastern US, you might enjoy reading the reports from this group: https://wildlandsandwoodlands.org/vision/overview/
Two separate creeks are on either sides of the property, and I've already seen so much life blossoming!
...of course, this is only anecdotal.
This is just a general rule, but the real life has a few caveats.
1) Grow is complex.
The first problem is that we don't really know "how much" slower is "slower". Has not being studied for most species, because finding a 500 year old ash that is not pruned or coppiced is basically impossible [1].
And we need to remind that trees are clonal organisms arranged around a very few parts that repeat themselves. Even if old trees would really grow much slower than saplings, they have a huge, huge difference on the --number of growing points--. This should overcome any speed difference. The result is that older trees still add mass on a velocity that young trees can't.
Other problem is that identifying grow with "how taller respect to the last year" is not practical. Biomass is the correct term in ecology. Young trees grow abnormally fast because they are searching for light. And this fast grow is the thinnest possible that can support the tree and still put it over its competitors. It can't be sustained later without risking for the tree integrity. This grow shouldn't be promoted. Wider is what we want. A tree is not growing slow just because is only 1cm taller than the last year. Mature trees have a "deploying umbrella" phase.
2) In the real life, trees often don't grow a lot the first years.
Most of the big oaks (and I had cultured a few) show a frozen grow in the first two years. They use it first year to make a deep root and 2 (two!) small leaves. Period. In the second year maybe four to eight leaves if the area is very favourable. The whole oak weights... dunno, maybe 50 grams? at this period. The CO2 captured from the air is close to zero and even could be a negative value while the sapling feeds on its acorn. Then at the fourth year there is a phase of (maybe) fast grow for a couple decades, but only if there aren't herbivores around and only if the area does not receive light.
In the same time, older trees would have included tens or thousands kilograms in each one of its main branches and the same for their main roots. Plus the soil generated. Plus the fruits.
And we can save the best for the last. Mature trees produce pollen. This is an output in our supposedly Carbon neutral system.
The number of people that had quantified seriously how much pollen produces a tree could fit maybe in a small room, but I'll assume that a fair sized tree produces tens of Kg of pollen each flowering season. What we know is that one single conifer can "paint" a car with pollen in no time, and can do it for weeks.
This pollen is protected and enclosed in a hard cage of Sporepollenin.
Sporepollenin is simply one of the most durable organic substances known by us. This structure is able to trap C for hundreds of millions of years in favourable conditions. Hundreds of millions!. Is --exactly-- the stuff what we crave for, and that we are looking for like crazy.
Except because some people can't avoid the itch to burn the soil. Though luck.
[1] When you coppice a tree, you modify the speed of regrow. My bet is that when on panic mode, old trees could easily have bursts of superfast grow. Easily much faster than a sapling. This mechanism is behind the recent fever (ehum, scam) of planting kiri trees.
To focus the discussion, here's a very recent report by the group I linked above: https://wildlandsandwoodlands.org/news-and-stories/new-engla....
I just submitted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39880257. I'd be interested to read your criticism of it.
About a third of it was clearcut last in the mid-80's, to grow hay... so those trees are "new" on the timelines of trees.
The other part was entirely clearcut during the civil war, and then again early 20th century (in places) for coal extraction.
>mature forest is generally close to carbon neutral.
Even the 19th century portions are filled with all manner of life / transpiration.
> Even the 19th century portions are filled with all manner of life / transpiration.
Definitely. We own and live on a somewhat similar parcel in Vermont next to the Green Mountain National Forest. I'm actually not saying that you should cut these areas, only that that you should consider doing so if your primary goal truly is carbon offsets. Although I think offsetting carbon is a good thing if all else was equal, it's not the thing I would prioritize here. You are a drop in the bucket next to all the adjoining land. Think of what you can do differently to provide for niches that are not already provided. My personal emphasis is focused more on wildlife habitat than carbon.
It's not what I had expected. Maybe there's a problem with the research, but I think everyone just assumed that new growth was better without studying the issue carefully.
As the average tree in a forest keeps getting older you keep sequestering carbon and older trees are sequestering faster than young ones. The issue is eventually you reach an equilibrium point where the average age becomes a constant because trees have a finite lifespan.
Globally most forests were cut down relatively decently so they haven’t reached equilibrium. But when you start talking the next 100+ years it does become an issue.
At a quick skim, I'm not sure this contradicts what I'm saying. Yes, large trees that are getting larger are excellent carbon sinks. On the other hand, there aren't many such large trees, and they tend to outcompete other growth.
From the article: Second, our findings are similarly compatible with the well-known age-related decline in productivity at the scale of even-aged forest stands. ... We highlight the fact that increasing individual tree growth rate does not automatically result in increasing stand productivity because tree mortality can drive orders-of-magnitude reductions in population density. That is, even though the large trees in older, even-aged stands may be growing more rapidly, such stands have fewer trees. Tree population dynamics, especially mortality, can thus be a significant contributor to declining productivity at the scale of the forest stand.
My point is contained within "the well-known age-related decline in productivity at the scale of even-aged forest stands" that they refer to. That said, I agree that this point is not universally true and depends on a lot of local factors.
If it's a relatively small area that was clear cut, the surrounding forest is likely to encroach pretty quickly. But unassisted, trees may grow too densely so you don't get a lot of thriving trees. Going in and picking many trees to keep and a handful to thin can help the ones you keep be healthy and grow well.
Most likely there are universities near you that can offer forestry advice tailored to your area.
I feel that is a cynical take and I defend against cynicism; however I think the government is more cynical that announcements are the only thing that matters. So it’s a question of whose cynicism should I defend against?
1. “Planting trees” actually means “planting seedlings”. There is no guarantee that the majority of seedlings will grow to be full sized trees. Once a “tree is planted” then the box is ticked.
On our farm we've planted a variety of about 500 native seedlings this year, and let me tell you, it takes hard work to keep them alive through the first Summer, even when mulched and given protectors.
A planted seedling is not a tree.
2. People tend to plant monocultures I can't count the number of times someone has pointed to neat, ordered ranks of nothing but pine-trees or blue-gums and labelled it a “forest”. Nope. A forest is an ecosystem, a great variety of plants — trees, shrubs, bushes, mosses, fungi, ferns, lichens — and animals. A monoculture is not “habitat” to anything much.
City people especially see these things and feel good that they're there, but it's like comparing a properly cooked and seasoned steak with the cheapest cheeseburger you can find.
Sorry, not a forest.
3. These monocultures, pines and bluegums and what have you, are not designed to be there forever (unlike a real forest). They're a crop. They're designed to be harvested. Bluegums for paper pulp; pine for furniture and framing timber. They're a product. They're planted, harvested and processed with more fossil-fuel inputs than they “save” by “carbon sequestration”.
Planting trees is good, but it's very much about appeasing someone's conscience, or looking “green”. The most important thing is not to cut them down in the first place. But growth economics demand that we do exactly that: clear land, cut down trees.
I'm not disagreeing with you on the bigger picture (at all) but I'm interested:
1. If a monoculture not-quite-a-forest is planted and not harvested, won't it gradually become a more varied ecosystem over time? As in, won't shrubs, bushes, mosses, fungi, ferns, lichens, and animals (not to mention other varieties of trees) gradually 'move in'?
2. Are we in danger of letting perfect be the enemy of good here? Would we rather have no new trees at all in a space, or a monoculture not-quite-a-forest (assuming it's not for harvest)?
2. Sure, always good to have more trees, but really what you need is ecosystems. For example, many trees don't reproduce without understory, which is the smaller trees and shrubs and plants that make up a forest. You don't get that with monocultures.
I can look out my window and see some beautiful Melaleuca trees in the middle of a grass paddock for cattle. If you drove by, you'd think maybe “nice to see some trees there. Lovely blossom.”
Those trees are functionally dead. They will never reproduce, because they depend on the understory to do so, which was cleared a long time ago. To say nothing of cattle nibbling on potential seedlings (but you know, food production is important).
This is one reason why the count of species that go extinct every day is so high. It's not that we exterminated them specifically, but we exterminated their food's food's food that was part of a tangled web of evolved inter-dependencies.
Monocultures, or near monocultures, don't have the complexity. Maybe best to think of them as “social housing for (a very few) varieties of animals”.
I guess, the long and short of it is, everything we're currently doing is largely palliative care, and just take a little care that whatever it is you do doesn't do as much harm as good.
The overall theme of your comment was criticizing planting trees and how it's "problematic" but spreading this message isn't constructive, it just paralyzes the ones trying to help, leading to a net negative.
The problem with these "tree-planting" programmes is they're rooted in simple economic thinking. Mostly along the lines of "Area X is being cleared because my generous donors need to build a factory which will be good for jobs and growth" ... followed by ... "Well, let's plant trees in Area Y, which will offset the damage and give everyone the green warm fuzzies. Win/Win!" This is how they think.
Critical thinking means asking questions. What's the survival rate? What range of species? What are you doing to halt land clearing? etc. Because for every linear inch you think they give, they are taking a square mile and making money from it. Asking those questions is not paralysis, it's direct action, it's the start of actual accountability.
And the solution for any paralysis is simple: go plant a seedling (or fund some specific person who will).
Aside: I asked the marginalia guy if he could add something to his search engine, and he did (which was amazing!). I don't have a lot of money and I really wanted to do something for him, so I planted a seedling. I think it was $1. It's out there on my place, growing. It's Summer right now and I've spent quite a few hot days lugging heavy watering-cans long distances to keep it, and other seedlings planted at the same time, alive. In 10 years it'll be a tree (or dead, these things happen).
https://ahealthierearth.com/news/blenheim-estate-announces-p...
Leave a patch of land untouched for a few decades and trees will grow up all by themselves.
The real cost is not the seedlings nor the planting, it is the land.
A pattern with the current government.
Even with their main fulfilled promise of legalization of Cannabis, the stated goal throughout the legislative process was to undercut and eventually choke off the black market.
Instead they cherry picked the most onerous regulations from the alcohol and pharma industries and taxed it like tobacco… while basically ending any sort of enforcement against black market operators.
5 years in the black market is larger and more public facing than ever, while licensed producers all circle the financial drain because they can’t possibly compete with illegal growers and retailers who pay no tax and follow no regulations (eg. release testing for pesticides, herbicides, heavy metals, mold).
The worst of both worlds!
It's like governing is the end goal and not a means for the political class, so we end up with crummy policy across the board.
(1) https://thehub.ca/2024-03-29/this-government-is-oblivious-th...
They may be floundering in the polls, sadly, but their impact has been immense.
https://breachmedia.ca/ndp-lobbyists/
Seems like it's just neoliberalism all the way down, regardless of the party.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ask-electoral-reform-2021-f...
https://mjbizdaily.com/canadas-legal-cannabis-market-winning...
I know people who cynically assumed legal weed would be overpriced & low quality. Figured they'd stick with their dealer. Now they just buy legal
Say what you want about cost of regulation. Running illegal operations has its costs & inefficiencies too
I must be a lightweight because just about every edible I take knocks me on my ass. They certainly seem more potent than the flower I get at the dispensaries in my area.
Choice quote from the article:
There are just over four million people in Oregon, and so far this year, farmers have grown 8.8 million pounds of weed. Which means there's nearly a pound of dried, smokable weed for every single person in the state of Oregon. As a result, the sales price for legal marijuana in the last couple of years has plummeted.
They outperform legal dispensaries in every way: no purchase limits, lower prices, you can buy your cigs + vape pens + cannabis all in one place, they basically never ID people, etc.
People who use cannabis are strongly incentivised to buy the illegal stuff, because the regulated market is too draconian and expensive.
Given Justin Trudeau's abysmal corruption and competency records, I expect that money will be buried in Katimavik Bitcoin wallets - no need to bury actual trees.
5 years and not much, 2-3 % of the goal
Heck if they had just asked every new immigrant/refugee to plant just 1 tree immediately they’d be much further into this goal.
I actually like the idea of such a program that I just dreamed up. Newcomers to Canada should be excited to fulfill their patriotic duty to plant 1 tree to “grow new roots” in their home country
Canada's immigration rate is high, but not as high as 40-60 million newcomers in 5 years.