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I have been listening to media reports concerning greenhouse effects, carbon sequestration, carbon emissions tax, and buying/selling carbon credits. What all this discussion is about is how to stop production of carbon dioxide or CO2 from man via automobiles, factories, industry and what ever thus reducing green house gases and global warming.
So I’m sitting in my chair in front of the television and it occurs to me that trees use CO2. So I’m thinking how much CO2 does a tree absorb? Will that was easy. I Googled the exact question. “How much carbon does a tree absorb. In seconds I found the following on the first site I checked.
If every American family planted just one tree, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would be reduced by one billion pounds annually. This is almost 5 percent of the amount that human activity pumps into the atmosphere each year. (Source www.coloradotrees.org)
So if every family planted 20 of the right kind of trees there would be no effect of Americans on the atmosphere. Well how many trees would that be? So I Googled “number of U.S. households” and I came up with a 2010 estimate by the U.S. Customs of 113,400 to 114,900 households. I multiplied 20 trees times 114,900 households and came up with 2,298,000 trees needed to remove all the CO2 put in the air by Americans.
Whatever the mechanism government could come up with to reduce CO2 output in the U.S. (never mind the world) and to turn global warming around I bet it would cost taxpayers billions of dollars, squash the economy, reduce our standard of living and grow government control over its citizen’s liberty.
So if the government really wanted to fix this problem they could give each U.S. family $4,000 to plant 20 trees and it would only cost $459.6 million. What can the government possible do with a tiny sum of $459.6 million that would have such an effect on all Americans? The 2009 federal budget is 6,745 times bigger than the cost to plant the trees.
So anyone cutting a tree down should plant one and every family should plant 20 trees. Why not get a bid from a private business or several private businesses to plant all of the trees. That could be a kick to the economy. Can you imagine the number of businesses willing to chase a $459.6 million payday?
My wife and I have already planted at least 150 trees when we built our new house in 2006. Most Dakotans have planted more than 20 trees already. Too bad the government wouldn’t pay us retroactively.
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m. baker
on Apr 15th, 2009
@ 10:11 am:
Hi,
I just wanted to point out that it’s not 114,900 households, it’s actually 114,900,000 households (the number in the census report was in thousands, so you have to add three more zeroes). The U.S. has 300 million people. It’s still a great idea, though — Los Angeles has a “Million Trees Initiative,” and is aiming to get one million trees planted in this city alone, so planting 2 billion trees around the country could be a reasonable goal.
on Apr 15th, 2009
@ 12:16 pm:
Just getting people to stop cutting down virgin forests, both in the tropics and elsewhere, would also be a win for climate. All in all, there is not enough land to plant enough additional trees to soak up all the excess carbon we’ve already emitted, though we certainly should do what we can to plant trees and save existing trees.
There has actually been a lot of research on how much carbon both forests and other types of plant life are currently taking up, and how much more they could absorb in the future. Climate change is likely to stress many existing plants by altering how much rainfall they receive and at what times of year. As climate warming becomes more pronounced, any given type of forest will be less well suited to where it is now and would do better at a different latitude farther from the equator; but there is only so far that a forest can “migrate” by growing new trees at its leading edge to follow these shifting climate zones. We may have to put a lot of effort into planting new trees of a suitable type further away from the equator to aid these shifts. Not all land is available for this either: farms, cities, areas with poor soil all can be barriers.