Even In Fragments Of SOTU Dealing W. Energy & Environment, Lie After Lie After Lie After Lie
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Lest you think the title of this piece misleading, Trump gave so little time to energy and environment that there was no room for his trademark falsehoods. At the top of the speech, he boasted of slashing "a number of job-killing regulations." A few minutes, and 26 pauses for huzzahs and applause from his partisans, he pronounced America energy independent. Some would disagree. But in any case, Trump praised the oil and gas industry, without mentioning the death spiral of coal and nuclear industries as domestic power sources. Nor did he mention the rapid growth and bright future of clean energy.
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Then, the Commander-in-Chief went full Lorax for an entire sentence: "To protect the environment, days ago I announced the United States will join the One Trillion Trees Initiative, an ambitious effort to bring together government and private sector to plant new trees in America and all around the world." The Trillion Trees Initiative was inspired by a much-criticized study that calculated that those trillion trees could suck up one-third of global carbon emissions. It picked up global momentum last month at the World Economic Forum, the annual Billionaires' Burning Man in Davos, Switzerland. But the trillion trees thing, admirable though it may be, has its own problems, so let's get out the calculator.
For the sake of argument, let's assign every one of the 7.7 billion of us on Earth our fair share of plantings. That's 130 trees for every man, woman and child in the world. The conventional wisdom in the tree business is that you've got to plant two to have a fair chance of getting one fully-grown, carbon-eating tree. So let's make that 260 trees for each one of us.
And where, you may ask, do we find the available land not already covered by trees, or farms, or cities – bearing in mind that deserts and tundra can't count as viable tree habitat? An estimate showed that in order to offset its carbon output, the U.S. would have to locate and set aside land twice the size of Texas. That land doesn't now exist, and as Mark Twain said, they're not making any more of it. So plant your trillion trees, but let's not pretend it comes close to solving such an immense program any more than banning plastic straws will cleanse the oceans of plastic.
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https://www.dailyclimate.org/trump-state-of-the-union-climate-change-2645073590.html
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