Trump's Plan to Plant a Trillion Saplings Misses the Forest for the Trees

[douglas9]

Donald Trump, it turns out, is a fan of trees. A big fan. Such a fan, in fact, that at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, late last month, the president announced that the United States will join the One Trillion Tree Initiative, an international plan to plant and restore a trillion trees globally by 2050. Doing so, he said, illustrated the country’s commitment to “conserving the majesty of God’s creation and the natural beauty of our world.” Two weeks later, he again touted the project in his State of the Union speech.

These were odd statements and an even odder policy shift from a man who has pushed for drilling and logging in millions of acres of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the United States’ largest national forest; shrunk national monuments; and proposed slashing funding for environmental agencies. Just this past summer, as the Amazon rainforest was burning, Trump failed to support sending $20 million in aid to the region to help fight the fires. (He said his resistance was due to a lack of coordination with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.) Trump has also had personal quibbles with certain trees: He once scoffed at the idea of a Japanese pine tree planted in Central Park in his honor because he thought it was too small. And as president, he allowed an oak tree gifted by French President Emmanuel Macron as a symbol of their countries’ “friendship” to die.

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2020/02/trump-one-trillion-trees-initiative-misses-point-climate-change/

[SWBTATTReg]

1. Ridiculous. Mouths off without looking seriously at the facts or doings of anything...

Planting a tree every 100 feet x 100 feet, giving each tree plenty of room to grow, means that

2800 trees roughly per square mile (100 x 100 feet per tree). For the state of Missouri, which has roughly 60,000 square miles, this would mean 167 million trees, plus or minus. And almost 8.4 billion trees for the whole US, 50 x 60,000 or 3 million square miles.

And rump wants to plant a million times more than the area of the whole USA.

Idiot.

[virgogal]

2. There was nothing in the article where he stated the amount of trees he wanted to plant.

[SWBTATTReg]

3. It's not the point, the point is that it's unfeasible and just where are you going to plant the ...

trees? Just planting a billion (not a trillion) trees is a major undertaking.

[virgogal]

4. If England can plant a million,as it is doing, we could plant quite a few.

[SWBTATTReg]

6. Absolutely. I know that large swatches of the west had caught on fire, hopefully they're...

replacing w/ a less fire prone tree, or perhaps let burning go sometimes, they say now that controlled burns are the best for old plots, removes the underbrush, etc.

[NickB79]

8. There is no replacement occurring in the West

Locally people are planting trees in suburban areas, but the forests lost won't be coming back if droughts and heat waves continue as predicted. They'll naturally transition to savanna in some areas, chaparell in others, but the oak and pine forests that California had in the 20th century won't survive in the 2-3C warmer world of the 21st.

[Midnightwalk]

5. Where did you get 100 feet?

Here’s a web site that says

Typically, a high-density softwood tree plantation uses 6 foot spacing between trees and 20 feet between tree rows and a high-density hardwood tree plantation uses 10 foot spacing between trees and 30 feet between rows.

[link:https://www.treeplantation.com/tree-spacing-calculator.html|]

Maybe 100 feet is a better average The site does say high density plantation. Don’t know.

Using the hardwood number I think that’s around 500x170 or around 34,000 a square mile (too lazy to use calculator i hope i didn't mess that up too bad).

I’m surprised that your 50 times Missouri was that close. 3.7 million square miles.

Not disagreeing that trump has no idea and doesn’t really care about reforestation. But think of the economic boom when we have to manufacture all those rakes and hire all those rakers.

It boggles the mind.

[SWBTATTReg]

7. I used a hundred because that's my estimate for old oak trees and such, pines can grow...

closer together, but the hundred feet is my estimate after having my own small xmas tree farm and also a plot in the Ozarks (lots of trees), it's just a reasonable estimate I came up w/ and I could be wrong, but when you consider the size of some of these white oaks, 100 is probably okay. The 50 times the of MO was just an estimate too, I thought I was under estimating the size of the US, 20% roughly, my bad too.

Ha ha, and I have to laugh about your joke about the rakes and to hire all of those rakers...since we're cracked down (rump did) on immigrants (legal and illegal), we can't even get enough workers to pick the fruits, plus the whole harvest requires on the part of workers.