The GQP Is Back With Their Climate "Policy" Of Let's Pretend Planting Lots Of Trees Will Fix Things

[hatrack]

As Speaker Kevin McCarthy visited a natural gas drilling site in northeast Ohio to promote House Republicans’ plan to sharply increase domestic production of energy from fossil fuels last month, the signs of rising global temperatures could not be ignored. Smoke from Canadian wildfires hung in the air. When the speaker was asked about climate change and forest fires, he was ready with a response: Plant a trillion trees.

The idea — simple yet massively ambitious — revealed recent Republican thinking on how to address climate change. The party is no longer denying that global warming exists, yet is searching for a response to sweltering summers, weather disasters and rising sea levels that doesn’t involve abandoning their enthusiastic support for American-produced energy from burning oil, coal and gas. “We need to manage our forests better so our environment can be stronger,” McCarthy said, adding, “Let’s replace Russian natural gas with American natural gas and let’s not only have a cleaner world, let’s have a safer world.”

EDIT

Enter the idea of planting a trillion trees. A 2019 study suggested that planting trees to suck up heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere could be one of the most effective ways to fight climate change. Major conservation groups, and former President Donald Trump, who downplayed humanity’s role in climate change, embraced the idea. But the tree-planting push has drawn intense pushback from environmental scientists who call it a distraction from cutting emissions from fossil fuels. The authors of the original study have also clarified that planting trees does not eliminate “the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Planting one trillion trees would also require a massive amount of space — roughly the size of the continental United States. And more trees could even increase the risk of wildfires by serving as fuel in a warming world. “There is a lot of value to planting trees, but it is not a panacea,” said Mark Ashton, a professor of forest ecology at Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

EDIT

https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-republicans-trillion-trees-01e455acce4397c0376e82bfa18b72c2

[jimfields33]

1. We can do a wide variety of solutions to combat it.

Planting trees is not a bad thing. A comprehensive plan with different solutions are needed.

[Brenda]

2. This has been shown to not work.

Lots of corporations, including good companies that are rated B Corporation status have been doing this with a high failure rate. It might be easy to gather people to plant saplings but they need care. There is no long-term care and most of those trees die due to lack of water or protection from the increasing severe weather events...hail, wind, floods.

Another one of those "nice ideas" that is a big fat distraction.

Also, see this article:

https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/why-dont-we-just-plant-lot-trees#:~:text=But%20trees%20can't%20absorb,matter%20how%20many%20we%20plant.&text=It's%20well%20understood%20that%20the,that%20trees%20absorb%20CO2.

Forests are a crucial line of defense against climate change. But trees can’t absorb enough CO2 to stop climate change on their own, no matter how many we plant.

[bronxiteforever]

3. American natural gas is exceptional because

it is American. Really it is a freedom gas that creates liberty and magic like isn’t a GHG!


Please note that my sarcasm is not an endorsement of Putin’s gas because screw that guy and Glory to Ukraine!

[Think. Again.]

4. "WE"....

WE are going to have to decrease and eliminate fossil fuel use no matter what republicans and their CO2 industry sugar-daddies say or do.