Because environmentalist advocacy is commonly couched in religious terms.

It's not seen as a means of improving thriving but a way to atone for sin.

As such it's approached as a ritualistic rather than an engineering problem.

Reduce? Absolutely. Stop? Not possible without a level of depopulation that would make Generalplan Ost seem like a particularly harsh flu season.

You would effectively have to starve the global south out of existence.

Yeeep. Anti-nuke rhetoric has recently taken on an even harsher tone by trying to claim that it's intrinsically only something no-no Germans would like. Somehow.

Significantly less efficient. You might as well use that biomass to create humus by turning it into charcoal and soaking it with nutrients and microorganisms to get said desert up to tundra status. That's gonna capture moisture and reduce how much heat gets bounced between ground and atmosphere.

Sequestration tech is thousands of times more effective. Unlike, say, insulin we're already doing better than nature. It's really a matter of scaling green energy Generation and the political will to do it.

Imagine my shock when I found out that evangelical churches in the south are famously climate change deniers! My middle school years were a total mind fuck.

Every organization can be thought of as organisms, which includes a survival instinct. Christians are extremely overrepresented in professions that utilize or extract fossil fuels as well as regions that require car usage so the memeplex detected a direct mortal threat to its constituent elements and created a counter meme to defend itself.

No,not all of it. A majority, yes. But it's still a net negative.

with 0 effort

BRB gonna tell my sister in law her agroforestry degree is useless cause trees just spawn into the skybox at the exact frequency and location we need. 😅

The fact you and several other people in the comments don't think trees are an incredibly profitable bulk product is frankly hilarious.

There's an unmanageable surplus of carbon in the air and in the ground. A lot of oil literally predates the concept of a tree so even turning the world back into a global rainforest wouldn't be enough.

The tree takes somewhere between twice to twenty times as long to reach full C02 absorption level and the bigger portion of its weight in carbon back into the atmosphere when decomposing (better than burning mind you but still).

That alone really skews the cost-benefit analysis.

Where it becomes murkier is the carbon footprint of the respective approach itself. The tree/facility needs to first offset the carbon released by getting it online. Reforestation runs a lot of fossil fuel from rearing to transportation to plantation and maintenance. It's significantly more industrial than the common image of tie-dye wearing enbies skipping uphill to plant sprouts upon a clearing and kissing them awake in the name of mother earth.

Conversely, we are aware that industry requires industry.

In terms of area usage the sequestration facilities are significantly more effective by a factor of a thousand. Which is definitely a good reason to try but for aforementioned reasons numbers only tell the full story if you ask complete questions.

WAS GETTING MILKED PART OF YOUR PLAN?

Exponentially more than trees occupying the same volume.

They're a degrowther. Anything except annihilation of industry isn't satisfactory to them.

Aaaand there it is.

The biggest role of tree planting should IMHO be reversing desertification and stabilizing every hill within reach. They're important to mitigate the results of climate change rather than climate change itself. That's the kind of message that's equal parts fact based, concrete and localized and therefore far easier to sell than contentious & global abstracts.

We probably need to look towards greening the desert en masse. Not so much for the carbon (though that helps) but because of the amount of sunlight that gets no longer bounced back and forth between the ground and atmosphere.

Plus it'd winnow down hurricane incidence a ton and long-term provide better access to clean water and arable land. All of which would indirectly mitigate climate change fallout regardless of carbon absorbed.