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Comment by hyperbovine | Hacker News Reader

> You can plant all the trees you want but as long as you're producing nearly 40 gigatons of CO2 a year, you're just making yourself feel good and getting some PR for your company/party/country.

Wouldn’t planting enough trees to gobble up 40+1 GT of carbon a year do the trick? I think this is the point of TFA.

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China is adding millions of new drivers a year (they've had to institute a lottery to see who gets to apply for a new license because of the demand), they almost have more drivers than the United States does people now. They are also actively constructing new coal power plants and creating insane numbers of new roads. All of these things are increasing their CO2 output and with creation of massive amounts of road, removing the ability of vast swaths of land to sequester CO2. That's just China.

Never mind the fact that trees don't immediately start sucking up their maximum amount of CO2 as saplings, it takes a decade or more for them to start doing that depending on the species.

trees only capture carbon temporarily

Good thing that they drop seeds and that their death triggers a prolific growth of seedlings then.

With the right trees it's sequestration for centuries.

We can also cut them to make room for new trees. If we don't burn the C in them to CO2, but use them as raw materials (buildings, alternative to plastics, etc.) there is even more potential for carbon capture in this way.

Of course, the long term solution is to grow as many new trees per year as we emit CO2, so there is an upper limit for our CO2 budget, but this should give use time to convert to carbon neutral energy production and consumption without hampering the the GDP growth too much. In fact, it has been estimated that world GDP can actually grow even during the transition, due to, for example, positive effects of improved environment (health improvements lead to productivity improvements and so on).

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