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That argument gets brought up again and again, and is just wrong. Can't people see the basic contradiction in that reasoning? Trees have always died!

What matters with forest-based offsetting is the increase of forest biomass - the deaths of individual trees don't matter. If you grow a forest, the corresponding CO2 is offset for as long as the forest stays there.

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We have burnt through hundreds of millions of years of fossil fuels (aka trees) in the past couple centuries. How can we regrow that “forest” one time and make a dent in carbon emissions?

Edit: I’d be happy to proven wrong, I just can’t imagine how if we increased the today’s biomass by an incredible percent, it would come close to the amount of carbon stored over millions of years.

Edit 2: 1.2 trillion trees would cancel out 10 years of human CO2 emissions. The planet currently has 3 trillion trees https://e360.yale.edu/digest/planting-1-2-trillion-trees-cou...

I was just refuting the incorrect statement: "The only way to make tree-growing carbon negative* is to sequester the grown trees underground."

It would indeed be foolish to believe we can halt climate change just by growing trees. But AFOLU is part of the toolkit we need to use (the most important tool in this toolkit is sobriety).

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