1 trillion trees? GOP climate plan needs to get real - The Seattle Times

1 trillion trees? GOP climate plan needs to get real | The Seattle Times

If there was ever a summer to drill into our communal conscience that the climate is changing, it has been the last few months. Temperature records have been set around this country (including Seattle) and around the world. Billions are suffering, thousands are dying, economies are spluttering.

One thing you may have missed is what the congressional Republicans plan to do about it. No, they don’t support a drastic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, which the science tells us is at the root of climate change. They don’t believe in incentives to help U.S. industry lead the worldwide transition to renewable technologies. Instead, they want to expand the extraction of American oil and gas in the cause of “national security.” One other thing they do advocate (according to the House Speaker Kevin McCarthy) is planting a trillion trees.

Planting more trees is not an original idea. It began in 2006 as a Billion Tree Campaign under the United Nations Environmental Program and was upgraded in 2018 to the Trillion Tree Declaration and in the 2020 World Economic Forum it became the One Trillion Tree Initiative.

Planting trees will definitely help the planet. On average, each mature tree absorbs about 58 pounds of carbon dioxide per year and 1 trillion such trees will absorb 20 billion tons of CO2 per year, roughly one-half of today’s total human emissions. Great, you may think, with a stroke of the pen we are halfway to a solution. Not so fast; there are some bumps along that route.

First, you would need an area the size of the entire United States. However, available fertile land tends to be used to grow crops or raise cattle. Next, trees need care, including water — on average, a tree requires around 7,000-10,000 gallons per year. And trees take several decades to grow and become mature, which is time that we do not have right now. Meanwhile, forest fires are destroying an increasing number of trees each year. In North America alone, that number is nearly 10 billion per year. Even if the GOP got its way, research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows that the trillion-tree program will cut about 0.27 of a degree Fahrenheit of warming by 2100 — 7% off the temperature rise expected by 2100.

So far, the scientific predictions have been right on target. Actually, the measured overall rate of warming has somewhat exceeded the predictions — scientists tend to be conservative in their pronouncements. We were also warned that the combination of El Niño and global warming could be a potent driver. Lo and behold, much of the world has suffered record-breaking extremes and “one-in-1,000-years” events.

So why do Republican politicians downplay the existential threat of climate change? To be fair, there is a Conservative Climate Caucus in Congress founded by Rep. John Curtis, R-Utah, that has 79 members. Here is some of what that caucus believes in (no mention of trees): “ … Answers can be found in innovation embraced by the free market”; “ … Fossil fuels … should be a major part of the global solution”; “ … China is the greatest immediate obstacle.”

This sounds like: no government guidance or incentives; if polluting is the cheapest, then so be it; and it’s all China’s fault anyway. This may get some votes in Permian Basin country, but who can look their grandchildren in the eye and explain that this is the planet we are going to leave them?

Fortunately, the gap between this mindset and reality is not unbridgeable. The bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus in the House has equal membership (29) from each side of the aisle. (There is a p arallel group in the Senate.) The group’s co-chairs, Reps. Andrew Garbarino. R-N.Y., and Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., have a lot of opportunities to bring the country together and to help the planet — and our grandchildren.

Possibilities I suggest include:

- Work more closely with China on reducing carbon emissions;
- Coordinate the programs that have been introduced by many of the states;
- Ensure that the Inflation Reduction Act expenditures are put to best use;
- Ensure that U.S. industry is a leader in the global energy transition;
- Consider a revenue-neutral carbon fee and dividend as in Canada.

As the country sweats its way through to the fall, consider whether Congress should stick with business-as-usual or follow the science and the rest of the world. Yes, there will always be climate-change deniers, just as there were those who denied the connection between smoking and lung cancer.