Opinion: No, Virginia, your Christmas tree is not a climate crime - Chattanooga Times Free Press

Opinion: No, Virginia, your Christmas tree is not a climate crime | Chattanooga Times Free Press

If there's one climate-change solution everybody seems to agree on, it's that trees are good. Even Donald Trump, who has called climate change a Chinese hoax, has proposed planting a trillion trees.

So it might seem that the holiday tradition of chopping down one of these precious planet-savers and dragging it into your living room to festoon with lights and ornaments, only to toss it on the curb a few weeks later, would be bad for the climate. But in fact, you may be doing the planet a favor.

For one thing, Christmas-tree farming is generally a sustainable business. Trees grow for many years before harvesting and are replaced by one or more seedlings when they're finally cut down. Just 30 million of the 350 million or so trees on farms actually get chopped down every season, according to The Nature Conservancy.