Comment by myrmidon
This is interesting to know, but easy to overstate IMO.
Back of the envelope number is 10 kg of CO2 absorbed per maturing tree and year (for ~20 years).
This means you would need to plant almost 1000 trees for each person (assuming roughly US/EU emission level) to compensate for current emissions only, every 20 years. That just seems infeasible to me, and a factor of 30% is not gonna change this significantly.
Renewables + electrification seems much more realistic, when countries like France are already under 5 tons CO2/year/person by relying on carbon-free electricity (US is at 15!).
But it's still nice to know because at least planting/conserving trees apparently helps even more than expected...
> This means you would need to plant almost 1000 trees for each person (assuming roughly US/EU emission level) to compensate for current emissions only, every 20 years. That just seems infeasible to me
That’s 50 trees each year for each person, or, in the USA, about 17 billion trees, for a total new forest of 340 billion trees.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20... says the USA has about 280 billion trees, so we’d ‘only’ have to grow that by 120%. That would grow forest in the USA from about 33% to about 75% of land area.
Infeasible, but not completely impossible, I would think, from a ‘could we do it?’ viewpoint. ‘Is there a decent chance we’ll do that?’ probably has the answer “no”, though. For the USA, I guess cutting combining forestation with decreasing energy usage would be the easier option.