Stop Planting Trees, Says Guy Who Inspired World to Plant a Trillion Trees

3 years ago by Renneder to c/becomeme

Ecologist Thomas Crowther’s research inspired countless tree-planting campaigns, greenwashing, and attacks from scientists. Now he’s back with a new plan for nature restoration.

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Renneder 16 points 3 years ago

• Crowther's research found that there is room on Earth for 1.2 trillion trees, which can absorb up to two-thirds of the carbon.

• The study sparked a tree-planting craze among companies and leaders seeking to bolster their environmental credentials.

• This led to a firestorm of criticism from scientists who argued that Crowther's study vastly overestimated the area of land suitable for reforestation.

• Crowther published a more detailed paper showing that preserving existing forests can have a greater impact on the climate than planting trees.

• The study caused a crisis of confidence in conservation programs, as the purchase of private carbon credits for forest conservation proved futile.

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Sanctus 6 points 3 years ago

Honest question; how are carbon credits supposed to help? They sound like tokens you spend to let you polute for being a "good" company.

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JGrffn 5 points 3 years ago

I might get flak for this, but isn't this the same idea behind hunting for the sake of conservation? Essentially, you just get a free pass and a karma pass to kill cause you paid an obscene amount of money for the right?

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CameronDev 2 points 3 years ago

I beleive the way should work is that credits cant just be made up. In order for the polluter to buy a credit, a cleaner needs to do something to generate the credit (carbon capture/plant tree/etc). So cleaner companies are incentivised to expand their operations, and polluters are incentivised to limit their carbon pollution, so they dont have to spend money on carbon credits.

Of course, there are a heap on administrative and political issues, notably:

cleaners can lie about how much they cleanup
polluters can price their products a bit higher and juat not worry about it

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freebee 1 point 3 years ago

The amount of "tokens" on the market is capped. This creates scarcity, and should help map out costs that used to be externalised, outside of the price of what pollutes. The credits force the cost of externality to be internalised into the price.

The idea is very good.

The issues are that it could in some cases actually slow down progress on cleaner processes and that the pricing can be very wrong, it all depends on how many credits are made avaliable on the market.

Another issue is that it, if poorly implemented, can create unfair competition, e.g. flooding the market EU market with cheap products from other continents where regulation differs and no import taxes to match that gap.

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