Why isn't there more of a focus on planting trees?

Question

With all of the talk about Global Warming being caused by CO2, why isn't there a major public push to plant trees? Wouldn't they help consume CO2?

I'm being serious about this. How could stopping deforestation hurt the situation?

While I'm known on here as a Global Warming skeptic, I'm very serious about taking care of earth. I try to do whatever I can to help the environment. I even do little things like bringing my own coffee cup to work so I don't use styrofoam cups instead. It's gotten so popular at work that everyone now brings their own cups. But that's beside the point.

Deforestation is a big issue to me. And I don't see why the government, and Al Gore himself, aren't making major steps to increase tree populations.

Answer 1

Easy:  Most of the people who believe man is evil and killing the planet reside in tightly packed urban jungles.  It's hard to plant trees in a paved parking lot.  Those of us who live in the sticks would have to clear a few trees in order to plant the new ones.  Look at a satellite image of this country...it's a whole lot of green with a few islands of rooftops scattered here and there.

Answer 2

In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore did urge more tree planting ("Plant trees, lots of trees"), and the UN is currently running the Billion Tree Campaign, partly in order to slow global warming (trees are carbon neutral over their lifetime, but younger trees act more as carbon sinks). The Nature Conservancy is running a billion tree campaign of its own in the Atlantic Rainforest of Brazil, and there are a number of tree-planting campaigns going in Africa, where it's an attempt more to slow the terrible desertification going on there right now, and provide wood for cooking fires for the many poor families who depend on it. The most famous is the Green Belt Movement.

http://www.unep.org/billiontreecampaign/

http://plantabillion.org/

http://greenbeltmovement.org/

I am also a big proponent of grasslands restoration where that's natural- grasslands are better than trees over their lifetime because trees store the carbon in themselves and it gets released by logging, burning, or decomposition. Grass stores it in the soil, so as long as you don't plow, you're good to go. Combine that with the health and animal welfare benefits of exclusively grassfed meat, the ease of combining wind farms with grass-based livestock operations, and the high levels of biodiversity in virgin or well managed restored grasslands, and we have a winner.

Answer 3

By the way plant all the trees you want, grow some grass - none of that will hurt.

Stop forest fires by allowing better management of the trees (even by cutting) and their underbrush (by clearing).  

I would think cutting in breaks thru contiguous forests would aid in stopping forest fires from wiping out huge areas as seen in California.  

We can't control rain or lightning, so something must be done to control the fuel that burns down our forests.  

Hundreds of acres of cut trees beats thousands (or millions) of acres of burned trees.  

I am not a proponent of CO2 Man-made Global warming, but if I were I would find a better way to keep huge forest fires from filling the atmosphere with uncontrolled burned tree smoke.

Before humans (with firefighting equipment) settled the entire US forest fires had to just burn themselves out which could cover millions of acres I would guess.

Comment on the Stossel article below:

They mention in the article posted below that people don't like looking at clear cut forest - well who give a rat behind what it looks like.  I live in west Texas and our beautiful sunsets will almost all show a 100' tall wind turbine at the current rate.  Do I care NO - we need the power - GO GET IT!  Everyone wants to use windpower and we've got it out the wazoo!

So if clear cutting a forest will stop an uncontrolled life threatening (to trees, animals & humans) forest fire, just suck it up and deal with it.

Answer 4

Trees actually release CO2 at night, so there is no relevance between global warming and plants.

Answer 5

Because the forrest acutally need thinned.

Everyone forgets the 50 mile wide fire that occurred in Northern Arizona five years ago.

The environmentalists would allow anything to be thinned let alone a prescribed burn.

So what happened........They lost it all.

Answer 6

Well honestly it is because Al Gore and some of the other leaders of the movement labeled trees as carbon sinks and as such bad things. This is why they support chopping down tropical rain forests to get open ground to grow sugar cane on to make ethanol from.

Answer 7

To me it is not so much about Global Warming, as it is about protecting the air that we breath, and the waste of land that land fills take, and the conservation of our water supply.

i am old enough that I can still remember when, if you you wanted a drink of water, you just turned on the tap, I can still remember how good and sweet the water tasted with out being polluted with chlorine.

Or drinking water out of a mountain stream, without worry.

Where I live now you can still do some of those things, a short trip up the mountain and there are still mountain stream that are fresh and pure.

The mountains are full of trees, and when they get cut, the area is replanted with trees.

And when there is no fog, or clouds, the sky still looks blue.

I look across the street and see more trees than houses.

But I still carry my own coffee cup, and have done so for many years.

I can also remember 20 years ago when there was a big push to plant trees, in areas were it wasn't as nice as it is here.

and even today many communities require parks to be planted along with community development.

Answer 8

Thats right! Al Gore forgot to buy stock in a tree farm so, he has to make his fame and fortune elsewhere!