Let’s Just Plant A Trillion Trees

Neko, Neko, Neko, you thought you could hide the best climate change solution in the world from me. Rolly, I’m not hiding anything. Oh yeah, what about the solution that’s got bipartisan support? Everybody agrees on it and it sucks carbon dioxide out of the air without us having to change our lifestyle even a little bit. Wow, that sounds too good to be true. Yeah, except it isn’t because it is true, we’re planting one trillion trees. Oh, it’s too dumb to be true. Okay, Rolly.

So tree planting seems like a pretty good idea to fix climate change, right? Sure. Because trees are big plants and plants eat CO2, which we’d discussed in season 1 episode 6. If anybody wants to learn more about plants eating CO2, I’s my case here on our Open and Shut, plant trees. And the idea of planting a tree is also really easy for people to grasp in a way that say direct air capture is not. As an example of how it’s easy to grasp, let’s listen to a quick clip from Biggest YouTube Creator.

I’m not the biggest YouTube Creator Neko. Thank you. I’m barely top 10. What you Mr. Beast. Oh God. Jimmy D. himself. You know, I never thought I would say I’wish we were starting with a Tucker Carlson clip. But bring on the beast. Bring on Jimmy. Okay, this is a clip from 4 years ago. It has 106 million views. Wow. And the title of the video is planting 20 million trees. My Biggest Project Ever. We partnered with the largest non-profit tree planting organization in the world, Arbor Day.

We need your help. Every dollar donated they will plant a tree. Watch. Here's a dollar. And I donated it. Another dollar. Another tree. Here's $10. And I just donated it. Arbor Day and their partners are the pros. They planted hundreds of millions of trees. They'll make sure they have a high rate of survivability and they genuinely do care. Now one thing I want to address. I personally haven’t always been the most environmentally friendly.

We've burnt the box forward and we've done many other dumb things. Wait, sorry. You've burnt a box forward? I think that's got to be a reference to another video that I don't personally think we need to watch. I don't. I don't really need to watch it. But like, a lot of you guys think I haven't been that environmentally friendly. And then he starts with a thing that's like one time I'd burnt this one thing instead of like being my three film crews fly all over the world doing pranks on people.

Yeah. Well, you know, burning the box forward is bad too. Yeah, maybe the box forward was full of like... Methane. Like heavy metals or methane, yeah. And a lot of you might be of the mindset of the old me though. It's basically, you know, someone else will figure it out. But that's not how it works. We genuinely need all the help we can get. And honestly, I've done everything I can. I got a bunch of fans together and we planted thousands of trees. I've done everything I can.

I've done everything I can. I have many millions of dollars and so I got a bunch of fans together and we planted some trees. Me and Mark have invested months of time behind the scenes into getting this all together. And I'm personally planting 100,000 trees. AKA 100,000 donation. I've literally tried my best to do everything I can and now what's your guys' turn? I don't know why he's emphasizing. Nobody would have been mad if he were like, I'm trying to do a good thing.

But to say you've done everything you like... I've literally tried my best. Greta Tunberg only takes boats places. Like... Well, she's literally trying her best and I'm literally trying my best to get a bunch of my fans together and make them pay to make a bunch of trees. You guys have been spamming my comment section and spamming my mentions on Twitter tell me to do something. I didn't want to do the best I could, but you guys made me. And now I want to see that same energy.

We only have one earth and it's important we take care of it. Recently, lots of not so great things have been happening to forest and people just keep making fun of our generation for retweet activism and not actually doing something. Which is why we created TeamTrees.org with the help of the Arbor Day Foundation. This is your chance to make a difference for every dollar you donate here on YouTube or at TeamTrees.org, a tree will be planted. So that's Mr. Beast's campaign.

It has been very successful. He's raised over $20 million. He's working with the Arbor Day Foundation. But the point is, like, this is an accessible way for fans of Mr. Beast to engage with environmental activism. It's really easy to understand. So give me a dollar I plant a tree. We also see corporations lean into this messaging. And here's an ad from Charmin. Oh. At Charmin, we make paper. And we love trees.

That's why we protect forests by using pulps certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. It's why we regrow at least two trees for every tree we use. And it's why when forests are devastated by natural disasters, Charmin helps restore trees through the Arbor Day Foundation. Regural and two trees for every tree we use is the genie curse for destroying humanity with too many trees. So you can enjoy the go, but forest remain forest. Charmin.

I really can't believe that they didn't use some version of a bear shits in the woods. I can believe that the toilet paper commercial trying to appeal to all generations isn't going to say, hey, a bear shits in the woods. I'm just saying, if they hired me for their marketing department, that commercial would have looked a lot different. We go Charmin after dark. These bears are shitting their brains out. These bears took ketamine last night and now they need the best quality Charmin.

I also just a little thing. I just hate the sort of Katie Britt style ad read of like at Charmin, we make paper. We love trees. Shut up. It is definitely like you can imagine her in the booth doing the bit and the director's like Katie, great job. Can you be way doucheier? Like, like disappear up our own ass, please. And we're even hearing about the benefits of trees from some unexpected voices, including our old friend here.

We're committed to conserving the majesty of God's creation and the natural beauty of our world. Today I'm pleased to announce the United States will join one trillion trees initiative being launched here at the world economic forum, one trillion trees. S mattering some of life. And in doing so, we will continue to show strong leadership and restoring growing and better managing our trees and our forests. This is not a time for pessimism. This is a time for optimism.

I love how he couldn't resist taking a shot at the wildfires in California. Yeah. You're going to better manage those wildfires. Remember when I said we should be raking the forests? Fear and doubt is not a good thought process because this is a time for tremendous hope and joy and optimism and action. But to embrace the possibilities of tomorrow, we must reject the perennial profits of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse. Uh-oh, profit of doom checking in.

The profits of doom, the perennial profits of doom. It's so clear when he's just riffing and when he's reading off of his teleprompter. It was so weird to hear him talk about the natural beauty of our world. But I was like, you don't give a fuck. That was magical creation. That was obviously a glorious president, Donald Trump speaking at the world economic forum four years ago.

So Raleigh, it might not surprise you that neither Trump nor Sherman are being particularly genuine about their commitment to ecological restoration. I don't know who is being less genuine. I truly don't. Yeah, I mean, here's the thing. If, if either Republicans or big corporations like it, it's probably because it just doesn't force them to meaningfully change anything about what they're doing.

Yeah. Even Trump, who I think has never thought about a tree outside of the speech, it's easy for him to be like, we're going to plant trees. You're welcome, environmentalist. It seems like an olive branch. Everyone can get on board with it. And also like they really are a magical creation that sucks carbon out of the air. You know, it's like, it's scientifically they do see it. It's the thing that we need desperately now. And it seems like all other things being equal.

Let's just plant a bunch of trees. I'm sold, Nicole. Let's do it. Podcast over. I'm getting my gloves on. Here we go. It is weird. Put my travel. Put my travel. I mean, driving gloves and a travel everywhere. Yeah. Well, I didn't know what it was for until we did this podcast. Raleigh, I have, I have some unfortunate news. Oh, fuck. It's time for me to be a negative Nicole about the whole thing.

Free planting isn't really a silver bullet and it's not really as effective as we're being led to believe. And most importantly, talking about planting trees in this way allows the powers that be to keep going business as usual without making the bigger systemic changes that we need to actually fight the climate crisis. I was just copy paste that exact thing on so many of these like bullshit climate solutions.

And yeah, that's, I'm sad to hear that because I was really looking at how I'm going to take these driving gloves off. And ultimately, like the best and worst thing about planting trees is the same thing, which is that it is a very easily comprehendable mental symbol for environmentalism, which on the one hand means it's really easy to get people on board with in a way that is like much harder for other climate solutions.

But it also means that people are more willing to look at this climate solution while ignoring other potential harms or other ways that we need to change. Gotcha. Yeah, it's also like kind of simple, right? Like build a house. I don't know how to do the plumbing and the drywalling. Plant a tree. I could do that. I could knock that out in 20 minutes. Yeah. And so that feels like now I'm already thinking, oh, I could do it in 15. Well, you'd probably plant a shitty tree.

You'd probably plant like a banana tree and it would die right away. But I'd plant like an oak, a wise oak. Well, Raleigh, this is a little bit of foreshadowing of what's coming up later in the podcast. But first, let's talk about the history of tree planting as an environmental solution a little bit. People have been planting trees for basically as long as human civilization has existed.

Just as like one example, there was forestry management being done in China as early as like 1122 BC, according to the United Nations. And then they've continued to do that for both agriculture and timber production and also environmental reasons. And overall, throughout the world, early efforts tended to focus more on local benefits of tree planting, including ecosystem resilience and economic opportunities.

So, you know, preventing desertification, improving the water table, providing crops, that sort of thing. Soil health also? Soil health, yeah. And I guess it makes sense to do like tree husbandry because we make our houses out of trees, right? So like when as a society, we use timber for a lot of different things.

So like not only is it good to replenish the, you know, renewable resource of wood, but also trees are environments for animals and creatures and forests are part of, you know, ecology. So it's probably really good to maintain that. And I think it's a reasonable thing that early humans figured that out and like acted in the best interest of future generations by planting trees.

Yeah. And if we want to get a sense for how that kind of transformed into the modern one trillion trees movement for climate change specifically, we should start with a woman named Vongareematai. Dr. Vongareematai was the first female professor in Kenya and she was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, largely because of her work with trees and reforestation.

She noticed that the environment around the villages where she grew up and visited in Kenya was degrading and she proposed trees as a solution to that. And I'm going to let Vongareematai explain for herself her focus on this issue. I was in the University of Nairobi and I was doing research in the field and I observed a lot of deforestation and soil loss. And I was also a member of the National Council of Women of Kenya.

And from that forum, I was hearing many rural women complain about the fact that they did not have firewood, that they were losing a lot of their top soil and that their children were suffering from diseases associated with the malnutrition. And eventually I connected that to the fact that they were planting more cash crops than food for household consumption. They were also complaining that they did not have enough water.

And I eventually connected it to the fact that water was disappearing because we were deforesting our catchment areas. So that's how Vongareematai's work started. Obviously, she is connecting trees more again to the local environmental benefits like protecting the watershed, like making sure that planting was sustainable, maintaining the livelihood of people who depend on the forest and things that grow in the ground.

So her focus was not so much on climate change itself, although she did end up talking about that many years later. So this wasn't at all like we got to suck the CO2 out of the air. This is just all the other co-benefit. Exactly. This is about local environmental benefits. This was before carbon sequestration was really on people's radar tree-wise. She would work with local women in these areas to plant trees. She referred to them as foresters without diplomas. And having...

Well, because at the time she started the movement and a lot of people didn't think that local people, especially women, could do it. They don't know how to plant and maintain trees. We need experts to do this. And one important thing that Vongareematai did, which we're going to talk about later in the episode, is she was like, no, we need to get the people on the ground to own this project. And so this movement became the Green Belt movement.

Yeah. It got promoted and then it was a Green Belt with a little bit of blue tape around the end. Let me say thank you, Sensei. Yeah. Sensei Vongareematai.

If you came to Green Belt movement and it got UN funding from that, and the current Green Belt statement on climate, which is only a part of their mission statement, says that current climate change policies and actions in Kenya and world over do not provide effective support for community engagement and decision making, nor sustainable livelihoods and environmental conservation.

It is because of this that the Green Belt movement has a climate change program that aims at strengthening the understanding and capacity of rural communities to take action against climate change. At the grassroots level, our goal is to create climate resilient communities through restoration and protection of forest watersheds and the creation of sustainable livelihoods for communities in Kenya and across Africa.

So basically, a lot of their work is focused more on climate adaptation and making sure there's some level of resilience for these communities against the impacts of climate change. But it is also a way that these people can take action on climate change mitigation when they don't have access to a lot of the traditional levers of power. Yeah, that part about the current top down insufficientness of our climate policy.

That really resonates with everything I've read about this where people are like, uh-oh, farmers aren't planting the right things. So we're going to build them a little calculator and parachute it in. Like, then no, he is it. It's like, one fucking no. They plant these things not because they're dumb, but because like, that's what the market is making them plant. And if they had extra funding, they wouldn't have to do that.

You know, people on the ground know better than people parachuting ideas in a lot of the time. We've got to stop wasting parachutes on calculators. We could be delivering those in trucks. Here's the thing. We have to see hammer ushered in a boom of parachute purchasing and we're still working off. We have so many parachutes. We just got to use them. So in 2006, the UN launched the billion trees campaign with a B. It was endorsed by Vongerimah Thai and it was largely informed by her work.

According to the press release from the announcement of the billion trees campaign, quote, rehabilitating tens of millions of hectares of degraded land and reinforcing the earth is necessary to restore the productivity of soil and water resources and expanding tree cover will mitigate the buildup of atmospheric carbon dioxide, a global warming greenhouse gas.

So 2006, this press release, as far as I can tell is the first time really officially tying this billion trees movement to we are going to sequester carbon. Gotcha. So we've got the billion trees campaign. We're going to plant a billion trees. How did we get from the goal of a billion trees to a trillion trees? Practice, Nicole. Exactly. Karate practice.

After this campaign was launched in 2006, we fast forward a whole year to 2007 when nine year old Felix Finkbiner of Germany is assigned a report on climate change in his like third or fourth grade class and he learned about Vongerimah Thai and her work. Felix is so inspired by this. He's like, I want little kids to plant a million trees. So he starts his own campaign to plant trees not just in Germany, but with kids all over the world.

This is called plant for the planet and plant for the planet claims to have planted a million trees in three years, which is pretty good for a campaign launched by a nine year old, I think. That's true. Then in 2010, Felix gives a speech in front of the UN General Assembly. He's 12 at the time. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And he didn't talk about Pokemon one time. It was crazy. My favorite Pokemon. Sorry. I'm trying to do a 12 year old German accent.

Yeah. That's why I love Pikachu as a bad because of the renewable energy that it can create from its little electric tail. So in 2010, he gives the speech when he's 12 years old in front of the UN General Assembly to celebrate the success of his movement and to express his enthusiasm for the billion tree campaign. And he says we should set a goal of a trillion trees in this speech. And as far as I can tell, this is the first time the trillion tree goal was said in this kind of formal setting.

Felix took over the UN's billion tree campaign in 2011 after Vungerimatai died. Wow. And after he takes over in 2011, they formally rebranded as the trillion tree's project. Now after they rebranded officially the project of trillion trees, they were like, geez, we should probably get some scientific backing for this.

So to kind of figure out how scientifically viable their goal that they set was, Felix emailed a member of the plant for the planet who happened to be roommates with this guy, Thomas Crowther. And Thomas Crowther becomes a very important figure in the trillion trees campaign movement. Both these guys were working at Yale at the time. Thomas Crowther is an ecology researcher. And he was inspired by this email to figure out like, how many trees are there? So he became the first author.

Wait, how many trees on earth are there? Oh, yeah. I have no idea. Nobody else did either. He became the first author on a 2015 study called Mapping Tree Density at a Global Scale, which was published in Nature, that estimated that the world has three trillion trees, which is an estimated 46% decrease since the start of human civilization. Oh, shit. So at some point there were like almost six trillion trees.

Yeah. Okay. The paper also found that there was currently a net loss of about 10 billion trees per year. And the implication of the paper is there's plenty more space for trees. This paper blows up, it kind of like makes Crowther's name in the scientific community. It also gets a household name. Who hasn't heard of Thomas Crowther? I have a Thomas Crowther tramp stamp that I got right after high school. This paper blows up. It also gets some criticism.

But basically Thomas Crowther is the first guy to sort of mathematically be like, I'm pretty sure this is how many trees there are generally across all species. The success of this research led him to co-author another paper in 2019 called the Global Tree Restoration Potential. This was in science. The first author is Bastine. I don't know what happened to Bastine because Crowther seems to be like the main guy who people talk to about this paper, but it is Bastine at all.

And Thomas Crowther was one of the other authors on it. And this paper found that the Earth had room about 0.9 billion hectares for about one trillion more trees, which could store approximately 205 gigatons of carbon, which at the time the paper said was about two thirds of all human CO2 emissions to date. Oh, shit. So I mean, that would be enough to really offset a lot of climate change slash CO2 we've put into the atmosphere.

Yeah. You can see why this is like a very exciting headline as a layperson about climate change. And then in the studies abstract, the authors wrote that their research highlights Global Tree Restoration as our most effective climate change solution to date. Okay, but there are two tree scientists who are like, hey, you know what's the best thing trees? Let me ask my toaster what the biggest problem with bread is. So this paper presents some novel claims.

Spoiler alert, these are some claims that would later come back to Hunt Crowther. But basically, you know, if you are just a person in the world trying to interpret this paper, you're like, okay, so we can basically undo a significant chunk of climate damage by planting trees. And it's the best thing we should be doing and we should start yesterday. And this like really caught fire in the media because of this headline and abstract.

According to the New York Times, greenhouse communications, a marketing company hired by Crowther's lab reports on its website that the science article spawned more than 700 media reports. A CBS news headline planting a trillion trees could be the most effective solution to climate change study says, a guardian headline tree planting has mind blowing potential to tackle the climate crisis in a P headline best way to fight climate change plant a trillion trees.

Mark Benioff of Salesforce heard about it and he got really excited about it. And he launched his own trillion trees campaign with World Economic Forum where Trump spoke to launch their one trillion tree campaign. This is like the moment that we're like we're doing it, we're planting a trillion trees. Now there are three separate one trillion trees campaign. There's plant for the planet, which was the original one with Felix Finkbiner's campaign that started with Montgomery, Matai.

There is a 2016 trillion trees campaign which was launched by a coalition of wildlife NGOs, including the World Wildlife Fund among others. And then there's the top rope that WWF comes in with a trillion trees slam. And then Mark Benioff of Salesforce launched his own one trillion trees campaign called 1T.org. 1T, I love the 1T, you just say 1 trillion, that's not time to say. We got sales to force. Force. I never realized that.

Hey there, a little inside baseball, we record this very podcast at the climate town office. And if you're not familiar with climate town, it's a YouTube series we make for as cheaply as possible. And that means schlepping our camera equipment all over New York City. Yes, our backpacks are full and the gear we reach for every time is peak design. That voice you just heard is Ben Bolt, the executive producer of this podcast and of climate town. That's right, Rally.

I mean this is an ad, but we are genuinely loaded with peak design gear from backpacks to sling bags to camera accessories. And by we, I usually just mean Ben. Ben literally has like seven things from peak design on during any given shoot. Yeah, Rally, I mean they make good stuff. My freaking phone case from peak design, my phone charger on my desk. That's peak design too. My out front bike mount that I can put my phone on. Guess what, peak design.

You know that little tripod we use on climate town shoots? A little travel tripod? A little travel tripod. They got organizers. They got straps, clips, duffel bags, everyday bags. And they're not f***ing around. Peak design gear is guaranteed for life, whether you buy it first hand or tenth hand. And they can make that kind of commitment and not go broke because they build stuff to last. As my father would say, it's built like a brick shit house. And now I'm hearing it out loud.

That term is a little dated. Peak design is a certified fair trade beacorp that prides itself on recyclable materials and it lobbies lawmakers in DC for environmental legislation. They're also the group who nominated climate town to be an environmental partner with 1% for the planet. So double thank you. And they also have been a podcast supporter of ours from day one. And also also they just make really good stuff. So go to peakdesign.com slash playbook.

That's PEAKDesign.com slash playbook for 20% off some of our favorite products and a picture of Ben on set dripping with peak design gear. I'm literally going to try to put as many pieces of peak design gear as I possibly can into one picture. I'm glad we just got health insurance because Ben's back is going to be demoed. But not because the peak design stuff is heavy, the other s*** that we put inside it. Well, in bulk it's heavy. If you stack enough peak design stuff. Yeah, okay.

I'm not saying it's heavy gear. It's good shoulder strap. It really takes the weight off your shoulder. It's going to crush you to death. That's how I got to go. Sayonara. Hey, Nicole. What's up, Raleigh? I just wanted to remind you to stock up on Patriot Powder for your underground bunker. Ah, yes. Good old Patriot Powder has 10,000 grams of fiber in every serving to ward off all that communism.

Raleigh, I got to stop you right there because that sounds like a fake ad for an awful product to highlight the fact that you can listen to this podcast ad free over on our Patreon page. Oh, you're talking about R, the Climate Deniers Playbook Patreon page with ad free episodes and that's it. That's not even close to it. Huh?

Our Patreon page also has exclusive Patreon-only bonus episodes as well as perks like being able to vote on future topics and the ability to talk directly to the Climate Deniers Playbook team. Now maybe I just ate too many servings of Patriot Powder, but isn't this podcast completely free to produce and requires no additional team members besides me and Raleigh? You are Raleigh. How much Patriot Powder did you eat? Bonus episodes? Why don't you take five and I'll close this one out?

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Link in the description. God dammit, Raleigh. Me, Raleigh? So multiple one trillion trees campaigns launch. Corporations really embrace it. Surprise. Tree planting is showing up in our consumer facing messaging. These are planting trees with purchases, you know you ever buy a pair of shoes and they're like, for every pair of shoes, you buy, we plant a tree. I have never had that experience. You've never had that experience.

Well, why don't you read this New York Times excerpt about all of the different products that you can buy and they'll also plant a tree? Sure. Alright, so this is a New York Times article from July 13th, 2022. It's called Can Planting a Trillion New Trees Save the World? Question mark. These are offered as a bonus alongside many goods and services. Can I want to try to get this all in one breath?

Including home nut milk makers, pre-slift kids, two-dimensional Christmas trees, whiskey, cannabis CBD oil, vaporizers, willing cat calves, velvet sneakers, socks that are meant to be worn outside without shoes, reusable menstrual pads, yoga mats, healing crystals,

cold play tickets, a debit card, a surge engine, a mobile phone plan, a flat rate energy plan, the honorary title of Scottish Laird Ship or Ladies Ship of Visit to the Amazonico, restaurant in Dubai, a visit to an axtering venue in Michigan, Ladybug Lads, non-fungible

tokens, crypto barista, non-fungible tokens, wooden airpod cases, wood burning can't stovs, wood burning pizza ovens, journals with wooden covers, journals with paper not made of wood pulp, but of calcium carbonate and literary journal Amazon shell HP MasterCard Nestle PepsiCo Unilever, new PS4 among the large and ubiquitous companies that have some hard interplay for a tree planting efforts. Fuck you, breath!

So you could see like in this instance, like great, they are planting trees, but also it is a marketing tactic. It is like if you're trying to decide between those pair of shoes and another pair of shoes or this pair of socks meant to be worn outside without shoes and another pair of socks meant to be worn outside without shoes, then maybe you'll pick the one that also plants a tree. Yeah, I think that's true.

That's a good example of the consumer getting this sort of good feeling in Dorphin guilt-free consuming, like oh I'm not really consuming because I'm actually making a tree. I would be evil not to buy these calf tans because if I didn't buy them I wouldn't plant a tree. Yeah, exactly. Who cares about the 80 gallons of water that goes into making healing crystals? No way. Yoga mats, whatever. Who cares about, you know what I'm getting out of here.

Who cares about all that shit we're planting a tree. And there's a lot of ways that corporations are using trees to kind of spin their production in environmentally friendly way. We watch that Charmin ad at the top of the episode. We love trees. Put these on your assholes. We talked to Shelley Vineyard from the NRDC. We showed her the Charmin ad and she was understandably pretty skeptical about it.

She pointed out that nowhere do they say that they're not destroying primary forests, which are forests that have never been industrially impacted. So they're probably still going in and exploiting fresh untouched wilderness. That's the best kind for toilet paper. When I'm wiping my ass I can feel the difference. I need to know that an orangutan tried to fight off the bulldozer that was pulling the trees down.

Okay. So the NRDC, the National Research and Defense Council, has they have a thing called issue with the tissue scorecard, which is it analyzes the sustainability practices of toilet paper brands. The problem in consistency earns an F, citing that 95% of Charmin toilet paper still comes from forest fiber.

Proctor and gamble the parent company of Charmin is so notoriously unsustainable that they're the only one of the three biggest toilet paper producers to score an F for each of their tissue brands on every edition of the NRDC scorecard. God, try taking that card home to your parents. Oh, geez. And videos like this sort of blur the focus and get people to focus attention away from the actual problem.

She says that there are plenty of products on the market that have a lower environmental impact and proctor and gamble could be more like those companies, but they're choosing not to be. And she's not really sure what they're doing with the Arbor Day Foundation, but she doesn't think it's looking to eliminate primary sourcing from the supply chain, which is what would do the most good.

And if the company isn't actually reforming how it gets its wood pulp, it's not focusing on the most important stuff. So it's like, well, you're, you're even if you're doing good stuff by planting, which is arguable, you're still ripping down old growth forest, which is way more important for climate anyway. That's a good question. Are all trees created equal? And is this whole like, oh, yeah, we destroyed a bunch of trees, but we're planting another trillion trees.

Are these going to be replacements for the trees that we ripped out? Or are they like kind of worst quality trees? The short answer is, no, they're not as good. And we're going to get into that in a little bit. Cool. Just a commercial for a sherman underwear. But corporations are not the only ones who are like sort of disingenuously clinging to this trillion trees thing. There's also our dear friends in the Republican Party. And like, let's take a second to get into the GOP's brain.

And the immigrants are going to steal your house. No, not that far. You went too far into their brain. We're sort of in a time period where like, it's less savory to outright deny climate change unless you're in sort of the dumbest recesses of the internet. Like even among Republicans, particularly for young people, people agree that climate change is real and we should do something about it, the extent to which they think we should act is variable.

But if you're straight up a climate denier, it's going to be harder and harder for you to gain support unless again, you're like a Marjorie Taylor Greene or something. So they need to acknowledge that climate change is happening, but not piss off their true constituents who are businesses. So here is a few GOP lawmakers speaking to the press about the rollout of the Trillion Trees Act, which is a direct response to Trump's commitment to plant a trillion trees at the World Economic Forum.

This is a pine tree. It is a pine tree seedling. And I've got more right over here. It is very important that we address the situation that exists right now with climate change. And there's no better way to do that than using natural resources such as our trees. Come around, come around. Today we want to talk about our Trillion Trees Act. We know what trees will do. It's like our own lungs cleaning the environment. And what can we do for our own environment?

You know, with a trillion trees that is equal to two thirds of all the man-made carbons since the industrial revolution till today. Interesting quote. Yeah, I wonder where he got that number. Sky red, the article. And this bill looks at a lot more than just planting trees. It looks at making our existing forest healthy and resilient. We also want to be able to do sustainable buildings. As we see a growing population on the earth and we see more housing needed.

We can use these wood products and houses and we can store that carbon for as long as that building and structure is there. We've got Democrats, we've got Republicans. I'm the first Republican that stepped out on this. I'm going to get others and Democrats. This should be the simplest thing that we can do from other earth. I'm proud that this is another example of how being a conservative goes along with being a conservationist. They're almost spelled the same way. Truly fuck you.

A conservative and a conservationist are not the same thing. Conservatives like shrink the government down. Have them do less. We want the less government and more private enterprise. And conservation is like stop private enterprise from destroying all of our shit. Look, they're spelled almost the same. They are spelled similarly. That he's got you there.

We need to put the action behind it to where we not only start with the trillion trees, we tackle many other ways to clean our air up and treat mother earth the way she needs to be treated. This commas says Bill. But listeners can't see this, but this guy is wearing like Morpheus sunglasses. It's amazing. He's sort of, yeah, he looks like, he looks like white Morpheus. This commonsense bill does not end your private industry, nor does it restrict personal freedoms.

This is the kind of commonsense initiative that this is the kind of only thing that Republicans will allow. This town can produce when we work together and consider the simplest, most efficient solution to a challenge that we all face. God, imagine if we could actually do the simplest, most efficient solution to challenge we all face. It's like slowly curve back fossil fuel use. No, no, no, no, that's not that that restricts free enterprise. Yeah. And we got to keep our personal freedoms.

Let's do the only thing, literally the only thing that a Republican Senate will allow. Plant an upon sapling. So I mean, look, maybe these guys don't want to cut down fossil fuels, but surely, surely they're sincere about wanting to fight climate change, right? Let me just see real quick who these guys are. Hold on a second. So let's see.

In this clip, introducing the Trillion Trees Act, we have five members of the GOP, Buddy Carter from Georgia, Kevin McCarthy from California, Bruce Westerman from Arkansas, Mike Braun from Indiana and Clay Higgins from Louisiana. OK, white Morpheus. Open secrets reports that the oil and gas industry is a lead contributor to each of their career campaigns for Congress.

Coming in at number 10 for Braun, number seven for Carter, number four for McCarthy, number two for Higgins, and number one for Westerman who sponsored the bill. Notably, Westerman's next top industry contributor for his federal career is the forest and forest products industry. So you know, the timber industry might benefit from growing trees. Come on.

And just to really hammer this point home, the League of Conservation Voters gave both Westerman and Higgins a 0% on their 2023 national environmental scorecard. Are you sure because conservative is spelled basically the same way as conservation? I mean, somebody should probably tell them. And Carter, Braun and McCarthy follow close behind with 3%, 6%, and 7%.

And the Financial Times published an article called the Illusion of a Trillion Trees, which I think had some really nice turns of phrase, including the Illusion of a Trillion Trees. The title's great. Right. Fire right off the top, which is bad for trees. They said that trees quote are just placeholders, argues James Dyke, associate professor of Earth system science at Exeter University, as leaders seek to pass the decarbonization burden onto their successors.

So basically they're like, well, we'll plant trees and you guys can figure out the rest of it after I'm dead. After I'm dead and after I've made all my money. So this is, I guess, another one of those classic. Here's a good idea that a black woman had to help out people. It slowly worked its way up the chain and then some rich white corporations co-opted it so that they could sell more shit. And then some Republicans were like, well, hold on a second. We can also make money off of this.

And so they sort of pretended that they cared about the black woman's idea. Exactly. For the first time in history. Okay. And as pissed as I would be if I was any of the people who were doing this for the right reasons, even though these corporations and these politicians seem to be doing it for the wrong reasons, if it's a good thing, I guess it's fine. Right.

If planting a trillion trees is going to pull that much CO2 out of the atmosphere, let's just let Charmin make money off of it, let's plant the trees, end of podcast. You know, Raleigh, I would totally agree with that. Awesome. Except. Except for you do agree with it? Except. A lot of the science isn't really there to back up these claims. No, no, no. Thomas Cruton was very specific in his paper. He said it was the best solution. Well, here's the thing.

The idea is really simple, that's why people latch onto it. You put a seed in the ground, you put some dirt on it and boom, you just planted a tree dirt on it, of course. But that's not really planting a tree that's planting a seed and that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to grow into a tree. It could become a chicken. It might. I'm going to say probably not. But maybe.

And for that seed to go on to become like a carbon sequestering, ecologically beneficial climate solution, it needs to be taken care of for decades along with any other trees that you're planting in the hopes that we will avoid climate destruction. Well, how many trees are we even trying to plant? A trillion. Oh, fuck. A lot of trees. So there's a few issues with this trillion trees thing. The first one is that it takes a fucking long time to become a full-on tree.

The Bastine paper in 2019 that Crowther was an author on projected 205 gigatons of CO2 sequestration, but that's over 100 years. Oh. Which is kind of a long time frame. Yeah. And that same financial times article I referenced earlier says that if current warming trends continue, global warming is likely to hit 1.5 degrees Celsius in nine years, while trees take several decades to start removing significant carbon from the atmosphere. Okay. Starting to sense the problem.

Yeah. Timeline-wise, even if we get all the trillion trees in the ground tomorrow, it's going to take them a while to start sequestering carbon anyway. Now there's also some other issues. There's been a lot of criticism of this Bastine paper, which is like where the one trillion number comes from. 51 scientists authored a comment against the paper, which is not, that is a large number of scientists, but that's not like an unusual process.

That's like how science has done, you publish a paper and then other people are like, well, what about this? And that's like how we get closer and closer to the truth. But 51 scientists authored a comment against the Bastine paper in science in October 2019, and the abstract of their comment against the paper. Long was this fucking comment. It's like basically another paper. Oh, damn. The comments need abstract now. I, as a YouTuber, I love that my commenters are not writing abstracts.

Writing abstracts were to proceed their comment. They're just writing like links to like crypto scams. The abstract of their comment says that Bastine at all is estimate that tree planting for climate change mitigation could sequester 205 gigatons of carbon is approximately five times too large.

Their analysis inflated soil organic carbon gains failed to safeguard against warming from trees at high latitudes and elevations and considered aforestation of savanna's grasslands and shrublands to be restoration. Aforestation is when you plant trees in places where there weren't trees. Yeah, sure. Instead of like restoring trees that have been removed from a place where there were trees. It's deforestation is the opposite of aforestation. Not quite. It's not quite the opposite.

There's a deforestation, which is like cutting down forest. Right, your favorite, right? Which I love to do. Reforestation, which is repairing that damage. And then aforestation, which is where you put trees where there historically have not been trees. Maybe there were trees like millennia ago, but they've been gone so long that it's not even really considered forested area. So I guess what we're getting into here is, like, is it an opposite to reforest or aforest?

And one could say that it's even more opposite to put trees where there were none. I'm not having this argument with you. All right. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You're right. I heard it coming out and I was like, shut the fuck up. Nerd. I'm regardless, this paper is maybe inflating, like, where we could put trees and the sequestration potential of these trees. But that's still 40-ish gigatons in a hundred-year. You know?

Yeah, I mean, look, I don't know if I said this strongly enough at the top of the podcast, but like, I think planting trees is good. Like, we should be planting trees. They will sequester some carbon. But like, looking at this as a silver bullet is not the same thing. especially because like this is the paper that Kevin McCarthy was like referencing in his big speech and that's just straight up wrong. You know, it's funny because Kevin McCarthy referenced that two thirds number.

And in 2020, the Bastine authors issued an erratum, which is like updates and corrections and stuff, which was published in science to correct the paper's errors. The erratum explains, quote, the authors stated in the abstract and in the main text that tree restoration is the most effective solution to climate change to date.

This was incorrect. No. This was incorrect. And the text may have given the impression that the global tree restoration potential might help to capture two thirds of the total anthropogenic emissions to date. The final paragraph of the report has been corrected to add that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide is approximately 45%. Okay. I like, yeah, you might have gotten the impression from the report based on the way we said it was.

Okay, 45%. You know, like it's important to get things right. They're still, this is still a vaguely exciting thing, but lowering our expectations. Yes, totally. This is like how science works. This is like you update your findings and you admit when something's not working and 45% is still a very big number that if I could wave a magic wand, I would love to eliminate. Awesome. Podcast over. However, this is also like a best case scenario of if all of those trees work out.

It's up to you could save up to 40%. Yes. We also have to think about the idea that protecting existing trees is more useful than planting new ones for CO2 capture. Do we fucking have to though? I mean, I kind of don't want a lot of people don't seem to want to. Yes, yes, remember that according to Crowther's first paper, we're losing about 10 billion trees per year. So it seems like if we just prevented the loss of those trees, that would probably be easier than planting a trillion saplings.

Those are the old growth trees that because they're big, huge organisms absorb a bunch of carbon and sequester it. So we need to work on preserving those forests as much if not more than we do, reinforcing and a foresting. Yes, so I guess you could theoretically be cutting down trees and replanting them at the exact same rate, but that's not replacing the trees.

If you cut down an old tree, let's say I'm going to say a tree weighs approximately a million pounds. I don't know how much it weighs, but it's not one pound. It's a fucking heavy thing. You're placing a hundred thousand pound tree with a two ounce sapling. That's a hundred thousand pounds that you've just lost. Even they have the same amount of trees. Yes. And you just do that for long enough, and we've still technically got the same number of trees, but they're certainly not...

But we have less biomass overall. And they're not sequestering the carbon that they were before you cut them down. And even if you are planting a trillion trees, that's not a recipe for success. It's two steps forward, one step back. Or one step forward, two steps back. Or one step back too much smaller, less significant steps forward. What is this? A Zumba class?

Okay. Related to preserving these old growth forests, we talked to Angelina Robertson, who's a senior researcher at Stand.Earth and who rules. She's so cool. I don't have enough nice things to say about her. Check out her work. One thing that she really emphasized to us about forest and trees is that they require a lot of stewardship.

You can't just plant a tree and be like, see ya, you got to make sure that the tree thrives, and that the ecosystem around it can support it, and it will in turn support the ecosystem. And this is a lesson that we see across a lot of different tree planting campaigns. How engagement from stakeholders, like what Vongarimatai did in Kenya, is essential to the process.

There was a paper called Lessons Learn from the Water Producer Project in the Atlantic Forest, Brazil, which was published in the Journal Forests in 2019, that examined 41 forest and landscape restoration campaigns, and how effective they were. Basically, each of the campaigns was like, we're paying local farmers to either reforest or not deforest their own land. And where the projects failed, it was because they didn't engage local landowners who couldn't like, steward the process themselves.

The paper wrote several challenges restricted the progress and monitoring of the project. The main issue was landowner participation and or engagement. In terms of Lessons Learn, we highlight that these schemes, which scheme in this context just means like plan, not scheming. That's highlight that schemes are more complex than initially thought, and that sufficient funding does not guarantee the success of these restoration projects.

It's essential to promote landowner participation and engagement by considering them key players in the forest and landscape restoration projects. Which just basically means like, the people who live near the trees have to care about the trees. You can't just like pay them to not fuck with them, they have to like be active participants in the process.

And so this best case scenario of roughly 45% sequestration, which is the updated number, is not going to be anywhere near happening if we don't have like wide scale stewardship of these new trees, because they're just not going to survive. And kind of related to local people needing to buy in, like part of the reason that they don't is a lot of these schemes take people's land, which is not ideal and doesn't lead people to like or support trees.

So for example, in the Republic of the Congo in 2021, there's a green piece article called quote, how are we going to live families dispossessed of their land to make way for totals Congo offsetting projects. And so French fossil fuel company, total energies, is planting a cashmangem and oriculoa formus, which are not native trees, throughout 40,000 hectares in the Congo's grasslands to make carbon credits, which we'll talk about in a minute to offset emissions.

And they claim that the trees will absorb 10 million tons of CO2 into decades, but this large scale tree planting will change the ecosystem, threatened water and nutrients supplies, increase the area's average temps since trees absorb more heaping grasslands and displace people and take away livelihoods. So it's like not a holistic approach to planting trees and it makes these people obviously hate the trees and they're not going to take care of them.

And I think a lot of times like a lot of tree planting schemes are criticized because they do exploit the global south like this and like far and away. Most of the problematic schemes are like, well, what if we just like bulldozed all of the Philippines and replaced it with trees and it's like, well, we can't, that's not a solution. And also it's a lot of trees already.

But would you believe this happens in the rich white global north also the BBC published this article called tree planting why are large investment firms buying Welsh farms? And it's like, haven't the Welsh been through enough? But the BBC writes that plans to encourage more trees to be planted in Wales are under fire for destroying communities in rural areas. After living and working on Fronger Farm in Carmentanshire's Cuthie Valley, I think I got that right. You nailed it.

Thank you so much for nearly 70 years. It was a wrench for John Thomas to sell the farm when he retired three years ago, but it was resold earlier this year to a multinational investment company called Forsite Group based at the Shard in London. Mr. Thomas said it was, quote, breaking my heart to see his childhood home become one of the many sold to huge faceless companies in England for planting trees. They're sacrificing Welsh land for the benefit of the rich in England.

Susan Price who lives on a farm near Land Rited in Powys said there were three farms in the area which had recently been sold to companies from outside Wales to plant trees. She said large companies bought land as an investment, outpricing local families and the Welsh government was making it so easy for them through its grant system.

So these perverse economic incentives are creating opportunities for corporations to plant trees in not the best way and kick people out of the land at the same time, which means that even if you're approaching this from the most callous perspective of I don't care about people, the only thing that matters is trees successfully drawing down CO2. This is not going to work because it requires buy in for the trees to successfully survive.

Yeah, and taking people's land is a bad way to get that buy in. Yes. It also needs to be said that the species of tree planted in the right place and for the right reasons is essential to this process. Adrian Boller has a really great book that is a hard book. I had trouble with it because it's all about economics. That's called The Value of a Whale. Oh, yeah. Yeah, which is basically like how economists calculate the value of environmental destruction.

And in this book, she describes an effort in Germany to grow the perfect forest of trees because timber was such a big economic product. That feels very German. It's very German. At the core of the model was the normal bomb, a mathematically abstracted ideal tree with average traits deemed representative of its particular species.

And so then they planted a whole forest that was just like rows of these trees perfectly distance according to the normal bomb and they got rid of all of the like ground cover so that there wouldn't be like pests and they wouldn't be taking nutrients from the trees or anything. And for a period, the German's experiment and forest management was by its own measures a runaway success. It was not to last.

While the first crop rotation of trees was staunchly productive by the time the second planting reached maturity, roughly a hundred years after the method was first put into practice, owing to the lifetime of trees, cracks had begun to show. The uniformity of the trees and their spacing turned out to be more amenable to the pests, plaguing the chosen species while rendering the trees more vulnerable to disease and damage from storms.

Clearing out both fauna and the forest for meanwhile also cleared the soil of its nutrients. By the time the second generation of trees was coming of age, the impact on both survival and growth was devastating. So devastating in fact that it merited a new word. Valdsterben, meaning forest death. Oh, that's so sad. Yeah, the Germans really do have a word for everything. So that normal bomb created a forest death? Yes, exactly.

So we've known for a while that if you're just planting trees and not taking care of the whole ecosystem, it's not going to work. And you see this a lot with monoculture cash crops and a lot of the trees that were planting would be part of like the timber industry. Yeah, it is a cash crop. So we have to be we have to be wary of our own Valdsterben and make sure that we don't have forest death.

So it's like a big issue with offsets because the easiest way to plant all these trees is to just plant a billion of the same tree. Yeah, and I mean part of the Matai clip was that she was mentioning that cash crops were destroying the ecosystem. Yeah, and they weren't able to like regeneratively farm the land properly with all the cash crops involved. Exactly. And these kind of monoculture plantations are also what you see with a lot of carbon offset projects.

And carbon offsets is like too big of a topic to like get into in this episode. We'll probably do a whole episode about it. Why don't we do this? We'll promise that we'll do an episode about it later so that we can get out of jail free right here. Now, Raleigh, it's crazy that you would phrase it like that because that's basically how carbon offsets work. Don't you forget about me. They never saw Raleigh again after that day. And there's there's like other scientific issues.

A big one is that like trees are good but often not the most effective method in a particular ecosystem. And taking over other ecosystems is not the move. Things like peat bogs and grasslands and savanna are all really effective at storing carbon and adding trees to them doesn't help. And in fact, like can take resources away from them.

Oh, yeah. I guess we have in our heads this idea that the tree is I can plant a tree and that tree is the it's big and huge and it's got roots and what could be better than a tree. There is something more fun about planting a tree than like sprinkling native grass seed. Right around, you know, or or planning a game of catch with peat bogs. Not peat bogs. A peat bog. Oh, I'm sorry.

We talked to Angeline Robertson about this as well. And she said like grasslands, for example, are amazing and they hold a ton of carbon in their soil. The root systems are exceptionally large and deep and they have a high albedo, which is the reflecting of energy away from earth, which makes things cooler.

A lot of times if you plant a forest because they're really dense and dark green, they absorb heat so they can have like sort of an unintended consequence, whereas grasslands reflect light away. So you really have to think about like the ecosystem that you're in and what is the most effective way of sequestering carbon or reflecting energy away in that ecosystem.

Yeah, and it's just hard to reconcile the concept that tree good, good, big, big tree carbon tree with the fact that like that's not always the right solution in every scenario. And I think the image of a tree in our brains has like a really powerful hold. Like one reason that grasslands are so great is because of their huge root system that's underground, which sequesters carbon, whereas a lot of the carbon that's sequestered in a tree is sequestered above the ground.

And the problem with storing carbon above ground, like in a tree trunk, is that that doesn't get stored forever. In that financial times article, they write that even if space were infinite, planting a tree and expecting it to permanently store carbon is unrealistic. This is primarily because many will be harvested in 20 or 30 years, says Simon Lewis, professor of global change science at University College London and the University of Leeds.

He says that much of the tree mass ends up in temporary products such as construction chipboard or toilet roll. Charmin. Oh, it all comes back to those shitting bears. The carbon in these products then returns to the atmosphere when they are landfilled or incinerated. So even if you're putting all of this carbon into a tree, once the tree's dead and decomposes or is set on fire, then the carbon goes back into the atmosphere. Yeah, and they're cash crops.

Yeah. People aren't planting them to not harvest them. Yeah. And this is actually a big problem with carbon offsets because as climate change gets worse, we have more and more forest fires. And that burns down the carbon that is sequestered in the offset forest. So those are some of the limitations for trees as far as sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere goes.

But let's say that it's all worth it. If we plant a trillion trees and we even get 20% of the effectiveness of what we are initially thought that's a huge win, let's do it. Still a good thing. Yeah. Okay, fine. But like logistically, what does planting a trillion trees even look like? I'm seeing it. So I'm closing my eyes and I'm visualizing it perfectly. I don't know what your problem is. It's just a lot of trees. Well, I'm glad it's talking a lot of trees.

You can see that like what a trillion trees looks like. I imagine you're just picturing the glow. You have a tree. It's like what a cartoon character gets hungry and I see everybody as stakes. Basically, there's like no serious plan to plant and maintain one trillion trees. The economics of it would be insane and none of the current three one trillion trees projects make any like serious attempt at tracking the survival rate and cumulative climate benefits of these trees.

There are, they're not doing nothing to track it. One of the promises that the 1T.org campaign makes is that the carbon offsets companies that it works with. It's going to like help them mathematically figure out like how successful they are. But nobody's really like writing this down anywhere. It's unclear where the three campaigns overlap with each other and whether like if one campaign does a trillion trees, the other ones will be like, great.

Then we don't have to. And just to be clear, when it comes to people like Vangri Matai or Felix Finkbiner or Tom Crouter, I don't like have any issue with these people or them wanting to preserve forests and plant trees where it's appropriate. I think it's totally reasonable to do research into like reasonably how much space do we have for trees?

Like I think like despite any criticisms of the crowd their paper or plant for the future or whatever, I haven't heard any legit criticisms of Vangri Matai. I think you have to be insane to do that. But like despite like legit criticisms, like I think what they're doing is good and they're like good well-meaning people and like that's fine.

It's when you get to like the Donald Trumps or the Kevin McCarthy's of the world who are like, yeah, we're just going to plant a trillion trees and that'll solve our problems and we can keep emitting and we can keep businesses usual and do whatever. Like like that's the problem. And I think honestly, Thomas Crouter is one of the ones who has like most concisely explained why something like a trillion trees isn't feasible.

On his own website after like all of these news stories blew up about like, oh, we'll plant a trillion trees. It'll be fine. He has like a whole FAQ on his website where he has to be like, no, it's more complicated.

And so one of the questions is, is it really possible to plant a trillion trees? Answer, no. To paraphrase a popular comparison between one million and one trillion dollars, if you started planting two thousand years ago and planted a million trees every day, you still wouldn't have planted a trillion trees today. What the fuck? A trillion is that big? Yes. God damn. A trillion is a million millions. No. Yes. Yes. Really? Yeah. Holy shit. Yeah.

In fact, after more than two thousand years of daily planting at that massive scale, you'd still be under three quarters of the way to one trillion trees. While tree planting can play a role in certain restoration projects, the tree potential paper is not a prescription for tree planting. Instead, it points to the tremendous capacity the earth has for forested ecosystems and to the benefits we would see if we created the conditions where a trillion more trees could naturally flourish.

So he's just answering. He's like, hey, if we had a trillion trees, it would do this. People are like, got it. No, no more need to talk to you. We're gonna do it. He's like, whoa, whoa, no, it can't be done. If you were a hundred feet tall, you'd win every game of basketball. Got it. Stretch them out, boys. Let's make a hundred foot tall, man.

Yeah. So just in terms of like the labor and time required to plant the trees, it's not really realistic. There's also the physical space that these trees need in the illusion of a trillion trees in the financial times. They write that no organization is centrally tracking the amount of land earmarked for the cause. And it is unclear to what extent the trillion tree campaigns overlap with the often vague a forestation and land restoration pledges and government's Paris agreement net zero plans.

Last year, Professor Dually of Melbourne University translated their promises into land area and found that they amounted to planting and restoring nearly 1.2 billion hectares. This equals almost a tenth of global land, excluding ice and barren rock or about a quarter of total agricultural land.

Dually and others argue there is simply not enough space for the ambitions to be met for 633 million of the 1.2 billion hectares or nearly twice the size of India, the plans would involve changing land use such as adding trees to areas not currently forested. Have we thought about putting trees into ocean? I mean, maybe I feel like no one's talking about it. And there's a ton of water there and what a tree's drink water.

So we like don't really have room for a trillion trees and also the trees we already are planting aren't surviving. The same financial times article says that evidence from around the world suggests that many saplings are not surviving. A recent study found nearly half of those in 170 Asian Reforestation projects died within five years. West Norfolk Council in England claimed to have planted 6,000 trees last May, but when a sample of these was checked in August 90% had died.

No, is that like a British 90% or is actually 10%. It's metric 90%. Almost all of the 1T.org pledges mentioned monitoring of the saplings, but many do not offer methods or time scale. Oh my God. And so not only would it take way too long, can you can you run that stat by me again? Like if you started a thousand years ago. Yes. If you started planting 2000 years ago and planted a million trees every day, you still wouldn't have planted a trillion trees today.

That's so many trees. This is this is the thing like I like brain can't even. Okay Nicole, I'm going to say right now on the record when I was imagining a trillion trees, I wasn't doing that. I was imagining I'm going to say 400 trees. I assume to just went back. Okay. All right. That trillion trees is a lot of trees.

Yeah. It's a lot of trees. And I hope that all of this illustrates that like while we should be protecting forest and restoring forest, it would be so difficult to do one trillion trees that we may as well just work on stopping fossil fuels and business as usual. So I think what we ultimately have here is this confluence of problems where visually it's easy to understand the benefit of planting a tree planting a tree is a good thing. That's so that's in one little bucket.

Then Crowther has this paper that says, oh, if we were to plant a trillion trees planting trees a good thing. So this seems like a good thing. It would result in a lot of great outcomes at the best case scenario. So we're taking what we know to be good planting trees and we're applying it to the trillion trees. And we're skipping over this giant chasm of practicality. When you actually try to consider doing any of Crowther's trillion tree concept, which he himself says impossible to do.

On his website, can we do this? No. But we're like skipping over that. We're going straight to this promise land of like, oh, we'll have a trillion trees in the ground. And then we won't have to do anything about our business as usual. And even if we just magically put a trillion trees in the ground, we wouldn't be able to go back to business as usual because the trillion trees were taking up the space of part of our business as usual.

Exactly. Because like since the Crowther paper, other experts like Doolie have come out and like done the research and been like the necessary land use changes would like definitionally not be business as usual, even if this we were to plant a trillion trees. And that's before we even talk about the incredible complexity of ecosystems, which they would need to thrive. And that seems to be the piece missing from a lot of these one trillion tree pledges and conversations.

Yeah, it's like these are the nuances that shake out when you abbreviate it to one trillion trees or just one tea. And the only reason we're even fucking talking about this is because this is effectively a pie in the sky plan to decarbonize that is acceptable to both groups across the aisle because it doesn't step on the toes of the fossil fuel industry. And it seems to be a nature first solution to decarbonization. And it is something we should be doing.

Yes, yeah, that's the other trap where it's like we want to do this because we want to plant trees because planting trees is good. But the moment we crosses over into the world of like, oh, we'll just plant X amount of trees and then we won't have to do anything else. That is that's where the fossil fuel companies are like, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. And that's not a real solution.

Yeah, and Thomas Crowther after these papers came out has faced a lot of, I would say fair criticisms about like the way the papers were presented. Some of it's not fair. Some of it's like you got to put a catchy title on the paper to give people to read it. Interesting. The way life works. You want to grow trees and yet your paper is printed on trees.

But he has spent a lot of time responding to these criticisms and I'm going to let him, I'm going to let him kind of have the last word of this section. This is him speaking on the Ted podcast. When the media explosion began, it sounded like planting trees can offset climate change or at least the vast majority of it.

Not only is that factually incorrect, it's really, really damaging to the climate change movement because it suggests that we don't need the thousands and thousands of other technological solutions that we urgently urgently need to limit greenhouse gas emissions. If I have said a negative word about Thomas Crowther on this podcast previously, I think I take it back.

I think this guy, he legitimately seems like a cool nice guy who I have no beef with and I think his research is like maybe the way it was packaged is like not ideal. But like Thomas Crowther, you and I are cool. Yeah, we're cool. It is possible that you got a little bit out over your skis on that paper and you're walking it back and you're being very cool about it. In which case, we're also cool and you're cool.

You know, it came across like a really damaging message for the climate change movement and it made it seem like protecting the ecosystems we currently have is not as important as planting a load of new trees, which is fundamentally backwards. Of course, preserving the nature that we still have is the top priority and then we want to be building on top of that. But I think by far my biggest failure and I don't know how this happened because in the paper, we never mention it.

But it's simply the idea of tree planting being the only approach. The idea that restoration is planting a trillion trees. Not only is that physically impossible, you know, it take all of humanity tens of thousands of years to plant a trillion trees. But it's also really dangerous because the monoculture plantations that we see people restoring all over the place are devastating for ecosystems. It's much much much healthier to work with nature so that those trees can recover naturally.

And you know, we can facilitate that with tree planting in some areas that can really speed things up or bring back biodiversity in a better way. What we wanted to communicate is that this is a place where trees can regenerate and nature can return. Not the idea that we can plant a trillion trees everywhere. So you can kind of see where crowd there's, how does that now?

I think his research is probably still pretty good and maybe it was a misstep to say in the abstract of your paper that tree restoration is the single most important thing that we could do for the environment.

But it is a good thing. And I think just when you encounter this argument in the wild, you know, this idea that tree planting is something that we urgently need to do and it is a super effective way to fight climate change, you have to ask yourself where it's coming from and why this person is making this argument. Are they somebody who doesn't have access to a lot of traditional levers of power and it's like, I can plant trees. That is a thing that I can do.

Or are they a representative of a company that's doing a lot of harm to the environment? Are they using the idea of tree planting to make themselves seem less problematic or to sell you a cat cave or something like that? Yeah, that's a great point. And like all the people that really know what they're talking about like Matai and crowd there, they're all like, no, this is not a magic fix for climate change.

And then the moment it gets translated to a corporate level, it's always like, we're going to solve climate change by you paying us a dollar to plant a tree. Yeah, yeah, and it is a way not only for them to absolve themselves, but for them to like get you the consumer to not make different choices about your own consumption habits. And then I also just want to end this by saying like, thinking about trees is kind of for babies.

Like we just need to be a little bit smarter in the way that we think about ecology. Like it's cool if you are nine years old Felix Pinkbiner and you're like, we should plant a trillion trees. That is like the appropriate level of thinking for a percusious nine year. Right. If you are an adult who makes policy, you need to be able to like consider whether grasslands are better than trees. Yeah, it's very much the asking a trucker to honk his horn of policy.

Like I think it is not unfair of me to be like, let's try to think about ecology with a little bit more depth than like tree is good. Meredith Martin, a forest ecologist at North Carolina State University said in that same financial times article, it sounds great to a donor to say, hey, you funded us planting a million trees. It sounds less good to say you funded us with this huge area to go in and selectively weed to ensure the native species are not being overwhelmed.

And like I understand that, but like if you have that kind of money, you should be able to understand ecology a little bit. I fucking figured it out Nicole. Here's what it is. Okay. It's tree offsets. Okay. You planted the equivalent of a million trees. Okay. You donated the money to allow us to plant the equivalent of a million trees. I can't see this backfiring. And in any way, or being used in a disingenuous way by any corporation.

Well, what you do is you say we get the money and then you selectively weed to ensure the longevity of your native species. And then you translate that to how many trees worth of planting and you tell them that. Raleigh, I gotta be honest. It feels like you haven't listened to a single thing. I heard you. Tree good. Plant tree. And honestly, let's plant a quadrillion trees from Raleigh Williams. And I love tree. Okay, Raleigh, the UCB theater just reopened in New York City.

I went to the Grand reopening. And I think if we're ever going to get a show at UCB, we got to work on our improv. We got to, we got to keep that, that engine running. Yes. And I'm going to propose that we do a little improv. All right. And this episode. And I'm going to pitch you. You know what? Let's have you be a famous YouTuber called Mr. Weast. Mr. Yeast. You. I'm a baking YouTuber. That'll just be Raleigh. Okay. And I will.

You could be a dark universe Raleigh where you're a different kind of YouTuber. And I will be the, I'll be the arborist that you've hired to help you with your tree plant X-king. All right. All right. We're ready to shoot the intro of this video. So everybody clear out of the way. And I'm going to fire this one down the line. And by the way, thanks so much for helping me out on my video. What was your name again? I'm, I'm Professor Grove. I'm a tree scientist. Of course. And you talk like Bjork.

And I love that about you. Yeah. Have you ever seen that video where Bjork is describing a television set that she's opened up? No. It's fucking crazy. Bjork's crazy. Okay. We'll put that in the Patreon. All right. Here we go. What's up tree heads? Go ahead and smash that subscribe button and blast my comment section with, with what, you want to see the next video about? Don't forget.

Last week we totally destroyed Tommy's house because he lost a bet and couldn't keep his hand on an Xbox 360 for 72 hours. Next week we're planning on poisoning Utah, but this week we're planting one trillion trees. Oh, so I'm sorry. And cut. Okay, go ahead. What's up? I'm so sorry to interrupt. He seriously talked like Bjork. It's crazy. First of all, what was the thing about poisoning Utah? Oh, that's next week's video. Don't even, don't even sweat about that. Oh boy.

Okay. I just personally think just based on my experience and expertise. I just think that planting one trillion trees probably just a little unrealistic. You know what? I will take that into account. I'll lower the number just a little bit and we'll get that one more time. Okay. What's up you fucking idiots? Here we're back on set. We're about to smash that subscribe button and nuclear bomb the comment section. All right.

So here we're going to save climate change by planting between one billion and one trillion trees. Um, sorry. I'm sorry. I was just wondering. Bjork, okay, I'm sorry. Go ahead. I'm sorry. It's just dumb. I'm sorry. Did you put your feet on that box? Yes. That box is full of hornets for two weeks. Frank from now. Okay. Don't rile them up. Okay. Why do you have them on set today?

Because I got to rile them up slowly over the course of two weeks or else they'll get rile whiplash and they won't be riled enough. Are you working with any kind of wasp expert? I can tell you, Peter's about to be a wasp expert in two weeks because he lost that bet because he couldn't drink a gallon of water and then not pee for 72 hours. Oh boy. Um, just a second ago, you said that we were going to solve climate change. That's right. We're going to fix climate change today.

It's sick and tired of seeing articles go by on my reddit stream about it and I'm going to knock out climate change. It's just that let trees don't, they're not going to do that on their own. It's that they're going to take a long time to suck carbon out of the atmosphere and dumb. Is it, is that because I said the word suck? Okay. Um, I just, I want to re-unface how like grateful I am just to have your channel and your huge audience focusing on ecology and. Of course.

And I'm only doing this because my commenters keep saying I've got it because I burned that forest down a couple of weeks ago as a pretty hilarious prank. Yeah. That was a really sad situation. Um, can you just walk me through? I think the audience would also really like to know just how this specifically is going to fight climate change. Sure. Sure. Yeah. I'll just get, well, actually roll on this one so we can cut it in later. All right. What's up, you fucking dickheads?

Okay. Don't forget to put that subscribe button in a choke slam and then kick the comment section in the boobah balls. All right. So I'm just going to talk us through how we're going to demo climate change just today and today only. And for this, I'd like to introduce my thought. What's up? Um, it's just that fighting climate change is sort of a lifelong. Can you just say that it's not today and today only is just a kind of a lifelong.

We have to commit to it just for a, if, sure, please, if you don't mind. We're going to destroy climate changes entire life today. So you won't have to worry about it tomorrow or the day after. But we're doing it because my dad, Kevin McCarthy says that all you got to do is plant one trillion trees. And that is Kevin McCarthy. I'll say so here when we're fucking filming a video, okay? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'll just stand back here until you need me.

Okay. What's up, you fuckly, dick shits? Don't forget to subscribe and give me a super thanks of $10. All right. So right now we're talking about a trillion trees. Now, my dad, Kevin McCarthy, read this amazing paper by this guy, Thomas Crown Affair. And it said, if you plant one trillion trees, it's number one the best way to stop climate change and number two will guaranteed stop climate change. So today and today only we're planting a trillion trees.

And this is the arborist who made it all possible. I wouldn't want to put my name right here. Right here. Dr. Grove, come on out and take about. Oh, it's, I'm, I'm so happy. I'm just gonna get started. I'm gonna get started. I wouldn't get right on the X. The X feels like a prank waiting to happen. Is this gonna be a prank? A lot of people. Oh, God, you shot me. We shot her. You shot, that's not the best way to get all.

All right, don't forget to subscribe and tune in next week when we poison Utah. I think that went really well, Dr. Grove. Shot me. Relax, it was a rubber bullet. It still hurt. Oh, yeah, it's a bullet. The climate deniers playbook was created by Raleigh Williams. That's me, Nicole Conlon and Ben Bolt. Our hosts are Raleigh Williams and Nicole Conlon, who is me and our executive producer is Ben Bolt. Post-production by Ubalaria Media.

Our researchers are Carly Rosudo, Kanute Harrelson and James Krugnell. The music from the smooth, sultry mind of Tony Dominic. And artwork by Jordan Dahl, who, yes, is technically my boyfriend, but that's not why we hired him. He's actually just really good at art. Thanks to the Civil Liberties Defense Center and to all of you who actually listen to the show and apparently even the credits. Now that's dedication. That's a Zumba class.