An armchair engineer’s plan to solve global warming
Recently, I needed something to distract me from work that needed to be done. So I calculated how many trees each person would need to plant to offset our carbon emissions. For the whole world, the average is ~200 trees. For the American, it comes out to ~1200 trees per person (per lifetime of the tree, which can be roughly compared to a human lifetime). Currently, one can have trees planted for a cost of ~$5/tree if ordering more than 100 trees. So for a lifetime cost of $6000, an American can have all of his or her carbon offset.
Now, I realize it’s more complicated than that. For one, where would you plant these trees? Then I realized it’s not a problem. You can selectively cut down existing trees and plant new ones in their stead. The cut down trees can be used for anything you want, as long as you don’t convert their carbon into CO2 by e.g. burning them: use them to make houses, furniture, etc; or even bury them to sequester carbon and gradually become soil within a decade or so (a practice known as hugelkultur).
So after writing this, I visited wikipedia’s entry on tree planting, and it turns out it’s even cheaper: “As little as US$90 will plant 900 trees, enough to annually remove as much carbon dioxide as is annually generated by the fossil-fuel usage of an average United States resident.” However, the trees should be planted in the tropics to mitigate climate change.
Now, which organisation will shut up and take my $360 to offset my family’s carbon emissions?
EDIT: This one will, for the same rate as mentioned above. Also, see more discussion at Hacker News.
