When I see people who are anti-tree planting, I wonder if there is some authoritarian predilections at play and anything that doesn't result in central control or provide some mechanism for rent seeking or corruption is going to get down played.
The reality is that if you go and work with your local land management folks who can give you guidance on the types of trees and where to plant them, then going out and spending a weekend putting fifty trees in the ground, will give you quite a nice reduction for the CO2 emissions necessary to plant them. What's more is trees reproduce on their own. If you get a tree into the ground it will likely produce two additional trees over its lifetime if not more.
Also, do you keep track of the trees to make sure they actually grow? Just planting the seed or even a sapling is far from sufficient to ensure that carbon sequestration occurs. Young trees are food for a variety of animals and insects. Do you know what fraction of the trees you plant actually reach maturity? I've seen estimates that far fewer than one in five do.
Your own property, literally anywhere trees can survive.
Which I am the opposite of.
There are a lot of flower & daisy soft solutions to C02.
Drive to the suburban forest in your SUV, plant 100 trees that will inevitably be cut down long before they have a carbon negative impact, come home and run your AC.
You're still running 1000/1 in negative C02 balance.
Vs finds ways to dramatically cut use, double down on investigative hard solutions like nuclear and major infrastructure projects like mass transport, car banning, new taxation on major freight (sea and road) to force efficiency adoption etc.
Lots of hard solutions are readily available to solving the problem, but by definition they're hard.
I agree with the point that planting 100 trees should not leave anyone feeling they've done their part. Repeating the math until we're blue in the face is what helps there I guess.
But convincing the entire population of the world to set their thermostat 1 degree higher during the summer months would have a 1000x multiple impact on a 40x shorter time scale than if every one of those people planted a tree.
The spirit of my comment is that in general people LOVE the path of least resistance.
Ask the average person about combatting climate change and their response is "plant more trees".
Because that's easy, shit you can pay the gardener to do it or donate $10 to a plant the tree collective and feel instant gratification with no sacrifice.
Vs the highest possible impact solution which is cutting personal consumption - even a little bit!
This confused me for longer than I'd care to admit, but now that I get it, I'd just say that a much smaller proportion of 'the entire population of the world' - even the developed world - has AC than it might seem to an American perspective.
You can't ask people to set their thermostat 1 degree warmer every year for that 40-100 years. You can expect there to be scope for continued tree planting for decades.
Neither is a sole solution, but both are part of a holistic, reasoned and coordinated journey to carbon neutrality.
So do 1000 times that, and don't plant them in a suburban forest but one that will stay around longer. Or contribute money to tree planting initiatives who do it right.
Trees provide more services than log production
I'm pretty confident OP up there also loves trees. But we're at a point where we need to calculate efforts and allocate resources wisely. Maybe we need fewer forests and more nuclear. idk.
I know for a fact every tree I can plant with my bare hands would be carbon negative, because I did the math.