Trees are valuable too. The problem is we don't understand and/or appreciate that value.

For instance, trees essentially power the entire terrestrial water cycle. Without trees all the water rains out within a few hundred km of the coast. Trees (far moreso than simple evaporation) are responsible for pushing that water back into the air-stream. Isotopic analysis confirms that 80% of the rainfall on land is caused by transpiration, and most of that is trees. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11983

This explains why deforestation causes desertification. Cut down the trees and you get a continent-wide desert.

These dynamics aren't well-captured by the present economic system, which only sees "valuable real estate" being "taken up" by trees.

>> Anyone still think it's a good idea to utilize all that "valuable real estate" being "taken up" by trees?

As long as plantation owners and/or illegal loggers do, then all your argumentation is moot.

Correct, thanks. Incidentally before seeing your post I just edited that part for clarity. Since I already made the edit, I'll leave it as-is.

Just up the ante for illegal logging and equate it to terrorism. Life sentence for anyone involved. I am sure it will make anyone think twice before doing illegal logging with such punishment.

With carbon credits, planting trees can be a profitable land use.

Stop subsidizing industry by socializing the cost of carbon and planting trees will be profitable.

Yes, tree planting for carbon binding absolutely need to be profitable to get real traction!

The US government already pays many farmers to plant things other than commodity crops.