A Trillion Trees: How One Idea Triumphed Over Trump’s Climate Denialism

WASHINGTON — People warned Marc Benioff, the billionaire chief executive of Salesforce, not to bother talking to the White House about global warming. But Mr. Benioff, a tech mogul and environmental philanthropist, felt sure he had found a climate change solution that even President Trump could love: Planting trees.

Marc Benioff, chairman of Salesforce, at the World
Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where President
Trump embraced his Trillion Trees climate initiative.

Never mind that the idea came from former Vice President Al Gore, who has demanded Mr. Trump’s resignation over his energy policies. Never mind that Mr. Trump has begun the yearlong process of withdrawing America from the Paris Agreement on climate change, mocked Greta Thunberg, the teenage climate activist, and worked to eliminate every regulation aimed at reducing planet-warming emissions.

The idea of planting one trillion trees had one enormous political advantage: It was practically sacrifice-free, no war on coal, no transition from fossil fuels, no energy conservation or investment in renewable sources of power that Mr Trump loves to mock, like the windmills that cause cancer or the solar panels that are not “strong enough.”

Read the story from The New York Times by Lisa Friedman - “A Trillion Trees: How One Idea Triumphed Over Trump’s Climate Denialism.”

Climate change could be paused by planting trees, researchers say, as they map out available land

Planting trees to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere seems like a no-brainer in the fight against climate change.

Australia is one of six countries that together hold
around 50 per cent of the world's tree planting potential.

But until recently it's not been clear how much land we'd need to make a tangible difference to warming, and whether we'd need to reclaim farm and residential land to do it.

Now new research published today in Science estimates there's enough suitable unused land on the globe for reforestation to store around 205 gigatonnes of carbon.

That's enough to buy us about 20 years in the fight against climate change, according to researcher Jean-Francois Bastin from the Institute of Integrative Biology in Zurich.

Read the story from ABC News by Nick Kilvert - “Climate change could be paused by planting trees, researchers say, as they map out available land.”

Land-clearing wipes out $1bn taxpayer-funded emissions gains

More than $1bn of public money being spent on cutting greenhouse gas emissions by planting trees and restoring habitat under the Coalition’s Direct Action climate policy will have effectively been wiped out by little more than two years of forest-clearing elsewhere in the country, official government data suggests.

Emissions projections data estimates more than 60.3m tonnes
 will be emitted this year – equivalent to more than 10%
 of national emissions.

The $2.55bn emissions reduction fund pays landowners and companies to avoid emissions or store carbon dioxide using a reverse auction – the cheapest credible bids win. The government says it has signed contracts to prevent 124m tonnes of emissions through vegetation projects – mostly repairing degraded habitat, planting trees and ensuring existing forest on private land is not cleared.

Read the story by Adam Morton from The Guardian - “Land-clearing wipes out $1bn taxpayer-funded emissions gains.”