It always struck me as fundamentally stupid during any debate about climate change that whilst on one hand we often hear about polices designed to reduce carbon emissions, we never ever hear about about any policies designed to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere itself.
I think that that most governments are hideously short-sighted and can't see the carbon reductions or the trees.
Trees are possibly the cheapest and most obvious method of clearing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. They cost nothing to run, don't require any complicated technology to run and their by-products are useful things like oxygen, wood and food.
Suppose that instead of spending trillions of dollars on military hardware for just one calendar years, all the governments of the world go serious and spent that money on planting trees everywhere. Imagine what sort of actual carbon sequestering could be done with several trillions worth of new trees.
Over the past 4000 years, mankind has very much been responsible for royally trashing the world. The Bible for instance speaks of great stands of cedar in the Lebanon. In Shakespeare's time it was said that a squirrel could run from John O'Groats to Land's End from treetop to treetop; the mighty oaks which once stood on that sceptered isle now lay at the bottom of the ocean, having been made into ships and sunk.
Brazil teaches us that areas which used to be rainforest and after being cleared and being worked with agriculture, after a few decades fall fallow and turn into deserts with similar soil characteristics as the Sahara; in China they're noticing desertification of former arable land after only 30 years.
The only common factor here is mankind and our wanton destruction of trees. If we spent massive amounts of money and put back all the trees we butchered, could we restore the environment and climate? Maybe; I'd like to think we could.
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