Didn't Bill Gates once say that planting trees has no impact on global warming?
The trees will ride through floods and reduce water flows, improve species diversity for insects, birds, small mammals, improve temperatures and ameliorate winds, provide shelter for farm animals, can enhance grazing. And there's wood to harvest in due course.
There's a lot more reasons to plant trees than direct AGW offset.
A huge amount of farmland is now surplus to production. Grasses and fields of weeds aren't always ideal. Taking land out of production can also attract offset funding for farmers (-yes, this is a secondary economic outcome and may also incur other costs)
People are healthier around trees. People like trees. Even Bill Gates may actually like trees.
If you burn the wood, sure. Forests only capture carbon if you leave that carbon alone forever.
Denmark isn't just trying to reduce their CO2 footprint, though. It's also dealing with terrible soil and water quality, both the result of many years of hyper-intensive farming. That's a local problem that needs local policy to solve.
Trees absolutely can help with climate change, although like everything in this universe, there are nuances at play, such as type of tree, location, etc.
We have done a lot of deforestation, and that absolutely has negatively impacted our climate, and we should work to reverse it.
And he’d be right.
When those trees die and then rot or burn, that CO2 will be released right back into the atmosphere. They’ll temporarily hold some, yeah, but it’s like trying to rapidly fire a squirt gun at a fire when someone else is spraying it with a firehose of gasoline.
Especially because trees plant themselves. If they want to set aside the land for forest and seed it a little to get going - great - but those large tree planting operations are a waste of time at best or carbon credit loopholes at worst.
The corollary to this would be that deforestation hasn't make climate change worse, and a simple Google search tells me that:
> Deforestation plays a significant role in climate change, contributing 12–20% of global greenhouse gas emissions
Most global deforestation involves slash and burn. This releases the carbon stored in the trees. But I think that's OPs point. A growing tree doesn't remove carbon, it temporarily stores it until it dies or burns.
Trees do pull carbon out of the atmosphere, which can be stored in the form of "wood", and it doesn't re-enter the atmosphere until burnt.
The point of planting trees in Denmark is not to cut CO2 emissions. The point is to restore biodiversity and the health of the environment. I assume the situation is similar in countries like the Netherlands.
Climate and environment are two separate things, and are in fact sometimes at odds with each other. Denmark is doing semi-alright on climate, but is absolutely terrible on environment. Aquatic ecosystems in the country are basically completely destroyed by agriculture, to the point where previously productive shallow waters are completely dead due to oxygen depletion.
He also once said that 640KB should be enough for anyone, so ... let's take his opinion with a grain of salt. Affluence does not equal wisdom.
He denies it, and even if he said it, it was 1981 and I doubt he meant "forever".
> Affluence does not equal wisdom.
True
Just waiting for someone to factcheck about planting trees: there must be nuance. In australia we burn em to protect people and the environment for example. We have done it for millenia.
You could plant a trillion trees tomorrow but it won't help anything so long as places like China and India pollute the oceans with millions of tones of plastic waste trash every year. That's in the thousands of tones per day region. The sheer scale of pollution there makes Denmark's measly little contribution just that, peanuts. No wonder the farmers are upset. They're destroying their own industry and people's livelihood and food security, for barely moving the needle on the altar of enviromentalism.
This is a type of fallacy. Denmark as a country is politically relatively powerless compared to China or the US, or even Germany, but each citizen has about the same or more power compared to each citizen in those larger countries.
The fallacy is to say "I, as an individual in a small country, cannot do anything because these other large countries are, collectively, much more powerful". Well, no kidding. Any Denmark-sized administrative section of a larger country (say, a US state, a Chinese province, or a German bundesland) has the same or smaller influence on the climate. Often a much smaller influence due to how international diplomacy works.
It's a category error. Whether progress is made in Denmark-sized chunks or in US/EU/China/Germany-sized chunks is irrelevant, as long as the average velocity per human is the same on a global scale. It's not high enough at the moment, but it's equally significant wherever it happens.
It’s funny how I also feel peanuts when I vote for elections but also feel very engaged and powerful with that paper holding a nano-minuscule fraction of power.
> They're destroying their own industry and people's livelihood and food security, for barely moving the needle on the altar of enviromentalism.
The environnemental impact of their AG is peanuts on a global scale but cause massive problems on their own lands and coast. Food security will still be largely fine : there’s large surpluses and you are actually safer stocking grains than livestock, especially in modern silos. For industry and livelihood I’m sure those guys are smart enough to shift to others activities. That may be quite easy when you look at the current meat industry profitability.