Restoring natural forests is the best way to remove atmospheric carbon

""That's because trees don't just absorb carbon when they grow, they emit it when they die and decompose, or burn.

When you add up both the absorption and emission, Canada's forests haven't been a net carbon sink since 2001. Due largely to forest fires and insect infestations, the trees have actually added to our country's greenhouse gas emissions for each of the past 15 years on record.""

Also, something not mentioned in the article (but added by a botanist friend), conifers in general apparently produce much more volatile oils, so are more susceptible to flames/ignition/burning.

Yes, it's cheaper not to emit than it is to reclaim, but how does this comment contribute to the solution? Even if everybody stopped emitting CO2 today, we still need to remove many Gigatons of CO2 from the atmosphere to save the planet. Planting trees is cheap and is PART of the solution.

Similarly, every time an article about direct air capture (DAC) comes up, somebody complains that we should be planting trees instead. This is ALSO a very unhelpful comment, because in truth we need to be doing both DAC and planting trees. Even if we reforested all the depleted forests of the world, there would still be gigatons of CO2 to remove.

The answer to every proposed solution to climate change is not whether "this or that", it is "this AND that". We need to be doing everything: reforest, DAC, wind, solar, nuclear, synthetic meats, etc. The whole kit.

This is the biggest contributor to CO2 pollution:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warmin...

Eating less meat gets mentioned whenever a climate change debate appears here. Perhaps my own position as a meat eater makes react somewhat critically to this (when I was a vegetarian, I had trouble with my digestion that eating meat seemed to solve).

With that caveat, I should say that even if producing less meat was a good solution to climate change, individual abstention seems unlikely to be a path that's going to get us very far towards this change. One can see various social movements against a variety of products which don't by themselves prevent the production of these products. Whichever actions one might describe in a "ten things one can do to save the planet" list, those actions will done by a limited number of people, determined by sociological factors. Moreover, reduce the demand for X environmentally product from group Y and you decrease the price, stimulating demand from group Z.

More concretely, I have friends are homeless and nearly homeless. Eating less meat might be healthier and less environmentally destructive but these people aren't going to make that choice because their choices and values revolve around what lets them survive. And broadly, if producers of a product can't sell to one group, they can find another group.

My claim is that any shift in agricultural CO2 production is going to require regulation, whatever choices some consumers might make just won't change things and to various extents, acting as if these choices are a program does more harm than good.