Carbon Fiction, Part 2

(This is part 2 of Carbon Fiction).

Planting more trees is a beautiful thing.

Mature and growing trees will soak up emissions over the course of their lifetime.

But no one has figured out how to plant a brand new mature tree that didn’t already exist – you can’t grow a mature tree overnight.

So planting new trees–saplings–to soak up all the gunk already in the air, is like employing a kid to guard a criminal.

Complete mismatch.

In Part 1 yesterday, the prison’s new solution was to install a logistically simple, but dramatically undersized tool (kids) to combat a problem (uncontrollable inmates).

And much like the planting-trees-to-combat-emissions solution, both “solutions” ignore the far more effective option that has been there all along.

Remove 👏 The 👏 Problem.

In other words, get rid of the prisoner.

(As in move them to max security or something, not get rid of them).

In real life, I have no idea how hard it is to move an inmate between prisons.

But in many many many cases, I know that removing emissions is far easier than checking how efficiently your sapling might be gobbling them up.

Some info on that here on offsetguide.org.

But how does one simply remove a problem? That’s not always an option–if your tap leaks, you don’t throw out the tap… if your laptop crashes, you don’t throw that out–so why is it an option here?

Part 3 tomorrow will wrap this thing up.