Number 1: Keep planting trees. Trees should not be perceived as a carbon sequestration device, wood to build your table or fuit provider for your basket. The greatest function of trees is in the complexity it provides to any habitat. Shade to preserve humidity in the soil, leaves that fall and form mulch that also provides cover for preservation of humidity in the soil as well, but also nutrition to the microbial and bacterial life and other organisms that in return provide the decomposing nutrition to the root systems and so on. The microbial and bacterial life are the source to every other trophic level you stack on top of it. If trees are good for them, they’re good for everything.

Number 2: If the only concern everybody has these days is Carbon offsetting, than you should all collectively work to ban all forms of commercial fishing. Nothing offsets co2 like the oceans. Nothing. And not even close. Oh, and the oceans provide about 72% of all the oxygen in the atmosphere. But even oil spills are small potatoes when compared with the destruction the fishing industry causes to the oceans everyday. Which leads me to…

Number 3: Our food system is the most abhorrent display of inefficiency, cruelty and destruction. To start… so cities are built in a vertical axis for efficiency, to the point that they’re housing more than half of the world’s population and we still spread the consumption of that said population horizontally??? That is genius levels of stupid in space management. And I don’t care about the word Vegan or what anybody thinks of Vegans or what Vegans think… A fact is a fact. Anytime you raise your intake in source of energy to a higher trophic level, you’re augmenting the inefficiency of the energy intake. Which always means greater loss. I’ll risk being condescending, but explaining this more simply would be saying this… every time one consumes a plant, one requires all the destruction that plant required to grow enough to be consumed, when you raise your intake to an animal, you require that same destruction multiplied by the necessity of that animal to grow to produce offspring and ensure continuity of species, wich is of your interest but also an absurd amout of loss of energy when you take the animal has the energy source, given that your intake from the animal will be less than the one the animal required. The larger the animal, the larger the loss. If you raised to the trophic level to consume carnivorous animals then the loss would be even more ridiculous. Do we all get this? This never changes. We can decontextualize the conversation to a bunch of ridiculous scenarios, but the truth would persist even in the scavenger’s rule of the wild, which is one of opportunity. But that is not the case of humans, as our provision is one of design. This is our design. And it is a terrible one. And not in just space management and loss in energy intake. Monocultures are terrible for the soil, as they create nutrition deficiency and when you add plowing and harvesters to the mix, spray some pesticides on top of all that and we’re pretty much engineering extinction to the entire trophic level that provides all other trophic levels and their subsequent existences. So we’re just engineering extinction really. But don’t worry, remember that we’re not just doing this on land, we’re doing greater levels of damage to the oceans at a rhythm that we can’t even fathom to on land. Especially with drag fishing. But hey, it’s only the largest source of oxygen and carbon sequestration as established. So no big deal there either, right?

Number 4: (It’s the final one, I promise) The solution to everything is every solution. And the concept of building hierarchies of priorities is the problem that keeps us all from that true solution. Which is us chasing every solution, and all of them all at once. Like transportation, Electric cars are not a solution on their own. But better public transportation systems are. I don’t think fossil fuels are a problem onto itself. Our magement of them is where the problem resides. Burning it to get stuck in traffic and wasting on trivial imports of dumb things that nobody should think they need or generating disposable plastics is. Which leads me to waste management. There’s no such thing as trash. If you think of trash, you are only noticing a flaw in a system. Nature doesn’t have trash. And we need to criminalise programmed obsolescence too. Yesterday. As to electricity, we need all sources. And we need geographical context. Sometimes a nuclear power plant will be the ideal for a region, but only nuclear everywhere is a ridiculous proposal. We need to find the geographical context and harness the energy accordingly. And sometimes that might be fossil fuels. Regional sovereignty is what we should chase in every way possible. Also, cities need to produce energy, and there’s many ways as to how. And food. Speaking of food… cities need vertical indoor structures to produce food like I previously mentioned. It’s great space management to match the vertical axis of how people live in them. But with the continuous upsrising in drastic changes in weather patterns, having the food growing sheltered within skyscraper like buildings is a good idea. Not to mention that you can expand or artificially generate seasons to grow all year round. In less surface area. Also a good idea is to build regional food banks like underground vaults, that can store provisions and wither natural disasters and crop failures if necessary. This is what taxes should do. Insure resiliency of the populace. Agriculture needs revolution and to integrate permaculture philosophy and syntropic knowledge in whatever shape it takes. There’s also precision fermentation. Having bacterial and microbial life directly producing our food is the most integral part that is missing at large. This is a solution that comes from people who truly understand entropy and the trophic level exchange. I wish I had invested my time in learning more in that field. I think it will play an integral part of all of our futures. If we get there. But if someone works let’s say in construction, they need to think of how to build with efficiency as to last longer but to need less of everyting over time. Less electricity, less repairs, less resources overall, and fight to integrate universal design principles to every new project in the future. It should be coded into law that every new building or home has to be adequate for everyone, of any age, of any type, a home should be a home to anyone at any point. This will lead to less rushed renovations in case of accidents, illnesses, disabilities or just old age finally catching up. This means literally any service or field will have a function that can be improved in so many ways. And we are all the necessary contributors to any solution. And the solutions go on and on.

I just vented all of this to say…

If anyone plants trees, keep planting trees. That is one solution we all need. Unfortunately, it is not the only one we need. We need all of them. And I only covered a surface level of very few in this too long of a comment. That’s why we need each other. No single person or even A.I. will fix this alone. Not when we’ve already breached 6 of the 9 established planetary boundaries. We need all the help we can get now.

And trees are definitely part of that help.

I’ve been saying this for years. Honestly, the whole carbon offsetting thing is very similar to the men will do anything but go to therapy meme. We are willing to just about anything other than CUT EMISSIONS.

Further what’s planted is often a monoculture, and does not restore the ecosystem lost.

Offsetting the estimated 182 billion tonnes of carbon held in the reserves of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies would require covering more land with trees than the entirety of North and Central America.

I am on board with this. We can live Ewok-style. I can’t solve for the farming problem though.