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I compared carbon offsets from tree planting versus direct renewable energy investment, and the difference is night and day
I spent about $200 last year on a popular tree planting offset program after seeing ads online. This year I put the same amount into a local solar cooperative in my county. The tree program sent me a nice certificate and said they planted some saplings somewhere. The solar co-op sends quarterly reports showing exactly how many kilowatt-hours were generated and how much coal power they displaced. One feels like marketing and the other feels like actual measurable change. Has anyone else looked into the actual math behind different offset options?
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michael_wood324mo ago
Same experience here. I ran the numbers on a few different tree planting programs and the math just doesn't hold up. They claim a sapling will absorb X tons of CO2 over 40 years, but that assumes it survives that long and doesn't get logged or burned down. Solar panels are boring but the output is right there in the data. The whole point of offsets is to actually offset something, not feel good about a picture of a forest.
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fiona_nelson514mo ago
Hold on though, the carbon math on trees looks totally different when you stop treating them like single-use machines. A forest that grows for a hundred years and then stays standing as old growth is a completely different calculation, it doesn't just get logged or burn down if you actually protect it. And those survival rate assumptions people throw around are based on the worst tree planting projects, not the ones that are doing it right with native species and long term management. I'd rather trust a properly managed forest program with all its messy ecosystem benefits than a solar panel array that takes a ton of land and resources to build and has its own end-of-life waste problem nobody wants to talk about. Plus the boring argument is such a cop out, the whole point of an offset is to actually fund a real living system that does way more than just sequester carbon, it rebuilds soil, water cycles, and biodiversity.
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the_shane2mo ago
I saw this one study from the University of Oxford a while back that actually measured old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest and they found these stands sequester carbon way faster than the young plantations people usually plant for offsets. It's like all the hype is around these fast-growing monocultures that die in 30 years but the real heavy lifters are the messy, ancient forests nobody wants to fund because theyre boring to look at on a brochure.
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