Comment by worik

Planting trees as "carbon offsets" has been a hugely profitable rort

The idea that we can lock up land, forever, planted in trees to offset our consumption is blissfully naive

In New Zealand large swatches of land are being taken out of production, for a onetime big payment

It neglects two things:

1. Trees burn. Forests left untended for years choke with fuel and then catastrophically burn releasing all that carbon

2. We need the land. Future generations, this generation in a few years, will not be sympathetic to the vast swatches of unproductive land (that due to 1. above create costs)

We must stop producing carbon. It will mean many obscenely rich will be downgraded to wealthy. And the prospect of that is enough to burn the world