House Republicans’ forthcoming agenda to tackle climate change includes a proposal to help plant a trillion trees to absorb carbon dioxide.
Republicans insist the plan is no joke and illustrative of the global scale of climate change — there are only 300 billion trees currently in the United States.
“Trees are the kidneys of the Earth,” Republican Bruce Westerman of Arkansas, a lead co-sponsor of the tree-planting bill, told the Washington Examiner.
The idea has powerful backers. President Trump endorsed the concept this week, announcing the U.S. would join a 1 trillion trees initiative launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
The concept spawned from remarks by an ecologist last year at a meeting held by the American Association for the Advancement of Science who said that planting 1.2 trillion trees could “cancel out” the last decade of the world’s carbon emissions.
“There is no limit to how much carbon we can store in wood,” Westerman said.
Westerman, a licensed forester, plans to introduce his “Trillion Trees Initiative” this spring with Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. The Washington Examiner obtained an early summary of the bill.
McCarthy, who represents an agricultural district in California, has identified climate change as a vulnerability for members of his caucus competing in swing, suburban districts, especially in terms of appealing to younger voters.
In trying to develop a House GOP strategy for combating climate change, he tasked committees of jurisdiction with identifying policies his members can support. The tree-planting bill is one of the first, along with other ideas promoting clean energy funding, curbing plastic waste, and exporting technologies like carbon capture and advanced nuclear reactors. McCarthy and Westerman presented the tree-planting plan at a GOP caucus-wide meeting last week.
The bill is not exactly how it sounds. The summary of the bill does not contain an actual numerical target, although a Westerman spokesperson later clarified the final legislation would set out a goal of planting 1 trillion trees globally by 2050. Also, the federal government won’t be swooping in and planting trees.
“One thing I told our conference is we can be a leader in the global trillion tree initiative,” Westerman said. “We can’t plant one trillion trees in the U.S. We will have to assess what we can do in the U.S. and what our share can be.”
Instead, it would incentivize companies, nonprofit organizations, and individuals to plant trees domestically and abroad by creating “a framework for companies to donate seedlings and other resources,” according to the discussion draft.
“The trillion tree idea is metaphoric, a lot like the Green New Deal,” said Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, which has consulted with House Republicans on the climate strategy. “Rather than scoffing at its lack of realism, it’s important that this is an idea with the scope that is necessary to make a difference on climate change. Recognizing this is a challenge that requires a global scale is not a bad direction.”
Westerman is also considering including provisions that would offer aid and expertise to other countries for planting trees.
His legislation would create an education program for fifth graders, providing students seedlings to plant and informing them on forest management principles and the value of capturing carbon. It would force the federal government to establish a target for increasing wood growth in existing domestic forests to help sequester more carbon, along with creating a new tax credit to encourage homebuilders and commercial developers to use less carbon-intensive materials and conserve energy.
Thomas Crowther, the ETH Zurich ecologist who conceived of the 1.2 trillion trees idea and is now the chief scientific adviser to the United Nations’s Trillion Tree Campaign, says there are 400 gigatons of carbon stored in the world’s 3 trillion trees.
“If you were to scale that up by another trillion trees, that’s in the order of hundreds of gigatons captured from the atmosphere — at least 10 years of anthropogenic emissions completely wiped out,” Crowther said last year.
Westerman argues planting trees is the most cost-effective and accessible carbon capture technique compared to using machines to capture carbon from power or industrial plants or swipe it directly from the air.
“There is nothing on that order of magnitude we can do to capture carbon in the atmosphere right now,” Westerman said.
Some critics say Westerman’s approach is insufficient because it does not directly confront the growing problem of deforestation, the deliberate removal of trees for agriculture, grazing, or another economic use.
Rep. Francis Rooney, a Florida Republican who favors a carbon tax to curb climate change, said he plans to introduce his own legislation blocking foreign aid to countries such as Brazil, the right-wing president of which, Jair Bolsonaro, has implemented policies in the Amazon aimed at deforestation in favor of business development.
It takes decades for new forests to mature, so protecting them from being cut down in the first place is more important, Rooney said.
“It’s one step forward, one step back if we plant a bunch of trees and Bolsonaro cuts down a bunch,” Rooney told the Washington Examiner. “You’ve got to wonder why we did not work on that side of the equation.”
Heather Reams, executive director of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, said she hopes House Republicans offer more ambitious plans.
“One of first things we are hearing from Republicans is very straight-forward and noncontroversial,” Reams said. “It does set the table to ask, is there something that’s going to be more aggressive and systemic? It’s fair question. What else you got?”
