While switching from fossil to renewables is needed for ecological, economic, and health reasons, it is no longer sufficient to stabilize the global climate, as our best scientists have repeatedly been telling us. What is required now is a direct, rapid, massive, effective, timely, verifiable and sustained carbon dioxide removal (“CDR”). Whether that is viewed as economically beneficial or detrimental depends largely on whether you are still using the economics of an earlier century or the New Climate Math.
Composing a power-point en route to the GEN-Europe meeting in Italy last month, I fashioned a slide that went something like, “Pakistan held the record for most trees planted in a single day — 847,275 — set in 2013 until India planted 49.3 million in one day in 2016.” India then raised their own record to 66 million in 2017. “Isn’t it time that record was broken again?” I asked.
But, by the time I got to Italy, Ethiopia had smashed India’s record with 353,633,660 tree seedlings transplanted in 12 hours. Their national pride at stake, one million Indians turned out on August 11 and put 220 million trees in the ground, a personal best, but not a new world record.
Ethiopia’s goal is one billion trees and they are on track to reach that. Ethiopians don’t just produce great marathon runners. They also sprint.