this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2026
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Net zero doesn’t mean lowering pollution btw. Net zero means essentially cancelling out any pollution by planting trees, buying carbon credits, etc. It’s possible to be the biggest polluter and also net zero as a company. If that actually helps the planet is another story.
And we gotta be negative. Net 0 is a nice milestone on the way to build a future for our children.
Most "we plant a tree for every _____" things are just scams. They plant the trees, sometimes as monocrops that could never become a healthy forest, and usually without monitoring the trees or guaranteeing their survival into at least early-maturity.
Trees get too much credit. It's plankton in the ocean that absorbs like 70% of all co2
Well, as long as trees magically suck pollution out of the atmosphere in extremely high numbers, and sequester it for at least a few million years, that should be fine
Otherwise, we're probably fucked.
In case it was not your intent to point this out with sarcasm, for anyone reading:
not all forests are created equal: new growth forests are simply not as good at long-term burial of carbon.
carbon sinks only work so long as the carbon stays sunk, so if a tree dies and rots before it's buried, all of that carbon just goes back to the atmosphere, except a lot of it is now methane, which is MANY times worse than CO2.
this means that it is possible for a poorly - managed tree to actually be an effective carbon source for the purpose of greenhouse gas emissions, rather than a sink, since a single molecule of methane can do the damage of a hundred molecules of carbon dioxide.
the largest carbon sink on earth is not the forests, but the ocean, and that carbon only really has two ways out: back into the atmosphere, or buried at the bottom in the calcareous ooze. Now if you really want to understand how fucked we are, read up on the following:
i dont trees can safely do it fast enough. also its mostly co2 , pollution is a different matter. Also algae, phytoplankton make half of the carbon capture as well, a net benefit when they become marine snow and sink to the bottom of the ocean.