CarbonTracking

Hey, everyone loves trees. Some love them just for the huggable side of things, some for the way they're so easily cut down and sold.

These days, people are loving them as a way of offsetting carbon emissions. The premise is straightforward : Trees sequester CO2 as they grow to maturity. So the majority of carbon offset companies sell a line like "If you drive XYZ amount of miles, or eat ABC kilos of meat, then planting *!& number of trees will offset those emissions". Clear conscience all around, after all these people are planting trees, right ?

Well, sadly it's wrong, the main reason being the time-lag factor. Instead of buy-now-pay-later it's fly-now-payback-later, much much later.

From a CO₂ viewpoint trees have three phases in their life.

• In the early days, around the first 10 years, there's little capture worth mentioning going on.
• The carbon sequestration happens in the following phase leading to maturity. Depending on tree species, this can be from 20 to 100 years.
• Once a tree reaches maturity, its pretty much CO₂ neutral, all the work is done.

The chart below lets you see what that means. We've got the bad stuff, the emissions, reflecting a lifestyle that neither improves or worsens in emissions terms. For this case I'm just using 1 ton CO₂/year as the metric. For the trees side of things, I'm assuming that person does the annual offset thing, paying for the planting of as many trees as necessary to offset his annual CO₂ emissions.

What the chart show though is that the good stuff is just too slow. By 2050, 42 years from now, when its accepted that our emissions will need to have dropped to between 60-85% of today's level, our brother here will only have offset around 28% of his emissions.