Hmm, you realize we exhale CO2 right? If we could see it everyone's head would look like it's perpetually in a fog. In fact that is one of the ways mosquitoes track you.
A human creates about 1043g of CO2 in a day of sitting or light action. A new car produces about 118.5g per hour active. When a human does strenuous activity CO2 can be 8x testing rate. Assuming a 1 hour drive at car+driver CO2=162g or a one hour run at 347.6g- the car will produce less CO2 for the same time, but travel a greater distance, still making it a lower producer of CO2. If we travel with a group of larger people, the numbers go even further in the cars favor once it is carrying passengers. If 1-2 people are walking an hour and in good shape, they will beat the car by quite a bit in that one hour period. BUT- the car only produces CO2 while active, the human produces at all times. Meaning that with an average drive of 40 miles a day for most Americans, a car will create 1738.3g of CO2, slightly worse than a human who did nothing all day. If you want to neutralize your CO2 output....
Decide if you want to have a car or a kid. Or maybe have neither and watch CO2 plummet. Obviously I’m being hyperbolic, my point is that the witch hunt against industrialization ignores the fact that all this industry exists to serve people, who enjoy having cars and machines to make life the way it is. Making more efficient machines is good to a point, but ultimately the issue isn’t about the machines but the people building them. If we insist on exponential population growth, and we insist on each one of those people enjoying a standard of industrialized living, it doesn’t matter how clean you make the machines- eventually one bypasses the other. The way we use machines, the things we require machines to do for our convenience, the things in life we refuse to do without- these are the greatest contributors to waste.
So if it's believed that CO2 is solely responsible for all the global warming. Wouldn't planting more trees be the solution? It would turn CO2 to oxygen and also cool the air temperature as well?
Yes, and as my tirade above states, it isn’t the rate we are killing trees, it’s the proportion of trees we kill to humans and human raised live stock born, to humans who have access and regularly use technology which puts out additional gasses. Why do we cut down the trees? Why don’t we just build farms and graze cattle and build industry somewhere else? Because- there isn’t room. Well, we don’t want there to be anyway. Lands suited to those things are too valuable to use on such things. People want to live there, shop there, work there. So while we technically have lots of room (everyone in the US could fit in Texas and have the same population density as India) we don’t want to. So the land is too valuable. So why do we need all those trees cut down? To supply people to the standard of living and consumption of modern society. With more people on the way, and more consumers popping up globally, we will need more room for farms and industry if we want to keep the current standards.
So where do we put the trees when we are already cutting down trees to make room? Last I checked everywhere I looked I see them building condos, not arboretums. A math wizard might crunch numbers and say that we could urban plan them in to population zones, they may calculate the volume as sufficient to offset what’s been cut while keeping the ratio for more expansion. Maybe. But the average “urban” tree doesn’t live very long. A decade is pretty lucky for most by the government numbers. There’s also a substantial dollar figure that goes with that- not just real estate, planting, basic care- but in things like trimming, clearing when roots begin to damage structures and the cost to repair those structures, and of course the pests and what not that come along with trees. So the easy answer is: there isn’t one. Like most thingsbin life it comes down to what someone is going to give what thing up, and who is going to get what benefit from that.
See-O2.