The fact is planting trees does help in the short term. You are removing many tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, until they either are burned, die and rot or something else.
If we could plant one billion trees, lets assume they'll all live 100 years. From a geological perspective 100 years is the blink of an eye (vs Earth's 4 billion year life).
But from a short term, lets avoid climate change in a pinch, they could fix climate change IF we could at the same time at least reduce our global emissions by 80% or more.
The fundamental problem is CO2 emissions are still rising. No mater how much China/India/USA/Europe is investing on Solar and Wind, are least up to a few years ago, they were still massively increasing their CO2 emissions. The whole Paris climate change agreement was not a binding commitment to fixing climate change but solely a statement of good intentions, where everybody claims they'll try. The Europeans likely will accomplish it (because they have rising popular demand to fix climate change), while Trump rips the deal of and even tries to keep the coal industry alive, China invest billions on solar+wind, but not enough to even reduce its coal consumption, India does the same, and we cannot ignore that there's still one major continent in the world that isn't true even in the developed world, Africa. Except for a handful of truly developing countries most of Africa's population don't even have access to energy and no mater how much we hope they'll start from scratch with solar+wind, the tendency is they adopt whatever is cheaper, which is still coal.
The bottom line for a mostly USA perspective is not even Hillary was serious enough about climate change, any truly, realistic approach to mix climate change would have to:
1 - Give Tesla at least a US$ 20 billion dollar zero interest loan to have them build at least 2 more Lithium/Model 3+Y giga factories in the USA, at least another 2 solar giga factories
2 - Give the NRC an ultimatum, you have 2 years reduce the cost of nuclear regulation by 2/3 or you will be shutdown and replaced wholesale with a brand new agency. The biggest objection will certainly come from the coal+gas interests
3 - Give a dozen US$ 10 million grants to nuclear startups and universities with the most promissing nuclear projects on Gen IV technology
4 - Cut all R&D credits to energy companies for any fossil fuel technologies, R&D credits must go 100% towards renewables or nuclear power
5 - Get serious about replacing natural gas consumption for process heat with medium/high temperature nuclear. There are essentially zero nuclear construction projects for reactors able to produce heat good enough to make hydrogen, ammonia, DME (clean drop in replacement to diesel), that project the US Navy had to make jet fuel aboard nuclear carriers directly from H2O+CO2+nuclear heat
6 - Get serious about ethanol, specially cellulosic ethanol and ethanol production from electricity+H2O+CO2 which was discovered about an year ago
7 - Get serious about fuel cells. Fuel cell policy has been 99.9% driven by $$$ influence from fossil fuel companies and traditional car makers. In order to keep their funding they have to actually provide a realistic plan to produce half a million FCVs in 5 years, and if they fail to achieve that goal, they must return the funding back to the government, either put up or shut up ! I would hope they would simply give up and we can then consider fuel cell cars DOA. Perhaps H2 can be made and stored in huge tanks to be converted back into electricity months later in those windless winter nights.
8 - End all subsidies on solar panels and redirect those towards energy storage only. Solar is already cheap enough.
9 - End all forms of subsidies to purchase of renewable energy products. The USA government should only give subsidies to USA produced equipment (either purchased by USA customers or exported). It makes no sense to fuel the China renewables production boom that exports jobs to China, produces material with filthy electricity, irresponsible environmental practices in general
10 - Give China an economic ultimatum, we are going to tax all of your exports if you don't quickly clean up your emissions, not only you produce way too much CO2, but you also allow large scale burning of coal in small furnaces which generate way too much carbon particulate and directly emits all sorts of coal produced poisons that kill way too much of your people. That ultimatum wouldn't just go to China but also to India, Bangladesh and every other country that has been profiting from semi slave labour, lax environmental laws and lack of respect for their local population well being. There's an estimate that half of the smog in California is a result of China CO2 emissions !
11 - Institute a serious nuclear fuel reprocessing program by taxing Uranium mining high enough reprocessing becomes economical. At the same time, forcing the NRC / DOE to stop making the nuclear industry uneconomical would help a great deal on the cost side.
Of course Hillary would never, ever have the balls to do this. My hope would be Bernie, but even him I'm not 100% sure !
Curious to see how common this knowledge is...
