“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident” – Arthur Schopenhauer.

Share Vega’s message about animal agriculture and climate change.

Share Vega’s message about Food Healers.

Dear Climate Healers,

Bill Gates ranted during the recent NY Times Climate Summit that it was “complete nonsense” to think that tree planting could solve climate change, adding “Are we the science people or are we the idiots?”

In order to answer this question and inject some truth into this tree planting debate, it is instructive to examine the climate arithmetic of planting trees.

Now, Bill Gates can claim to know a thing or two about climate arithmetic as he wrote a New York Times #1 bestseller book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, after ten years of research. In it, he asserts that as a rule of thumb, every tree that we plant can capture 4 tons (4,000 Kgs or 8,800 pounds) of CO2 from the atmosphere over 40 years.

This actually appears to be an overestimate!

According to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the earth currently stores a total of 2.15 trillion tons of carbon in soil and vegetation. Even if we assume all that carbon is stored in the estimated 3 trillion trees on earth along with their root systems and surrounding soil, we can calculate that the average tree stores 2.15/3 = 0.72 tons of carbon per tree. Through photosynthesis, that tree must have extracted the 0.72 tons of carbon by converting 0.72*(molecular weight of CO2)/(molecular weight of carbon) = 0.72*44/12 = 2.64 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. Therefore, at best, every tree on planet Earth is storing 2.64 tons of CO2, about two-thirds of the 4 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere over 40 years that Bill Gates uses as a rule of thumb.

A more conservative estimate is that on average every tree we plant can capture about 1 ton of CO2 from the atmosphere over 40 years.

Most of the 3 trillion trees on the planet are to be found in the 32% of the ice-free land area that is classified as managed or intact forests in UN IPCC reports. However, it is estimated that the earth used to have about 6 trillion trees 10,000 years ago before humans started burning down forests for agriculture, mainly for animal agriculture. Therefore, in a Vegan world, if we replenish the missing 3 trillion trees on the planet by restoring the native ecosystems on the 37% of the ice-free land area that is currently being used for grazing farmed animals, then that would capture and store at least 3 trillion tons of atmospheric CO2 over the next 40 years.

Since humans have added 1 trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, it would appear that replanting the 3 trillion missing trees on the planet would remove this excess CO2 from the atmosphere and then some. It would also restore the habitat for wild animals, replenish the water cycle, clean up our chemical pollution and indeed, positively impact ALL six of our planetary boundary transgressions.

Therefore, why is Bill Gates ranting about tree planting?

It appears that despite his overestimate on the atmospheric CO2 storing potential of each planted tree, Bill Gates engages in some dubious arithmetic in his book, where he seems to have overlooked a digit or two. Then, he concludes that too much of the world would need to be forested merely to offset the emissions of Americans alone. In his book, Food is Climate, Glen Merzer remarks on this miscalculation that Bill Gates is much better at counting his money than at climate math.

Now it is possible that this miscalculation on the efficacy of tree planting was a typical “Windows blue screen” type honest mistake that even his editors at Penguin Random House failed to detect and correct. But the net effect of his miscalculating and ranting is that it leaves ordinary people confused and “gaslighted” into status quo inaction even though the solution to our ecological catastrophe is largely staring at our faces from the edge of our table forks, three times a day. Therefore, this particular Bill Gates “Earth blue ocean” mistake is extremely dangerous at this critical time in human history and needs to be debunked widely as soon as possible.

Here’s a gracious poetic offering on this issue from M. Edward King, the British farmer’s son who has been thrilling the Vegan world on social media:

We’re living in a nation
Where there’s growing condemnation
Of what is done to those who cannot talk
I was blind to all their pain
So I couldn’t feel the shame
In that broken piece of body on my fork

Then I wondered could any child
Breed a bird that can’t be wild
To eat its wings, take off its legs and its head
No, so we pay for hidden slaughter
With addicted sons and daughters
For our habit of eating the dead

It’s not so very long
Since who could see the wrong
In breeding humans as slaves without pay
It can be a woman without a vote
Or killing a leopard for his coat
Did we ever see the evil of the day

So do you think you are any better
Now the animals we fetter
Outnumber humans ten to one
And many children hardly eat
Because their food has fed your meat
While the blame for the shame you pass on

So give me avocados
And I’ll eat tofu burgers
And you can even give me black bean curd
But please don’t give me bread
If it’s wrapping the dead
Or the remains of the body of a bird

For every piece of flesh you buy
You are paying to breed the next to die
By compassion no longer we led
And for the cow, it’s worse I fear
They rod rape her every year
Take every calf, take all her milk, until she’s dead

This choice you say is your right
That you can eat just as you like
It’s merely an opinion that I voice
It’s your choice which kills so many
This opinion kills not any
And your victims, do you give them any choice

So there’s more to avocados
And eating tofu burgers
Than minimizing sickness and your girth
No less than Einstein did resolve
From eating flesh we must evolve
Or mankind, he said, may not survive on earth

The age in which we’re living
Is ever more misgiving
Over what is done to those who cannot talk
Are you blind to all their pain
Can you not feel the shame
In that broken piece of body on your fork

So, who’s the science person – Bill Gates or Albert Einstein?

We’re betting our bottom dollar that it is Albert Einstein. Please let us know if you agree or disagree.