by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow
The Daily Sentinel
In 1989, the U.S. Forest Service published a 13-page booklet (Program Aid No. 1442) titled, “Trees are the answer… to America’s growing environmental concerns.” The Society of American Foresters turned it into a bumper sticker and by the end of the 1990s cars across the country proclaimed, “Trees are the answer.”
During that same period, the global warming movement escalated, heightening worldwide concern about CO2, so the link between the two was inevitable. Human activity moves CO2 into the atmosphere — trees absorb it. A 9-year-old German student named Felix Finkbeiner started Plant-for-the-Planet, proposing that he and other kids plant a million trees in their own countries. He came to the UN, which had proposed a “billion trees program,” and Finkbeiner’s group turned it into the “Trillion Trees Initiative.” The group now has 30 employees, affiliated groups in eight countries, and has planted 100 million trees. An affiliated program on the Yucatan Peninsula has planted 17 billion.
The Trillion Trees Initiative caught the attention of world leaders, and President Trump, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2020, committed the U.S. to participation. His State of the Union message promoted the idea to Congress, touting the effort by both government and the private sector in planting trees across the U.S. and around the world.
Congress’s only forester, Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), introduced the Trillion Trees Act to finance tree planting and provide tax credits for sustainable wood products. He cited an American Association for the Advancement of Science report suggesting that a trillion trees could capture 205 giga-tons of carbon, two-thirds of all man-made carbon in a century. Sixty-seven members of Congress of both parties cosponsored the bill before a heavily publicized committee hearing.
