Numlock Sunday: Sophie Alexander on the quixotic mission to plant a trillion trees
Numlock Sunday: Sophie Alexander on the quixotic mission to plant a trillion trees
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to Sophie Alexander, who wrote “A Billionaire Wanted to Save 1 Trillion Trees by 2030. It’s Not Going Great.” for Bloomberg. Here's what I wrote about it:
There are lots of complex, sophisticated ways to meaningfully address the complicated issue of global climate change, and then there are the sure, sounds great, that seems way easier angles that attract the attention and the money despite a somewhat flimsier grounding in reality. Take the effort to plant 1 trillion trees in 10 years for example, which sounds clever on paper: starting in 2020, grow, restore or conserve a trillion trees that otherwise wouldn’t exist in 2030, fueled by a billionaire and the World Economic Forum. Well, it’s not going great; the total number of trees pledged four years in is less than 15 percent of the 1 trillion headline number, there’s very little accountability, and by the partial count only 2.6 billion trees have been actually accounted for, 997 billion short of target, meaning 0.3 percent progress has been made about a third of the way in. The sole paper that provoked the crusade went viral in 2019, but has since received substantial pushback from other scientists.
We spoke about the logistics behind the movement, the market for carbon offsets, and what role corporations should play in the climate crisis.
Alexander can be found at Bloomberg and on Twitter.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Sophie, thanks for coming on.
Thank you so much.
Can you tell me a little bit about where this story came from?
Sure. I cover rich people for Bloomberg, and I am interested now in the intersection of wealth and climate change. I've covered a lot of philanthropy stuff and that’s how I came to this piece, because Marc Benioff, of course, is a billionaire and he has this grand project, and I was just interested to see how it was going.
It's ambitious to say the least: a trillion trees planted by 2030. On paper that sounds nice; that sounds like a good thing. We're all big fans of trees. Where are some of the issues here?
It starts with the origins of Benioff's grand plans in the first place, back in 2019. This is all based on this research paper that came out in 2019, and Benioff caught wind of it when Al Gore, his friend and mentor, showed it to him. He got really excited about it. The paper basically said that there's room on the planet for a trillion more trees and if we planted them all, then we could sequester more than 200 gigatons of carbon, which is basically 200 billion tons of carbon, a pretty sizable chunk. That’s about five years’ worth of emissions.
So this paper comes out in 2019, gets Benioff really excited about it, and he starts rolling on it. In the meantime, there are all these scientists who are responding to the paper, so from the very beginning, they take issue with the science behind it. That’s one big issue. Then, 1 trillion trees planted in 10 years sounds like a pretty straightforward project, and that's just simply not the case. I think they chewed off a little bit more than they could swallow without realizing it.
It seems like it's a very well-intentioned idea that maybe has some execution problems. You wrote a whole lot about how it's not really that easy to plant a trillion trees. It takes quite a bit of work.
They would emphasize, also, that they're not just trying to plant trees; they're trying to protect them and restore forests. There's a bit of a difference here. It's not really directly from this initial 2019 paper that planting a trillion more trees is going to solve the climate crisis. They’re trying to do something a little more modest. But it really does get into questions of, with this big problem, what are the solutions and who should be involved in the solutions?
Yes. And it seems like a lot of their answer to that latter question has been large corporations who want to look good.
I think Benioff is coming from a place where, of course, he's the CEO, chair and co-founder of this enormous corporation, Salesforce, the biggest employer in San Francisco. So I think he sees corporations as a part of the solution in all of this, especially when a lot of these corporations are also huge parts of the problem.
Do you want to expand on that a bit?
It’s interesting. Benioff and the other organizations involved — the World Economic Forum, and then American Forests is one of the co-leads of the U.S. chapter — they're all really into this idea of radical inclusivity, and getting as many people involved in the first place. Donald Trump, former U.S. president, was one of the first people to sign on to this plan. He was really excited about this whole trillion trees idea. But at the same time, his administration was rolling back rules on pollution and he himself has denied climate change at various points in time.
Should we be allowing climate deniers to be involved in this project? And if we're allowing climate deniers or people who are rolling back rules on fossil fuels, emitting pollution, emitting greenhouse gases, are they really earnest in their goal? Are they trying to do the same thing that we are? They would say that they just want as much bipartisan support for fighting climate change as possible.
It does get into a whole lot of thorny issues, like how exactly do you address a very large and expansive problem? And it does seem a little bit like when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Right. And I think Benioff would argue that he's being a bit more creative here, because scientists are really focused on getting emissions down. They think that this is what we need to be focusing all or most of our energy on. Fossil fuel companies, the biggest emitters, should they be focused on planting trees at all or should they be spending all of their time trying just to reduce their emissions and switch to renewables and things like that?
Yeah. The root of the problem is that millions of years ago, a lot of trees became oil, and we keep taking that out of the ground, right?
Right, yeah. It is a noble idea, but there are definitely some flaws there.
Just to get a little bit into the execution element of this, you have some really stunning graphics in there. We're about four years in, give or take; how are they doing on the goal?
It depends on what your expectations are. If you were expecting them to hit a trillion or even make a dent in a trillion at all, then they're doing really poorly. They've planted or protected at most 2.6 billion trees so far, so that's around 997 billion trees to go.
But they would also emphasize that they're part of this broader trillion-tree movement. They're not the only ones working on this. It’s actually really impossible to say how much progress has been made at all. So yes, 2.6 billion trees is the highest number that we can estimate has actually been accomplished, which is no small feat, but it pales in comparison to the goal.
I feel like this comes up a lot in your reporting. Like you mentioned earlier, you cover rich people for Bloomberg, which is a fascinating beat and a fascinating place. One of your more recent stories was just the private jet usage from Taylor Swift. Can that even be offset?
It seems like a lot of people are trying to have their cake and eat it too, particularly when it comes to some of these climate goals. And for the kind of folks that you cover, they can buy a lot of cake.
It is really interesting. It gets into whole moral questions of whether you should be allowed to pay someone else to basically delete your emissions. That’s a moral question to begin with.
And some people have decided, yes, you should be able to. There’s this whole market for carbon offsets where you can essentially pay someone to remove carbon from the atmosphere, or prevent it from being released into the atmosphere. Then, in theory, you can subtract those emissions that you're saving from your own emissions, the emissions that you yourself are putting out there into the atmosphere.
In theory, that's not a terrible idea, but the problem is that the market is deeply flawed. And a lot of these projects, especially these REDD+ projects, which are specifically focused on forests and reforestation, are very rarely doing what they claim to be doing.
Really?
Yeah, it's a deeply problematic market. There's a woman that I quote in the story, Barbara Haya, who runs this market. She basically collects all this data on information in the market, and she’s been studying the carbon market for 20 years. It's been 20 years and this thing is still not working. So you really have to ask yourself, is this a viable solution if it is so deeply flawed?
Again, this gets back to the whole biting off more than we can chew thing, which a lot of these projects are. If you're Microsoft and you're buying carbon offsets from a project that's deep in the Amazon rainforest, how are you going to verify that they are actually doing what you are paying them to do, or doing what they're saying that they're doing? It’s complicated.
That feels like that shouldn't be as sketchy as it is.
Yeah, but here we are.
Before we wrap up, what's your takeaway from this when it comes to Benioff?
Benioff is an interesting character. I think he does have the best of intentions, and I think this is just a larger problem in billionaire philanthropy. You’ve made unfathomable amounts of money doing something that you're presumably very good at; what are you going to do with it? You want to give it away. How do you give it away? Where do you give it away? All of a sudden, Benioff is trying to help solve the climate crisis, which is something that he is far from an expert in.
I think people and specifically uberwealthy people who are trying to get rid of money — fast, too — are going to be drawn to the shiniest projects. And that can be a problem because the climate crisis is very complicated. It's not going to be solved by a silver bullet. So, I think that billionaires should be very wary when they see something like, “A trillion trees is like the best solution that we have right now.”
That's interesting. It seems like incredibly talented and intelligent people can sometimes get confused because they think that their talent and intelligence lay everywhere.
Exactly.
Fascinating. Sophie, where can folks find you and where can they find your work?
I am on Twitter, @sooo__phie, and then on bloomberg.com.
Excellent, all right. Thanks for coming on.
Thanks so much.
Edited by Susie Stark.
If you have anything you’d like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.