Jan 26, 2020 2 min read

Big numbers

On Jan. 21, at the economic conference in Davos, Switzerland, billionaire Marc Benioff pledged to provide financial backing for a global effort to plant 1 trillion trees over the next decade. President Trump said the United States is willing to jump on that bandwagon. After all, who could be against planting trees?

The program has even found support from the leaders of the world’s most polluting industries. Their thinking is that because trees absorb and store carbon dioxide, the more tree there are, the more they can continue pumping polluting gas into the atmosphere. It’s no wonder environmentalists look on the proposal with jaundiced eyes.

The proposal has a problem with logistics, also. A trillion is a very big number. How big? If 100,000 people were hired to work 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, planting those trees, and it took each person, on average, one minute to plant each seedling, it would take 83 years to plant 1 trillion trees! Don’t even consider where a trillion seedlings would come from, and where they would be planted, and how they would be protected, and how much employing 100,000 planters for most of a century would cost.

Trump bragged about high employment in the U.S., taking credit for what he calls the strongest economy in the history of the world. He did not mention, however, our nation’s budget deficit, which is now $1.1 trillion.

Nor did Trump mention our national debt, which now stands at $23 trillion.

Those are very big numbers, too.

Parker Burroughs

South Franklin Township