President Trump wants to plant one trillion trees to protect the environment. In his State of the Union Address, he announced that the United States would join the One Trillion Trees Initiative. “To protect the environment, days ago I announced that the United States will join the One Trillion Trees Initiative, an ambitious effort to bring together government and private sector to plant new trees in America and all around the world.”
One of my friends who adores the president sent me this in a private message, and although it is great that he wants to plant trees, it’s not great that he has abandoned the Paris Agreement, promotes fossil fuels, and has completely stripped pollution protections and obliterated the Clean Water Act. Trump has stated before that he believes climate change is a hoax (even though that makes no sense and is obviously false), and based upon this belief (or fake belief), he took the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which was set up to combat climate change.
Planting trees is always a good thing, but they will not clean up the toxic waste out of the Mississippi River, which is the drinking water source of 18 million Americans, including me. Editor’s note: As a con man does, it’s Trump dangling a shiny object on one side as he picks your pocket on the other. Remember, this guy has repeatedly proclaimed he was donating money to charities for various noble purposes, and then it turned out he didn’t donate any money at all (almost every single time). He just held press conferences about it or announced such donations at major events, but was completely lying. Instead, he turned around and took money out of the Trump Foundation (money others had put in) to buy a portrait of himself of a signed Super Bowl helmet to put in his gold resort. Dangle a shiny thing over here, take your money while you’re not looking. If Trump is known for one thing in NYC, where he and his father did business for decades, it’s for being a con man. When will more voters catch on?
“Planting trees is good, of course, but it’s nowhere near enough of what needs to be done, and it cannot replace real mitigation or rewilding nature.” —Greta Thunberg
In her speech addressing the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Greta Thunberg pointed out that paying someone else to plant trees in places like Africa while at the same time destroying forests like the Amazon isn’t really offsetting our emissions. “We don’t’ need a low carbon economy. We don’t need to lower emissions,” she said. “Our emissions have to stop.”
It’s great that Trump wants to plant trees, but at the same time, his wanting to plant trees to help with pollution is as fake as a three-dollar bill. It seems to me that he is doing this just for show. He knows that he messed up by stripping all of those EPA protections, so I think he is just trying to save face.
Editor’s note: Also, someone needs to check that the trees are actually planted. Trump has too much of a record lying about good things and then doing bad. If it followed his normal pattern, he’d announce that we were planting a trillion trees and then would actually cut down a trillion.
Photo by Chanan Bos, CleanTechnica
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