The “10 tomato plants per person” number makes things look pretty dire, in my eyes.<p>World population is about 7,800,000,000. The population of Germany is about 83,000,000. That makes roughly 940 tomato plants to offset the CO2 emission of one person.<p>Even putting that number aside, tomato plants are not exactly small plants. A significant part of world population won’t have the leisure to keep even <i>one</i>, let alone <i>ten</i>, tomato plants (or the equivalent in other plants). Think people who live in slums, people who live in dense areas (e.g. people who subsist with minimum wage in subdivided apartments in HK).<p>Yes, we should definitely grow plants, but even more so, we need to consume way waaaay less.
I think this is a large oversimplification. What the author states is not just "10 tomato plants per person". But it is "10 tomato plants per person per year". In this calculation, the plant's CO2 respiration during life is considered, but not the CO2 respiration after death.<p>So that means to compensate for the stated amount of CO2, you need to plant 10 tomato plants extra each year (the second year you would have 20, the third year you would have 30, etc.). That is not taken into account that it is challenging to overwinter plants outside.<p>According to the first referenced article[1], the tomato plant stores the largest part of the CO2 in its fruits. If you eat your freshly grown fruits, you will respirate (a large amount of) this CO2 again.<p>Besides that, I enjoyed the read. I had nine tomato plants on my balcony this past summer. They take a lot of room and a lot of work, but it is lovely to eat your own homegrown fruits. I can recommend it to anyone! I only think the calculation is way off.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.lessco2.es/pdfs/noticias/ponencia_cisc_ingles.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.lessco2.es/pdfs/noticias/ponencia_cisc_ingles.pdf</a>
Hey HN community, Thank you for the great discussion we had last time[1]! A lot of people reached out and spawned some very interesting conversions. Happy to jump right back in, reading how you tear apart my numbers :)<p>Ben<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24696688" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24696688</a>