A. Seems like this is just a really weak discussion rip from the <a href="http://terraton.org/" rel="nofollow">http://terraton.org/</a> competition that put up money for practical ideas for accomplishing what they're talking about. This article is just hand-waving BS that doesn't even discuss practical approaches being studied today that benefits both farm and environment.<p>B. India and Ethiopia already did the "plant a record breaking hundreds of millions of trees...yada yada". Here's the problem with that. Said trees are planted as really small saplings. Because that's cheap. If Kenya does this, they need to keep up with watering and barricading against critters that actively feast on saplings. A small percentage (independent estimates are single digits) of the trees through the PR stunts actually survived after a year. Since a lot are planted in drier, non-agriculturally viable areas not conducive to thriving plant/tree growth on their own. That's assuming the numbers were legit to begin with as there's a lot of controversy to that as well.<p>B2. Did some math. "Kenya, for example plans to plant 2 billion trees on 500,000 hectares(1,235,526 acres)". That's about 1,600 trees per acre. An overcrowded forest, with short trees, high fire risk and high beetle/pest infestation spread is 500 trees per acre. Forests are thinned down from that number to mitigate pest and fire by forestry programs. Plus, less than 250 trees per acre produce far taller trees (more carbon sucking) due to less resource competition.<p>C. They really provide nothing but finger pointing and "shame on you" in this article.<p>D. New research is already showing that trees don't capture anywhere near as much of the world's carbon as we thought. Last I saw was about 25%. I think pound for pound algae does a far better job than planting trees. Along with time scale. It takes your average oak/pine/maple about 10 years to actually start pulling the 40 pound a year carbon amount which is the rough rule of thumb needed.<p>D2. Oh and I just started learning about this the past few weeks. The CO2 we generate from fossil are not the same we breathe out. Trees don't absorb fossil fuel CO2 as well as what we breathe out. Evolutionary speaking, that makes sense to me since that's what a majority of plants are originally use to, animals breathing out.<p>E. All that being said, I've already read a few of the scientists they talk about in the article in the past. They're smart cats and this article bastardizes the absolute fuck out of their research. Skipping a lot of the interesting work they actually do. But hey, it's Time magazine. Can't expect much from them.<p>Reversing our shitting on the planet is important to me. Giving attention to stupid ideas that won't work or pointless discussion points doesn't help. This useless finger pointing politics and idealism in fighting climate change needs to end and more attention needs to be given to practical solution finding instead.