There’s been this surge of articles in the past day or two about carbon sequestering, new power-generating systems (some of them are quite interesting) and most bafflingly, fake trees.

Fake trees, the phrase makes me think of plastic Christmas trees, you know the ones with weird strips of green plastic that are supposed to emulate pine tree leaves. You can’t fool anyone with them, unless they’ve just been born.

But these things, the fake trees they’re talking about, are machines built to react a substance with CO2 to make another substance which they’ll then do something with. You have to refill these fake trees with the original substance over and over to get more CO2 from the atmosphere. Crazy isn’t it?

So. Why don’t they just plant more *gasp* real trees? Startling idea I know, and call me a radical, but I bet most of us would prefer that.

The reason I say we should plant real trees is this. We have lots of land we don’t do anything with. Moors, grasslands, prairies, steppes, tundra. All of these places could support trees (with the exception of tundra, although you see enough wildlife films to see trees in siberia, which shows you it’s possible). Why aren’t we using this land?

The moorlands of the UK for example. We can build a prison in one, why not reforest it all? After all, it once was forested back in the bronze age, but our forebears chopped them down for fuel. What’s the problem with building massive nurseries and reforesting the UK?

So come on governments, put some real trees in, not these machines that really, honestly, aren’t going to solve our CO2 problem.

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