I can imagine a 40% tax on gasoline, and I’d love it. But, I think it would be nearly impossible to get it done in modern North America.

People making decisions decades before we were born were happy to create a world where car travel dominated. We were born into a world where it’s hard to get around in any other way. Young kids today may be willing to make the sacrifices necessary to save the world, but almost everybody else thinks it’s too inconvenient.

Yeah, we’re fucked. Or at least the generations who will have to live in this hellhole we created are.

Yeah, nature is great. If all it had to handle were billions of people breathing we’d have no issues.

The problem is that modern machines are extremely efficient at dumping CO2 into the atmosphere, but as great as trees are, they’re not all that efficient at removing it. So, if we want to keep CO2 at survivable levels, we either need fewer CO2-emitting machines (ideal) or a machine that takes CO2 out of the atmosphere (so far, impossible at scale). Simply relying on trees isn’t going to cut it.

A tree absorbs about 25 kg of CO2 per year. A human breathes out about 250 kg of CO2 per year.

Trees are great, but not all that efficient. To deal with the amount of CO2 humanity is currently producing, we’d need a whole lot more of them.