Do you have any numbers? How many square kilometers of forests should we grow to compensate for all CO₂ emissions?
Here's some hypothetical numbers. Correct me, if they are way off.
1 tree = 0.5 m³ of wood = 250 kg of CO₂.
1 ha = 10 000 m² = 500 trees = 125000 kg of CO₂.
Humanity CO₂ emissions at 2018 year are 33 100 000 000 000 kg. So you would need 264.8 millions of hectares (2.6 millions of km²) of forests to compensate for those emissions.
There are 38 millions of km² of forests on Earth right now. So even if we would double our forests (and that would be a truly tremendous task), that would buy us 14 more years of emissions (and that would not get back all the produced CO₂, by far).
It's not even clear if we would be able to keep CO₂ emissions not increasing in the future.
And there are only so much of land to plant forests.
I have more trust in some kind of phytoplankton. Oceans are vast. Those organisms can capture CO₂. Some of them will be eaten and some of them will die and submerge to depths where they'll keep that carbon forever. If they won't work well enough, future bio-engineering might fix that.
Here's some hypothetical numbers. Correct me, if they are way off.
1 tree = 0.5 m³ of wood = 250 kg of CO₂.
1 ha = 10 000 m² = 500 trees = 125000 kg of CO₂.
Humanity CO₂ emissions at 2018 year are 33 100 000 000 000 kg. So you would need 264.8 millions of hectares (2.6 millions of km²) of forests to compensate for those emissions.
There are 38 millions of km² of forests on Earth right now. So even if we would double our forests (and that would be a truly tremendous task), that would buy us 14 more years of emissions (and that would not get back all the produced CO₂, by far).
It's not even clear if we would be able to keep CO₂ emissions not increasing in the future.
And there are only so much of land to plant forests.
I have more trust in some kind of phytoplankton. Oceans are vast. Those organisms can capture CO₂. Some of them will be eaten and some of them will die and submerge to depths where they'll keep that carbon forever. If they won't work well enough, future bio-engineering might fix that.