Want to plant trees to offset fossil fuels? You'd need all of North and Central America, study finds
Many respected climate scientists and institutions say removing carbon emissions — not just reducing them — is essential to tackling climate change. And trees remove carbon simply by "breathing." But crunching the numbers, researchers found that the trees' collective ability to remove carbon through photosynthesis can't stand up to the potential emissions from the fossil fuel reserves of the 200 largest oil, gas and coal fuel companies — there's not enough available land on Earth to feasibly accomplish that.
And even if there were, if those 200 companies had to pay for planting all those trees, it would cost $10.8 trillion, more than their entire combined market valuation of $7.01 trillion. The researchers also determined that the companies would be in the red if they were responsible for the social costs of the carbon in their reserves, which scientists compute around $185 per metric ton of carbon dioxide.
'The general public maybe understand offsetting to be a sort of magic eraser, and that's just not where we're at,' said Nina Friggens, a research fellow at the University of Exeter who co-authored the paper published in Communications Earth & Environment, a Nature Portfolio journal.
Carbon offsetting essentially means investing in tree planting or other environmental projects to attempt to compensate for carbon emissions. Trees are one of the cheapest ways to do this because they naturally suck up planet-warming carbon. Fossil fuel corporations, along with other companies and institutions, have promoted tree-planting as key part of carbon offset programs in recent years.
For example, TotalEnergies, a global energy company, said in a statement that it is 'investing heavily in carbon capture and storage (CCS) and nature-based solutions (NBS) projects.'
To do their calculations, the researchers looked at the 200 largest holders of fossil fuel reserves — the fuel that companies promise shareholders they can extract in the future — and calculated how much carbon dioxide would be released if this fuel is burned. The researchers also focused solely on tree planting because the expense and technological development needed for other forms of carbon capture are still mostly cost-prohibitive.
Forestry expert Éliane Ubalijoro, who was not involved with the research, called the study 'elegant.'
It 'gives people a sense of proportion around carbon,' said Ubalijoro, CEO of CIFOR-ICRAF, an international forestry research center.
But she cautioned against oversimplifying the equation by looking only at carbon capture, noting that tree planting done right can foster food security and biodiversity and protect communities from natural disasters.
The paper effectively makes the point that it's financially impossible to offset enough carbon to compensate for future fossil fuel burning, said Daphne Yin, director of land policy at Carbon180, where her team advocates for U.S. policy support for land-based carbon removal. And the idea that companies would ever be required to account for the downstream emissions from the fossil fuel they extract is a 'fantasy,' she said.
The idea of planting trees is appealing to the public and to politicians because it's tangible — people can literally see the carbon being incorporated into branches and leaves as a tree grows, Friggens said. But she says other methods shouldn't be overlooked — microbes underground store carbon too, but they can't be seen.
And it's a physically and mathematically inescapable fact, illustrated in part by this study, that there's no getting around it — we have to stop emitting carbon, said Jonathan Foley, the executive director of Project Drawdown, who also was not part of the study. Carbon emissions are like an overflowing bathtub, he says: Before you start cleaning up, you have to turn off the water.
'Trees are the sponges and the mops we use to clean up the mess," he said. "But if the taps are still running and the water's pouring out over the edges of your bathtub, destroying your bathroom and your home, maybe you've got to learn to turn off the taps too.'
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The Associated Press' climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP's standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
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The Verge
3 days ago
- The Verge
Microplastics are everywhere — including in the air around plastic treaty negotiations
Thousands of delegates have descended upon Geneva this week for what's supposed to be the culmination of years of negotiations that, if successful, are supposed to end in a groundbreaking global plastics treaty. They might be breathing in the very thing they're trying to clean up as they negotiate. Greenpeace tested the air around the city just before the talks began this month and found a small amount of microplastics. It wasn't so much a rigorous study as it was a way to prove a point. Microplastics are turning up all over the place, including in the air we breathe. That's why health and environmental advocates, as well as a coalition of governments, are pushing for an ambitious plastics treaty in Geneva. Recycling isn't enough — only limiting production can stem the tide of plastic pollution, they contend. Recycling isn't enough 'That you can find microplastics in urban air, that's not really shocking because it's been reported before in other cities. I think this is just a way of illustrating that nowhere is free from this pollution,' says David Santillo, a senior scientist with Greenpeace Research Laboratories. Greenpeace strapped an air-monitoring device to a person while they went about their day in Geneva, spending about eight hours in and out of shops, cafes, office spaces, and a railway station. The samples they collected on July 17th were meant to show what a typical visitor to the city might be exposed to; they weren't able to take any samples within the negotiation rooms that delegates would actually use. The device had a replaceable silver filter that Greenpeace researchers were then able to analyze to see what particles they caught, which amounted to at least 165 fibers and fragments. The filters picked up a range of different materials like bits of skin, plant-based fibers, and what was likely soot. Greenpeace was interested in synthetic materials, however, and was ultimately able to identify 12 pieces of microplastics, including polyester, nylon, polyethylene used to make bottles and bags, and other types of plastics. That might not sound like much, but the organization only had the equipment to be able to detect larger particles that were at least 10 microns in size. (For comparison, the average human hair is about 70 microns in diameter.) 'If they found the big ones, it's a pretty fair bet that the smaller ones were there, as well,' says Philip Landrigan, director of the Global Public Health and the Common Good Program at Boston College, who was not involved in the Greenpeace study. Generally, the smaller the particle, the more problems it can potentially pose by being able to penetrate deeper into organs and tissues in the human body. A human brain might contain as much as a spoon's worth of microplastics, research published in the journal Nature Medicine earlier this year suggests. 'Unfortunately, microplastics are pretty much everywhere in today's world,' Landrigan says. He's the lead author of an August report, published in the journal The Lancet, on the links between plastic pollution and health outcomes. 'Plastics cause disease and death from infancy to old age,' the report says, adding that plastics are responsible for $1.5 trillion in health-related economic losses each year. The report accounts for all the risks along the lifecycle of plastic, including chemicals that workers and communities near manufacturing facilities are exposed to, and waste that breaks down into nanoplastic particles that have been found in human bodies and breastmilk. 'Plastics cause disease and death from infancy to old age' Scientists are still working to understand the health impacts of inhaling microplastics in the air. Landrigan points out that we at least know that all plastics are made of two main components, a carbon-based backbone derived from fossil fuels and chemical additives. 'When the microplastic comes into the human body, whether you inhale it or drink it with your water or eat it with your food, when it it gets into you and the plastics move from your gastrointestinal tract into the bloodstream, the microplastic particles are carrying all those chemicals with them,' Landrigan says. The more than 16,000 different chemicals used in plastics production — including the carcinogen vinyl chloride, for example — are primarily responsible for the known health risks associated with plastics. But the toxicity of more than 75 percent of the chemicals in plastics have yet to be studied. Greenpeace doesn't claim to be assessing air quality in Geneva or the health impacts of what they found in their air samples. All they can show is the presence of microplastics in the air, adding to previous research that has done the same. What's notable now is that Greenpeace has documented this at a time when leaders from around the world have the opportunity to actually do something about it. Negotiations on a plastics treaty in Geneva are scheduled to end on August 14th. In 2022, United Nations member states agreed to develop a legally binding pact on plastic pollution. It's been an uphill battle to agree on terms ever since. Major fossil fuel producing nations blocked a deal in December, pushing negotiations past their initial 2024 deadline. So far this year, there's still a fight over whether focusing on recycling and reducing plastic waste is enough. The fossil fuel industry and countries including the US that produce a lot of plastics and its ingredients are fighting efforts to exclude limits to plastic production from the treaty. A 'high ambition coalition' launched by Rwanda and Norway, on the other hand, wants to address the full lifecycle of plastic, starting with production. It's also open to using the treaty to phase out or restrict the use of problematic chemicals in plastics. It doesn't make sense to simply mop up the mess plastic leaves behind without also turning off the faucet, says Angel Pago, Greenpeace global plastics campaign media lead. 'We're brimming with plastic because of overproduction. And we cannot solve this crisis with just, you know, cleanups,' Pago tells The Verge from Geneva. The Lancet article similarly says 'the principal driver of this [health] crisis is accelerating growth in plastic production.' Production has ballooned from 2 metric megatons in 1950 to 475 in 2022. Less than 10 percent of plastic waste has ever been recycled, in part because the many chemicals used to manufacture different types plastics make it difficult or uneconomical to rehash the material. 'If we're going to do something about plastics, we need to cap plastic production,' Landrigan says. 'I hope and I pray that the treaty negotiators are actually going to produce a treaty that protects human health.' Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Justine Calma Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Climate Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Environment Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Health Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Policy Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Report Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Science
WIRED
5 days ago
- WIRED
Central American Beaches Are Being Overrun With Local and Foreign Plastic
Aug 12, 2025 5:00 AM A study of plastic bottles washed up on the Pacific coast of Latin America has identified a double problem—a mass of local waste combined with long-traveling bottles from Asia. Plastic bottles on a beach in Llolleo, Chile. Photograph: CLAUDIO REYES/AFP via Getty Images A Powerade bottle from 2001 was found on Yaya, a Peruvian beach south of Lima. A Coca-Cola bottle from 2002 was found on Robinson Crusoe Island, a World Biosphere Reserve, in Chile. These were the oldest of all the bottles collected. These discarded pieces of packaging were collected in a new macro-study that looked at the origin of plastic bottle pollution on beaches and cities along Latin America's Pacific coastline. The research—the first to be conducted on a regional scale, thanks to a citizen science initiative covering 10 countries—combed more than 12,000 kilometers of coastline along the west coast of South and Central America. It found that across the region, Central American countries are most affected by coastal plastic pollution, and underscores the urgency of confronting this major problem. Although volunteers found numerous bottles dating back more than a decade, 'most of them were less than a year old,' says scientist Ostin Garcés, an expert on the impact of plastic on marine ecosystems at the University of Barcelona and a lead author of this new research. Plastic makes up the majority of the garbage on coastlines around the world and has reached even the most inhospitable corners of the planet, including the deepest parts of the oceans and both the Arctic and Antarctic. Its impact not only has repercussions on biodiversity and the balance of ecosystems; various studies show how plastic already colonizes our insides, runs through our blood, and lives in our brains and organs. Microplastics have even been found in semen and ovaries. The microplastics that we eat, drink, and breathe every day are part of us. An environmentalist searches for plastic waste and packaging dumped on El Esterón beach in Intipuca, El Salvador, in October 2024. Photograph: MARVIN RECINOS/AFP via Getty Images 'Production and consumption continue unabated,' says Garcés, who is part of the team that sampled a total of 92 continental beaches, 15 island beaches, and 38 human settlements to determine the abundance, origin, and characteristics of plastic bottles along Central and South America's Pacific coast. This study reveals surprising data, given that more than half of the bottles and caps collected had visible dates. According to the study, containers for soft drinks, energy drinks, and drinking water were the most common. The countries with the highest rates of plastic bottle pollution were El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, likely due to their coastal population density, high consumption of beverages in plastic containers, and poor waste management, the study's authors argue. 'These are countries that lack the necessary infrastructure and technical capacity [to control plastic bottle waste]. Therefore, all the beverage waste that reaches their communities ends up in nature,' says Garcés. There is also another very important factor that is driving up pollution, Garcés says. 'Our study shows rising temperatures have caused people in these tropical areas to consume more bottled beverages.' The large number of plastic water bottles found in Central American countries is a symptom of another serious problem in the region, but one that affects most countries on the continent: limited access to safe drinking water, which drives people to buy bottled water and other packaged drinks. Volunteers pick up trash and plastic debris on the beach and cliffs as part of a nationwide beach cleanup in Lima, Peru, in March 2025. Photograph: Klebher Vasquez/Anadolu via Getty Images The results reveal that almost 60 percent of the items with identifiable origins came from countries within the Latin American Pacific region itself—that is, from local producers. 'They are manufactured by bottling companies located in the same country but that work with international brands, such as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Aje Group,' explains Garcés. These three multinationals account for the majority of the collected bottles. Bottles from 356 brands produced by 253 companies were identified. The study recorded information contained on the bottles and their caps—such as labels and engravings—to work out their manufacturer, production date, and place of origin. This allowed the researchers to identify sources of pollution and the journeys taken by individual items to reach the beach or city where they were collected. While continental beaches were filled with local products, island beaches receive many Asian bottles, likely arriving from ships and via ocean currents. This observation, Garcés says, was precisely what prompted the research he participated in. In 2023, the Trash Scientists Network, a program of Universidad Católica del Norte in Chile, conducted a study that showed that many bottles that end up on remote islands, such as Rapa Nui (Easter Island) or the Galapagos, had letters on their labels that were not in Spanish, but in Chinese or Japanese. 'That's where the idea of investigating where those bottles came from came from,' Garcés says. An image from the study illustrating how plastic bottles reach Latin American Pacific coasts. Illustration: Garcés-Ordóñez et al. (2025) (CC BY 4.0) The scientists found that, like other marine debris, the bottles and caps they retrieved were sometimes colonized by immobile organisms called epibionts, which live on the surface of other organisms or materials. The team found items with bryozoans, barnacles, and mollusks attached, with the presence of these correlating with the age of the plastic. Bottles and caps also exhibited degradation patterns typical of marine exposure—discoloration, wear, and fragmentation. However, despite these transformations, the plastic waste often retained key identifying characteristics, such as product codes, brand names, manufacturing locations, and dates. This data helped trace their provenance, even when bottles were damaged or heavily colonized by organisms, providing valuable information about their origin and transport pathways. For Garcés, one of the most worrying conclusions of his study is the situation on islands like the Galapagos and Rapa Nui, protected natural areas. As he explains, epibionts attached to the plastic bottles are washing up on their beaches, 'and that represents a serious threat, because we don't know what species of organisms are arriving or where they're coming from. And they can be invasive.' The work would not have been possible without the collaboration of up to 200 local leaders from 74 social organizations, as well as the 1,000 volunteers who were part of this citizen science initiative. Their methodological approach not only allowed the research team to better understand the characteristics of the plastic waste affecting the Latin American Pacific, but also to understand regional beverage preferences and consumption trends in different countries. Proposals to Solve This Crisis Given the widespread presence of disposable plastic bottles, mainly of local origin, one of the researchers' main recommendations is to replace them with standardized returnable bottles throughout the region—'like we used to do,' Garcés says. 'When I was a kid, products were sold in returnable glass bottles. This would be one of the main measures we propose to reduce the production of plastics from the source.' This measure, he says, should be complemented by refund policies and corporate social responsibility initiatives on the part of the beverage companies involved. Demanding reusable packaging and accountability from large producers of bottled drinks are essential strategies to reduce plastic pollution and protect coastal ecosystems, say the authors. 'In the end, companies have their own interests and look for the cheapest alternatives for bottle production. That is why governments have to get involved,' says Garcés. However, he says that improving waste management, especially in coastal communities, is another key issue that needs to be addressed. The researchers also highlight the central role of human behavior in reducing plastic pollution. 'As we grow as a population, consumption increases. And, as long as the basic needs of coastal populations in terms of access to drinking water are not met, it will continue to increase, contaminating more and more coastal environments,' Garcés says. When drinking water is only available in single-use plastic bottles, consumers have no alternatives, 'limiting their ability to act sustainably.' This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Yahoo
Why are heatwaves getting worse? An expert explains
STORY: :: An expert explains why climate change is making heatwaves more intense and frequent :: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio :: Exeter, England :: August 6, 2025 :: Raphaelle Haywood, University of Exeter 'Climate change is the main driver of heatwaves and the evidence for that is overwhelming. There is no doubt about that. We have done tons of observations. We have observations, we have models. Everything agrees, the scientific consensus is overwhelming and it's decisive. Right. And we know that as long as we're going to keep burning fossil fuels, we are going to see an increase in temperatures and that's going to make heatwaves more likely and more intense.' '...And as we burn these fossil fuels, we're releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and carbon dioxide is a really, really potent greenhouse basically means that when you burn it, when you put it into the atmosphere, it makes the atmosphere warmer.' '…We're looking in some places at, you know, heatwaves of 40, 45 degrees, almost 50 degrees (Celsius) (122F) temperature, probably more than that in the next 20 years. And we're looking at that being completely normal, you know, by the end of the century, if we don't act on climate change right now.' Climate change is fueling a range of extreme weather around the world, from flooding and storms to droughts, but the change it is most clearly producing is more extreme heat. The continued release of planet-heating emissions - largely from the use of coal, oil and gas - will push global temperatures into "uncharted territory" in the coming years, scientists have said. Heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels is raising temperatures to levels unfamiliar to many parts of the world. About 90% of that excess energy - or heat - has so far been absorbed by the world's oceans, moderating temperature increases. Extreme heat stress has already doubled in the last 40 years, according to the U.S. space agency NASA. Around 2,300 people died of heat-related causes across 12 European cities during the severe heatwave between June and July, according to scientists at Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Extreme heat could also spur other types of disasters, from water shortages, worsening droughts, wildfires and biodiversity loss. Solve the daily Crossword
