Billionaire globalist Bill Gates said planting trees to solve nonexistent climate change is “nonsense.”

“I don’t use some of the less proven approaches,” Gates said at the New York Times’ Climate Forward summit.

“I don’t plant trees,” he added.

“Some people would even say that if you plant enough trees it would take care of the climate issue altogether,” the reporter commented.

“And that’s complete nonsense,” Gates said.

“Are we the science people or are we the idiots?” he asked.

“Which one do we want to be?” he added.

WATCH:

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff criticized Gates for his comments.

“Who is for the trees? Anyone? Even Bill Gates has turned on the trees. With only 3 trillion of 6 trillion trees remaining who will love the trees? Who will value the 200GT of CO2 that that every trillion trees sequesters? Who will conserve them? Who will protect them? Who will plant them? Who is for the trees?” Benioff wrote.

Insider reports:

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who has put $300 million toward planting trees to address climate change, took offense.

Benioff called New York Times climate reporter David Gelles to criticize Gates’ opinion.

“I couldn’t really understand why he was going on this tirade,” Benioff told Gelles. “Number one, we all have to go net zero. And number two, we have to plant a trillion trees.”

Benioff has been outspoken in the past about corporate climate responsibility — and the best ways to reduce carbon footprints.

“We think every company should be focused on how to sequester the carbon that they’re creating, Benioff told Insider in 2019. “It’s not that hard. We can all do it very easy.”

He was a strong advocate for planting trees then, too.

“The one that we directly have in the most actionable form is more trees,” Benioff said. “You can have 205 gigatonnes of carbon sequestration for every trillion trees. We need more trees.”

Maybe there’s another reason Bill Gates thinks planting trees is nonsense.

Gates has funded an initiative to reduce carbon emissions and fight so-called global warming by chopping down and burying trees.

Bill Gates Wants to Fight Global Warming by Cutting Down Trees?

From the U.S. Department of Agriculture:

Trees also store carbon dioxide in their fibers helping to clean the air and reduce the negative effects that this CO2 could have had on our environment. According to the Arbor Day Foundation, in one year a mature tree will absorb more than 48 pounds of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and release oxygen in exchange.

So next time you take a deep breath of air give credit to a tree or hug a tree in thanks for what it gives us – the very air we breathe.

However, Gates helped bankroll Kodama Systems in a “stealth effort to bury wood for carbon removal.”

“Bill Gates and other investors are betting Kodama Systems can reduce carbon dioxide in the air by chopping down and burying trees, which has raised $6.6 million in seed funding from Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy and others,” Crossroads with Joshua Philipp noted.

“Scientists say, ‘burying trees can reduce global warming as well.’ I don’t know where they’re finding these scientists, by the way. To help address the problem, the U.S. Forest Services aims to thin out 70 million acres of Western forest, mostly in California over the next decade, extracting more than 1 billion tons of bone-dried biomass,” Philipp said.

“Normally, when you cut down trees, when you’re a lumberjack, when you have a lumber company, you’re selling the lumber to build houses, people buying from Home Depot or whatever. They’re arguing that they want to, rather than sell the timber, take all that wood and just bury it, because they’re saying that that is a better solution. And so in other words, this is a business, because they’re getting money to create carbon offsets, and this is what Bill Gates is financing,” he added.

WATCH:

MIT Technology Review reports:

A California startup is pursuing a novel, if simple, plan for ensuring that dead trees keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere for thousands of years: burying their remains underground.

Kodama Systems, a forest management company based in the Sierra Nevada foothills town of Sonora, has been operating in stealth mode since it was founded last summer. But MIT Technology Review can now report the company has raised around $6.6 million from Bill Gates’s climate fund Breakthrough Energy Ventures, as well as Congruent Ventures and other investors.

In addition, the payments company Stripe will reveal on Thursday that it’s provided a $250,000 research grant to the company and its research partner, the Yale Carbon Containment Lab, as part of a broader carbon removal announcement. That grant will support a pilot effort to bury waste biomass harvested from California forests in the Nevada desert and study how well it prevents the release of greenhouse gases that drive climate change.

It also agreed to purchase about 415 tons of carbon dioxide eventually sequestered by the company for another $250,000, if that proof-of-concept project achieves certain benchmarks.

“Biomass burial has the potential to become a low-cost, high-scale approach for carbon removal, though there is a need for further investigation into its long-term durability,” said Joanna Klitzke, procurement and ecosystem strategy lead for Stripe.

For the last several years, Stripe has pre-purchased tons of carbon dioxide that startups aim to eventually draw out of the air and permanently sequester, in an effort to help build up a carbon removal industry. It has also helped establish a different model for counteracting corporate climate emissions that goes beyond simply purchasing carbon credits from popular offsets projects, such as those that involve planting trees, which have come under growing scrutiny.

A handful of research groups and startups have begun exploring the potential to lock up the carbon in wood, by burying or otherwise storing tree remains in ways that slow down decomposition.

Watch more at Crossroads with Joshua Philipp:

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