Finally. McCarthy embraces “Plant a Trillion Trees”

While touring an Ohio natural gas drilling site this week, Speaker Kevin McCarthy was hit by the usual questions that lefty reporters always ask. You’re promoting more fossil fuel drilling, but what about climate change? This time, McCarthy had an answer ready and it’s one I’ve been waiting to hear the GOP leadership embrace for a long time. He told the reporter that we need to plant a trillion trees. The AP made a big deal out of this, pointing to the smoke from the Canadian wildfires hanging in the air and blaming that on climate change. But that’s what they always do, so there’s no surprise there. But the trillion trees campaign rarely gets enough coverage, and it was refreshing to hear.

As Speaker Kevin McCarthy visited a natural gas drilling site in northeast Ohio to promote House Republicans’ plan to sharply increase domestic production of energy from fossil fuels last month, the signs of rising global temperatures could not be ignored. Smoke from Canadian wildfires hung in the air.

When the speaker was asked about climate change and forest fires, he was ready with a response: Plant a trillion trees.

The idea — simple yet massively ambitious — revealed recent Republican thinking on how to address climate change. The party is no longer denying that global warming exists, yet is searching for a response to sweltering summers, weather disasters and rising sea levels that doesn’t involve abandoning their enthusiastic support for American-produced energy from burning oil, coal and gas.

The only danger in McCarthy raising this banner, assuming you want to consider it a “danger,” is that the AP immediately pounced on the opportunity to say that the Speaker was “no longer denying that global warming exists.” In reality, I don’t recall any serious Republicans ever denying that the Earth’s temperatures go up and down all the time and they always have. What they have debated is the cause for that phenomenon and how much impact – if any – so-called fossil fuels have on the situation.

As noted above, the AP was quick to point to the smoke from the Canadian wildfires as the “proof” that “forced” McCarthy to give a nod to the need to combat climate change. But as anyone who has been paying attention knows, the northern forests of Canada burn every summer and they always have. We’re just noticing it more because some odd shifts in the upper atmosphere have forced the prevailing winds more to the south this season.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t heartily embrace reforestation. Some of us have been shouting from the rooftops about the Plant a trillion trees campaign for years. More trees lead to more shade and more CO2 being removed from the atmosphere in the way nature intended it to happen, along with the generation of more oxygen. And while the AP clearly thinks they caught McCarthy in a gotcha moment, this debate actually puts Democrats back on their heels. Now they have to come up with a reason that they’re opposed to planting trees. Good luck with that.

It’s long been obvious why these so-called environmentalists want to focus on eliminating fossil fuels and why they ignore the reforestation option. Nobody makes any money from planting a tree, except possibly a lumber company several decades later. (And they are legally obligated to plant new trees when they cut some down now.) Conversely, a lot of “the right people” are making a ton of money from government-subsidized solar and wind projects. (Spoiler alert: You’re not one of “the right people.”)

You can learn more about the Trillion Tree Campaign here. While there is room for plenty of new trees in North America, our government could be doing more elsewhere. We still send a lot of foreign aid to both South America and sub-Saharan Africa. That aid should be tied to commitments to reforestation efforts. And if we get enough of this work done, the liberals may finally stop yapping about drilling, gas stoves, and electric cars. Or at least we might dare to hope.