Respectfully ignoring the snark, we have an immediate problem and tress aren't fast enough, take up too much land, and the land needs to be suitable.

I've watched the past 30-odd years - and my father for 50-odd years before that - as fertile farmland with good reliable rain (this is not a common combination in Australia) has been built-over with housing. Agriculture has been pushed further out to areas with less fertility and rainfall.

Most of the remaining wide open spaces in Australia can support little more than bush and patches of grass. All the good land with rainfall has people living on it.

This is a problem all over.

Before it was Silicon Valley, the Peninsula was said to be the best citrus growing land on Earth.

It's a nice place to live, don't get me wrong. But I can't help feeling like growing detached single-family homes instead wasn't a good trade.

You, or anyone else here, can reverse this trade today by buying up homes, demolishing them, and planting citrus trees.

You wouldn't make a profit doing so though, which tells you that the collective hivemind that makes up the economy prefers houses over trees.

Indeed. A lot of problems are solved by having less people on the planet, and ultimately that will happen whether planned or not.

That's true.

It's also true that, if I wanted to build a nice subdivision under El Capitan in Yosemite, I would find that I'm quite unable. The collective hivemind that makes up the body politic prefers a national park over houses.

So now that we've acknowledged that Mammon isn't the only god in our pantheon, perhaps we can make better decisions on that basis, going forward.

Yes, thats sucks.

For that specific problem, you could imagine policies allowing you some kind of 'zoning swap' - where you get a bit of land in one physical location and swap all laws, covenants, and restrictions for land in another region. Obviously you might not have a 1:1 exchange rate...

Youcould set up a collective farm, where a neighborhood essentially owns a farm.

Or you could just grow trees on top of your houses!

Most of the fertile land is in fact used by humans. And planting trees in remote areas is not good either: you need to cut them down and actually sequester the carbon if you want to do something about climate change. Just having stable forests is a far too small carbon sink (and the change in albedo from dark trees actually works against you in many areas of the world). Reforestation is good, but trees alone are not enough.

Trees aren't enough to scale up. You can play with toggling deforestation and reforestation here: https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?p50=0....

Even in the most optimistic scenarios, it's clear that we'll need additional carbon capture to avoid situations like 3-4 degrees C of warming.