Better than trees!

An interesting post on 'geoengineering' by Matthew Yglesias ...

On international coordination, for example, it’s actually a lot easier for me to imagine China agreeing to binding emissions targets than to imagine China agreeing to let the United States conduct a doomsday weather control machine or us agreeing to sit idly by while China launches a satellite capable of blotting out the sun.

On a non-insane level, the idea of trying to build machines that suck CO2 out of the air and then somehow store it is pretty clearly worth researching. That said, trees already do this quite well and our tree-planting technology is fine. Rather than wait around for the hypothetical “artificial trees” of the future why not just plant more trees? It seems to me there are lots of places in America where trees could be growing but aren’t.