"HOW IS THAT RIDICULOUS?"

My current favourite conservative meme is a video showing Joe Rogan proposing to his guest, "You have people like Bill Gates saying that ‘planting trees to deal with carbon is ridiculous, that’s a ridiculous way to do it…’ How is that ridiculous? They literally turn CO₂ into oxygen. It is their food."

There’s so much to love about this, but we can just stick with the planting of trees and carbon offsetting and don’t need to get into the politics around Bill Gates or how ‘20s Republicans are just ‘90s Democrats or anything else.

TLDR: I assume Rogan's suggestion that we plant trees to deal with CO₂ is that he sees the reason for CO₂ concentrations going up so much and so fast is as a result of the tremendous amount of deforestation, particularly over the last century, and that we've been pumping out evermore CO₂ as a result of industrialization. As such, the existing forests seem to be already accounted for or they would be compensating and we would be getting back to some kind of equilibrium. Therefore, according to Rogan, we either need to slash CO₂ production or plant loads of trees, or both. From there I notice that:

A) There's just too much CO₂ production for how little absorption even the biggest, longest living trees can manage;

B) There isn't enough space (not already occupied by forest or agricultural land) even if you insistent on treeplanting;

C) The time, labour, and costs associated with tree production and planting at almost any scale would make the project prohibitive even if none of the above was operative; and

D) It also seems you should just plant lots more trees

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