If there’s one climate-change solution everybody seems to agree on, it’s that trees are good. Even Donald Trump, who has called climate change a Chinese hoax, has proposed planting a trillion trees.
So it might seem that the holiday tradition of chopping down one of these precious planet-savers and dragging it into your living room to festoon with lights and ornaments, only to toss it on the curb a few weeks later, would be bad for the climate. But in fact, you may be doing the planet a favor.
For one thing, Christmas-tree farming is generally a sustainable business. Trees grow for many years before harvesting and are replaced by one or more seedlings when they’re finally cut down. Just 30 million of the 350 million or so trees on farms actually get chopped down every season, according to The Nature Conservancy. While they grow, the trees absorb carbon from the atmosphere, doing their part to eat the emissions humans wantonly pump into the air by burning fossil fuels and the like.
Of course, cutting trees down, digging up the soil to plant new ones and hauling the harvest to your local Elk’s Club or Walmart parking lot for sale to the public does generate carbon emissions. But this pollution is nothing compared with what’s involved in producing artificial trees. These are typically hard to recycle, and they are also typically shipped all the way from China to that Walmart. According to one estimate, a 6-foot-tall artificial tree (on the short side for a McMansion) produces 88 pounds of CO2 equivalent, compared with less than 8 pounds for a real tree of the same size.
And remember, if you use an artificial tree, you’ll have to use it for 12 Christmases to make up the difference in emissions.