People Have Passively Planted Over 30 Million Trees Simply by Surfing the Web

[OnlinePoker]

There are now 30 million more trees in the world thanks to people who are casually surfing the web.

The environmental milestone is thanks to Ecosia, a search engine that uses all of their profits generated from internet searches to plant trees around the world.

It works similarly to any other search engine (like Google), except for the fact that since Ecosia started in 2009, their reforestation efforts have removed 1.5 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere.

https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/people-have-passively-planted-over-30-million-trees-simply-by-surfing-the-web/

[virgogal]

1. That is VERY cool---thanks for the info.

[Nitram]

2. I don't know. Sounds like an ad to me.

Their claim that you support planting trees simply by " casually surfing the web" is false according to their own website. They only earn money when someone clicks on an ad.

[OnlinePoker]

3. Not really.

They're taking a search engine function which everybody uses (Google, Bing, etc) already. If someone searches and does click on a link that produces income, instead of going to enrich shareholders, the profits above expenses go to tree planting around the world. They support a lot of non-profit tree-planting organizations which wouldn't get a lot of support otherwise. They also show their monthly financial reports and say how much comes in and how much goes out and to which organizations. http://documents.ecosia.org/467540/12095458

[NNadir]

4. Well, it gives one a sense of scale. If they actually did this, their 1.5 million tons represents...

...in the "percent talk" so favored by those who can't calculate that so called "renewable energy" is useless, 0.0043% of the annual injection of the dangerous fossil fuel waste CO2 each year, 35 billion tons while we all wait like Godot for the grand renewable energy nirvana that seems to never actually show up.

Of course, this is 1.5 million tons over a period of 9 years, or 167,000 tons per year, meaning it's actually, on an annual basis, it represents 0.0005% of world CO2 dumping.

I really don't have any figures available immediately, but I would guess that one "renewable energy" dam in the Amazon releases that much carbon in a year from the former rain forest trees rotting beneath the waters, and not as CO2 either, but as methane.

We'd all like to feel that we're doing something, but the reality is that if we believe that stuff like this is meaningful, we're just kidding ourselves.