I don't think plants are a viable solution for quite a number of reasons. The most fundamental is that they are inherently temporary storage. Plants absorb var

I don't think plants are a viable solution for quite a number of reasons. The most fundamental is that they are inherently temporary storage. Plants absorb various gases as they live, and then emit it as they die. So you're just kicking the can, and not even especially far. For instance a tree can absorb up to around 50 pounds of CO2 per year. To put that into contrast an iPhone 7 results in about 123 pounds of emissions, so you need 2.5 trees per iPhone per year. Alternatively a gallon of gasoline releases about 19 pounds of CO2. So for every 10 gallons of gas a person uses you'd need about 4 full grown trees. And again that is per year, per person. Look around your house and imagine how many trees you'd need just to temporarily mask just your own personal consumption. It'd be a small forest, per person. That leads to the second problem - scale is limited. With an unbelievably massive planting effort we could probably work to temporarily mask our emissions today. And while our emissions today are a problem, you can't ignore the future. Right now the vast majority of the world doesn't emit much per capita, but that's because most of the world lives in less developed areas. As China, India, Africa, and other areas continue to develop their emissions per capita are going to continue to increase. We should expect worldwide emissions to sharply increase over the coming decades, and so we need solutions that can scale accordingly. And the final issue is that these solutions can, at times, go up in flames. For instance a recent study on wildfires has indicated that wildfires in places such as California can end up contributing even more to their CO2 output than the vehicles in those areas. [1] Mass planting of greenery would work as temporary storage, but it's not an especially stable form and so the net effect would be very difficult to accurately predict. [1] - https://www.livescience.com/1981-wildfires-release-cars.html https://www.livescience.com/1981-wildfires-release-cars.html