An ex-Silicon Valley CEO says that using technology to combat climate change is not a realistic solution. He is convinced that trees are the simplest, most obvious and logically proven answer to CO2 pollution. One that needs a worldwide approach to be viable – and he has the answer to that too. By Jeremy Torr.

Waimea, Hawaii. January 2021. The ex-CEO of the massively successful online service Reddit is worried.

“Climate change is a very, very large problem. It is larger in scale than any other problem the human race has ever attempted to solve,” says Yishan Wong. Wong has spent 20 years working at geek-factories such as PayPal, Facebook, Reddit and more, and he understands the appeal of a tech-heavy answer to global warming. But, he notes, while new tech is shiny, attractive and usually easy to sell to users, it is almost always expensive, and in addition often comes with bugs, with on average, 100 to 150 errors for every thousand lines of code – which multiply the more it is used.

“This means that new technological solutions carry large absolute risk: deploy a billion pieces of some new technology that has a one percent error rate, and we see 10 million errors,” he explains. As he observes, solving big problems like climate change and global atmospheric pollution is already hard enough without introducing a few million more potential snags. “We shouldn’t make it harder by adding that additional risk,” he says.

So Wong has decided instead that he should put his skills and resources into an old-established, proven technology; one that has already been proven over thousands of years to combat climate change and carbon build-up: trees.

“The best way to solve a problem (like climate change) of such massive scale is not to develop a new technology,” he asserts. “Instead, we need to piece together, proven, reliable prior-generation technology, and learn to scale it.” As he points out, trees have been around for millions of years and are the most efficient carbon capture tools readily available, anywhere.

Wong and his new venture, Terraformation, are aiming to use simple, established approaches to capturing carbon at scale – planting up to a trillion hectares of reforested land that could store over 200 gigatons of carbon in coming years. But there are a few significant hurdles, they are available land, water and irrigation.

First, land. Deserts are ideal. The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification reports that around 4.7 billion acres have been affected by desertification and offer otherwise unused land. They can, says UNCCD, be potentially be restored, but this needs water. OK, next find the water. Wong says the logical choice is to desalinate seawater as there is still plenty of that to go round. Then desalinate it. But how? Use solar panels to provide the electricity, he says.

“Solar power and desalination are both decades-old technologies,” he says, noting that both have the benefit they don’t come with the new-tech problem baggage of many other strongly-touted solutions. They are proven, relatively simple technology with no bugs. “Trees are cheap.  Solar is cheap.  Desalination is cheap, and with declining prices it is now economically feasible to run (projects like this) at large scale,” he says.

To prove this idea works, Terraformation has set up a pilot in Hawaii using the world's largest off-grid, solar-powered desalination plant. It produces enough desalinated water (some 130,000 litres a day) to drip-irrigate almost 2,000 newly planted trees on the company’s previously arid 45-acre test site at North Kohala.

“Climate change is daunting because of the sheer scale of the problem,” admits Wong. “But a program of massive reforestation - all over the world - done in a decentralised manner, through multiple, parallel efforts, each customized to its local ecosystem and community is the most affordable, lowest-risk, and most politically feasible solution to climate change.”

Wong and his team are confident this approach will work, not just reducing desertification but also greening the planet and sequestering carbon in the process. Terraformation is working towards the next phase of its plan, replicating the Hawaii experiment worldwide, creating million-seed seed-banks that can be shipped in containers to almost anywhere in the world, and creating open-source planting and management software to be used to ensure the best possible outcomes for any seeding project.

Wong understands the terrifying immensity of the task at hand, but is nonetheless undaunted. “(If we planted) ten billion trees in coming years that’s actually only 1% of the problem, and 1% in 10 years is simply not going to get us there,” he says. “Most plans are like, we’re going to plant a billion trees by the end of the century. That isn’t even close to what we need.”

His answer to this gargantuan task is not to be the big fixer, the Google of the carbon capture world. It is instead to be the fertiliser of millions and millions of local activists. He notes that the problem is literally 1,000 times bigger than any single organisation can possibly address.

“What we want is a million copycats. We want to give out our technology and our techniques as widely as possible, and tell everyone, this is what we do, and you can copy us, and it works. That’s the only way we’re going to achieve an order of magnitude increase in the acreage that is reforested per year.”

It’s a bold plan. But it’s simple, and it works. And it doesn’t demand the latest version of Android or iOS to happen.