- Several technology leaders announced that they are making donations to the #TeamTrees campaign. Here are the details.
Elon Musk recently wrote a tweet saying that he is donating $1 million for planting 1 million trees. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke, and YouTube are also joining the cause.
The cause that is facilitating the donation is #TeamTrees. This campaign was launched by Jimmy Donaldson (known as MrBeat on YouTube). Donaldson grew a major following by performing certain stunts and also taking on mundane challenges such as counting to 100,000 in a two day period. And Donaldson turned more towards philanthropy as his following grew. For example, Donaldson has been giving donations to homeless people along with his parents and friends.
After Musk announced the commitment, Donaldson referred to him as “Treelon Musk.” And then Musk changed his Twitter name to “Treelon” and updated his profile photo with an image of a forest.
Dorsey is donating 150,000 trees for the cause. And YouTube is going to match $1 million donated to TeamTrees through its donate button. Lütke is donating 1,000,001 trees for the cause.
Donaldson had challenged his followers to raise enough money to plant 20 million trees by next year in order to celebrate his 20 million subscriber milestone on YouTube. The goal is to hit this milestone by the end of 2022. As of now, the #TeamTrees campaign has hit over 12 million and counting.
This campaign was put together in a partnership with the Arbor Day Foundation. The trees will be planted in a variety of forests on public and private lands in areas where it is needed.
In order to combat climate change and reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, growing trees is essential. According to researchers at North Carolina State University, the average tree is able to consume 48 pounds of carbon dioxide per year. And this figure is expected to hit 1 ton of carbon after 40 years. This means that 20 million trees would be able to consume 480,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year.
