Last month, President Donald Trump spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, an event that also featured speeches from climate activists Al Gore and Greta Thunberg.

In his speech, Trump announced the United States would be supporting the Trillion Tree Initiative. He mentioned it again in his State of the Union address.

While Trump never uttered a word about global warming, the initiative is aimed at easing man made climate change by removing gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Last week, Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Arkansas, introduced federal legislation to help bring about the goal.

The initiative is based on a Swiss study published in the journal Science last July. According to the researchers’ calculations, planting 1 trillion trees would sequester about 25 percent of the carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere. If CO2 emissions stopped today, which isn’t going to happen, and we managed to plant all those trees, it would bring CO2 concentrations down to levels they were at a century ago.

There are some critics of the bill who say it won’t accomplish what it proposes to do, and there are others who dispute the research.

Like any proposal to address climate change, it has strengths, weaknesses, and uncertainties. It is promising, though, this idea is being given serious consideration. So far, the bulk of proposals to address climate change mostly seek to ban fossil fuels and force people to rely exclusively on the wind and sun for energy.

To push this ill-conceived plan that would deprive people of the energy source that accounts for 80% of the globe’s energy, anti-fossil fuel crusaders have grossly exaggerated the threat climate change poses, wrongly claiming it will result in mankind’s extinction.

They then label anyone who questions their hysteria a science denier, lumping them in with those who wrongly believe climate change is a big hoax. It is not a hoax, but it’s also not going to result in the collapse of our civilization.

It is going to be a big, expensive problem to solve, but uncompromising and polarized ideologies driven by extreme rhetoric make it impossible to pursue even the most reasonable courses of action, such as planting trees.

As soon as Trump voiced his support for the Trillion Tree Initiative, CNN’s climate change analyst, John Sutter, wrote a scathing criticism of it, arguing that since it doesn’t ban fossil fuels, the proposal is just “near-nonsense.” Trump got CNN to criticize a massive reforestation plan. Think about that.

This is like a debate over what to do about traffic fatalities, with a large group of people insisting the only solution is to ban cars and another group insisting car accidents are a hoax. Then, when someone reasonably proposes encouraging drivers to wear their seat belts, the anti-car lobby laughs it off because it would still allow people to continue driving their death machines.

Energy is vital to our modern world. It produces our food. It powers our schools and hospitals, and it drives our economy. People are not just putting CO2 into the atmosphere because they don’t care about the planet. They’re utilizing the most abundant and reliable source of energy we have. This makes the problem of climate change difficult to solve, and no one approach is going to provide a silver bullet, any more than wearing seat belts eliminates all traffic fatalities.

There are a lot of proposals to consider. Planting trees is one. Renewables will not replace fossil fuels, but they have their place. Nuclear energy provides safe, carbon-free energy. Carbon capture technologies are showing potential.

There are a lot of options to explore, but if we can’t get past the all-or-nothing stalemate on this issue, we’ll just be standing in place yelling at each other.