Campaign aims to plant a tree every time Trump tweets about climate change

An organisation has launched a campaign to tackle environmental issues by planting trees for every Donald Trump quote denying climate change.

Treepex, a platform in which users sponsor the planting of trees, has created a new campaign to allow users to “fight back” against Mr Trump, who has publicly cast doubt on the existence of climate change throughout the years. The campaign titled, Treespond, aims to be an outlet for those frustrated by the US president’s rhetoric surrounding climate change, by allowing users to plant trees for every environment-related quote by Mr Trump.

"The main antagonists of our campaign are politicians, one of them: Donald J. Trump, who is one of the biggest climate deniers with THE biggest media stage," the campaign website states.

Treespond has tracked quotes from Mr Trump and evaluated them on a scale of how ignorant the organisation perceives the statements to be. The more ignorant Treespond rates a statement, the more trees it supports to be planted for that particular quote.

Treespond has pulled together various quotes and tweets on climate change by Mr Trump, like in 2012 when he tweeted: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.” Although Mr Trump later claimed his 2012 tweet calling climate change a Chinese hoax was a joke, he has notably been critical of climate change since then. He has publicly cited cold temperatures to undermine concerns on global warming.

It costs about $10 (£8) for contributors to plant a tree for the Treespond campaign; users receive information on where the sponsored tree is planted with updates on the plant’s progress. Treespond has partnered with the American Forestry Association to plant trees across the national forests of California recently devastated by wildfires.

US politicians have fiercely lambasted climate change deniers for opposing scientific consensus that human-caused global climate change is occurring.

Such is the case for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 28-year-old Democratic socialist who defeated longtime US House Representative and Democratic Party star Joe Crowley in a stunning primary victory, who has proposed implementing a bold climate proposal, titled “Green New Deal” aimed at investing in the “development, manufacturing, deployment, and distribution” in green energy, as she told HuffPost.

The founders of Treepex told The Independent that its viral campaigns, like Treespond, further its efforts to fight deforestation. Lasha Kvantaliani, co-founder of Treepex, said its platform provides an alternative to having a “verbal argument” about the environment in a statement according to a press release.

“In order to fight back and compensate for the damage a single ignorant opinion can cause, we created a platform that gives ‘a green fighter’ the possibility to skip ‘verbal argument’ and immediately take action,” Mr Kvantaliani said. “All this with humour, of course.”