If we're worried about more CO2 then plant more crops. People are not going to reduce their standard of living. Want to buy some carbon credits?
Are there really that many area's of the world that can grow plants that aren't growing plants?
Though, someone came up with a pretty ingenious method to catch dew in deserts, which then feed tree's, giving them enough time to root down and get some water. That could actually be a good way to reduce desertification, and desertification would be a problem either way.
As another side point, we should probably reintroduce more predators in the Wilderness. Predators kill elk / deer, elk/deer kill sapling tree's and produce more grasslands. More predators = more forests = better carbon sequestering.
Actually the point Scheavo and I have been making over the course of this thread is that people's standard of living actually doesn't need to change drastically in order to protect our environment...
It kind of does. The Western way of life is fundamentally unsustainable. There's no question about that.
There's a lot we could do that wouldn't really effect our lifestyle. Geothermal would reduce energy costs by a lot, and doesn't require us to change jack shit. Same goes for solar panels. Of course, this is just in regards to CO2, our overall nature of consumption is, by definition, unsustainable.