Could the oncler realistically cut down all those trees? script and voice recording (Patreon)

We’ve all been there, we remember a movie we haven’t watched in like 10 years, remember one detail from the movie that may or may not be plausible and then spend the next 4 hours attempting to answer a question that nobody cares about. So, today I shall attempt to answer a simple question about the 2012 movie, The Lorax.

Could the Oncler realistically cut down all those trees? well,

Let’s say the surrounding thneed forest is the size of texas. This would mean a square kilometer area of 431. Now, looking at images of the thneed forest before it’s destruction, we can estimate about 80% coverage. Canada is a close estimate of trees per sq kilometer in this instance. So, there are 30,000 trees per sq kilometer in canada, extrapolate that data to our 431 sq kilometer area and we get 12,930,000 thneed trees. Honestly, that’s a much smaller number than I expected. 

Now, let’s get to the machinery used. For simplicity's sake, we’ll be saying that for the entire duration of the destruction of this forest, the Onceler used his choppy chop mobile which can be seen in this scene from the “How Bad Can I Be?” song. I counted it to cut down about 20 trees per second. If, from the moment he set foot in the forest, the Onceler used the CCM (choppy chop mobile) to cut down all of the trees (without rest mind you) it would take him 7.5 days. He’d be cutting down 1,728,000 trees per day.

According to the movie's timeline, the Onceler began chopping trees 5 years ago at the end of “How Bad Can I Be?” 

So, with this knowledge, how many trees would the forest have had for the Onceler to possibly take 5 years to cut them all down? Well, let’s start by lowering our original number to something more reasonable by assuming normal working hours (40 hours a week). We get 2,880,000 trees per week, or roughly 576,000 trees per day (assuming 5 day work week). We never see any workers besides his family so we can assume that he only has about 7 of these CCMs running per day. So, 2,880,000 multiplied by 7 brings up to 20,160,000 per week (or 4,032,000 per day). Taking this and multiplying it by 52 (for the amount of weeks in a year) is 1,048,320,000 per year and finally multiplied by 5 gives us our grand total of 5,241,600,000 trees in this one forest. To put this into perspective, there are an estimated 288 billion trees in the US. 

For the Onceler to tear down the entire US’s trees would take roughly 275 years. It’s also estimated that there are 3 trillion trees on earth (all of these numbers according to 8BillionTrees.com). So it would take the Onceler 2,862 years to destroy the entire planet’s population of trees.

Keep in mind that we still have plenty of oxygen after 4 billion trees died due to chestnut disease (according to Sam O’Nella Academy). So the Onceler destroying this single forest wouldn’t’ve even put that much of a strain on our breathing capabilities. So, if we assume every tree on earth had to die for this megalomaniac to destroy the oxygen production to the point of people needing to buy bottled air to survive, what number of workers are we looking at for this to happen within 5 years?

Roughly 3,999 workers. Which is a surprisingly low number. Anyways, this was a dumb video. I, uh, guess I’ll see all you guys in the next one, peace.