And trees are a very long term carbon sink.
Define "long term". A typical maple, for example, lives for no more than a century, and then dies and *releases the carbon* as it rots. And it only grows slowly, to boot.
Give people property tax breaks for planting new trees and for not cutting down existing trees on their properties.
Don't bother. You're thinking on the wrong scale. Those people who live in the US suburbs or rural areas (so that they have trees and space to plant them), are in the minority.
We release about 40 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere *per year*. That means about 11 billion tons of carbon. A fully adult tree may weigh between one and 10 tons. Even if they were pure carbon (which they aren't), you need billions of trees. Even if every human (from infant on up) in the US planted a tree, that's only around 300 million trees. You are short of the issue by a couple or few factors of ten, there. And that's required *each year* just to catch what we are releasing.
This carbon didn't come out of our current biosphere. You can't really expect the current biosphere to absorb it on human timescales.
Build continental water infrastructure so that whole regions of a continent don't dry out and lose significant portions of their carbon eating plantlife.
Um, where's that water coming from? You need a *source* of fresh, clean water. "Infrastructure" does not make more fresh water fall from the sky. In general, the areas with surplus water and those that are short are thousands of miles apart - infrastructure to gather and move appropriate amounts of water that far would probably be the largest civil engineering effort ever seen on the planet, done several times over for various continents.
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