I also see plants as something we need to understand better, I think it's cool you looked at all of this. But it spoiled it a little when you mentioned carbon footprint, that is one of the most deceptive, distractive concepts standing in the way of us finally fixing the problem of environmental damage, imho.
Carbon is a symptom, never a cause, it's a response to doing something we need to stop - profit.
I think this misunderstanding is due to our conditioning to think in narrow bands of specialism, your own specialism might be in plants / horticultural things, but you are maybe not an energy specialist, so you understandably don't think much about energy, as ironically, that isn't where you see your next energy coming from (your pay packet!).
Even energy specialists and economists seem to miss that money is energy, this is how most of us obtain the 150 or so Joules per second we each need to live.
Anyhow it's the energy handling property of plants that we need to learn from, by doing what we can to emulate it as a species.
We need to go photosynthetic as a species.
To do that we need to understand how the plant manages to grow to the point it forms leaves, on energy extracted from Earth, and then after it forms leaves, as still an infant, the energy flow through the plant changes in direction, from upwards, via nutrients drawn by the plant doing work against gravity, to downwards by the plant creating nutrients corresponding to the Joules landing on its leaves from the sun, those then flowing effortlessly downwards to Earth with gravity, enriching the Earth from that point onwards in the life of the plant.
This is where we are at as a species, we've lived mostly exclusively until very recently on energy extracted upwards, out of the planet using money like a gearchain, the mechanism of profit driving the work done to extract the energy from the planet.
When money makes money, or when we put out some Joules of work, to receive much more back in the form of money, or in things extracted directly from Earth, the energy gained had to come from somewhere, and the only thing that can sustain putting more energy out than in for any time at all is the planet.
This is an energy rip-off from the planet that we almost never think about.
And yet it is now what is proving existential, this is the fundamental unsustainable deed done.
We should see this as a kind of loan, an enetgy debt, something to be paid back, the same way as every plant pays it back in its lifetime, thousands of times over, by growing to its full adult size, maximising the good it does for the planet.
How far away from that we really are, by prioritising monies spent on bullshit business like war, and even all the science of "Renewable Energy", all of it is for profit, the original energy sin that robs energy from the planet.
This is the real reason we are seeing money steadily devalue whilst solar energy use relentlessky ramps up, money is progressively becoming less reoresentative of the only energy scaling up, whilst all the others, extracted from Earth scale downwards.
Because money as debt or profit literally can't monetise energy given for free, it's physically impossible.
Hence why it looks like the only solution of a truly sustainable existence is to mimic what plants do, we need to issue money in the same way as plants issue nutrients in response to the energy received by its leaves.
Money is our nutrients.
Anyway thanks for the plant loving story, they are incredible things.
BTW I read somewhere they can see too, they respond to shadows sometimes like chameleons, their leave shapes miming the shadows the plants around them form on their leaves.
That is pretty incredible too imho :)