[permaculture] Are carbon offsets from tree-planting nonsense?
Rain Tenaqiya
raincascadia at yahoo.com
Wed Oct 10 13:47:11 EDT 2007
I have always thought that the practice of carbon offsets for polluters was problematic, for many reasons. But if what Toby was saying about the neglible impact of tree-cutting on global warming is true, then all those carbon offset offers that are starting to pop up everywhere are total bullshit. You can now pay some person in a poor country to plant a bunch of trees to supposedly make up for your greedy little plane trip vacation. It would only cost me $40 a year to pay for all the carbon I currently emit, according to one web site (I think it is part of green.yahoo.com). In any case, trees do sequester carbon dioxide, and that carbon stays locked up until the tree decays. So for land that has space for trees, planting trees could remove some of the carbon dioxide emitted through burning fossil fuels, at least temporarily. Keeping the land in permanent forest would permanently decrease the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. This was part of Robert Hart's hope, in
his effort to promote forest gardens. The question is, how much carbon can be held by trees relative to the amount that is being released from burning fossil fuels. If I'm hearing Toby correctly, the amount of carbon released from burning fossil fuels is so huge, that it totally dwarfs the amount that trees could hold, even if all forests were restored. I do believe this is what a recent report on the destruction of the Amazon rainforest concluded, as well.
Rain
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