permaculture

[Rain Tenaqiya <raincascadia@yahoo.com>]

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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