According to the 24 Dec. article, “Trees sold for their carbon,” the Jefferson Land Trust took $8,000 from Shorebank Enterprise Cascadia to “offset” SEC’s three-year “carbon footprint.” JLT will now spare specific trees from harvest for 100 years while these trees “lock in” carbon they remove from the air. This article gives public “feel good” credibility to these two organizations … but the science is goofy.
Please ask JLT to explain the benefits of this transaction. There are none! Will there be any net change in the number of trees being sold for timber? Any change in demand for lumber? What if these trees burn? What happens after 100 years? What is done with the $8,000? This scheme is pure balderdash!
The carbon banking idea (as it involves trees) is based on an inappropriate time perspective of nature’s carbon cycle. One hundred years of carbon sequestration is of absolutely no consequence in the context of climate change. Even the entire time required for the growth and decomposition cycle of a tree (perhaps 1,000 years) is of little consequence. The carbon that trees capture while living is quickly released via decomposition. Trees are not the solution to climate change.
Man’s only opportunities to do anything about “greenhouse gases” are to significantly reduce the size of the human population and to eliminate the use of fossil fuels. Neither of these is practical nor would the impact of even these drastic actions be measureable. Our path, despite the Copenhagen hugfest, will be to minimize pollution as we shape civilization to accommodate climate change. Successful species accommodate. Polar bears may join the millions of extinct species that did not. Millions of new species have evolved over time as well. Man was one of them; not really so long ago at that! Another pesky “inconvenient truth!”
John Baker
Mukilteo
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