Here's one from the former VP of Research at Greenpeace: Don't want CO2? Then cut old growth forests!
...As Greenpeace expanded to become the world’s largest international environmental organization, Moore’s star steadily rose and he eventually became vice president of research. Then he did something even more unexpected than joining the organization in the first place. He packed up and quit. “Fifteen years in the ecotrenches had worn me out,” he says. But his exit wasn’t just about fatigue. In the months before his departure, Moore had begun talking heresy. “The environmental movement had gone astray and lost its perspective on forests,” Moore says. “Rather than cutting fewer trees and using less wood, we should be growing more trees and using more wood.” Greenpeace branded him an eco-Judas.
Now comes the biggest surprise of all. Recently published research suggests that Moore is right. Cutting down old trees could be the best way to thwart global warming.
Carbon Sinks
To understand the beneficial effects of chain saws you will need to dig deep into your memory bank, to a lesson you probably learned in grammar school. Animals inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. Plants do the reverse. They take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen. The carbon stays behind. In trees, we recognize it as wood.
Animals, of course, aren’t the only carbon dioxide producers. When anything containing carbon undergoes combustion in open air, carbon dioxide is produced as a byproduct. Since the start of the industrial revolution, burning wood, coal and petroleum has measurably increased atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide. This isn’t an opinion. It is scientific fact. During this time, global temperatures also have risen. Again, this is an undisputed scientific fact. The physical process that links increasing carbon dioxide with our atmosphere’s rising temperatures is the so-called “greenhouse effect.” Carbon dioxide blocks infrared-frequency energy, and in so doing acts like the glass in a greenhouse. The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the less Earth’s heat escapes into space at night. Putting together these pieces, it doesn’t take a leap of imagination to see how trees can be used to remove carbon dioxide buildup.
“One of the most contentious debates during the recent climate talks centered on the possible use of forests as credits toward reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide,” says Alison Gillespie of The Ecological Society of America (TESA). Environmentalists often point to the carbon dioxide uptake of trees to support the need to preserve old forests. At the same time, they argue that planting new stocks in giant plantations isn’t a good solution because trees need more nutrients than the soil can provide. Now comes a study in a recent issue of the TESA scientific journal, Ecology, that offers a simple and inexpensive solution to the nutrient problem: Plant trees that naturally fertilize the soil.
Like all plants, trees need nitrogen. This gas makes up most of the air we breathe, but in its chemical form it isn’t useful to plants. First it needs to be “fixed,” converted into a form that can be taken up by plants. Jason Kayne of Colorado State University says nitrogen deficiencies could be easily overcome by planting forests with species including Albizia falcataria, a type of mimosa tree that adds missing nitrogen compounds to the soil. The trees themselves don’t do this work. It is done by soil bacteria that take up residence in tree roots. The bacteria turn nitrogen into ammonia, a compound that fertilizes the tree.
In his paper in Ecology, Kayne reported on experiments he and his colleagues conducted on a former sugar cane plantation in Hawaii. Instead of planting it with only a single species of eucalyptus trees, as is the normal forestry practice, he added mimosas. Carbon uptake of the eucalyptus trees doubled.
A New Attitude
Getting trees to remove more carbon dioxide is only half the battle, which brings us back to Moore. The former Greenpeace executive is now campaigning to get manufacturers that use plastic parts and the chemical industry to think differently about trees and treat them as a basic, multipurpose resource, like petroleum.
“Forestry is the most sustainable of all the primary industries that provide us with energy and materials,” says Moore, who has detailed his ideas in a book titled Green Spirit: Trees Are The Answer. “The cellulose that makes up 50 percent of wood is used in rayon and acetate as well as cellophane and explosives,” he says. “But it is the lignin portion that makes up the other 50 percent of wood that has the most potential for new materials. Lignin could readily form the basis for a chemical industry in the same way that petroleum does today.”
Selling the science of his idea is the easy part. Getting the public to accept the greater use of forests and forest products is proving more difficult. The sticking point is the word “use.” For trees to be truly effective at removing carbon dioxide, they will need to be cut down on a regular basis and their carbon content converted into products. This means cutting down some of the most majestic stands of old-growth timber, because these trees are less efficient at removing carbon dioxide than younger trees. As a result, Moore’s hardest task is changing public perception of forests, to see clear-cut lands not as ugly, but as a beautiful environmental solution. “The time scale of forest growth extends beyond the human lifetime,” says Moore. “That’s difficult to appreciate in a world of 30-second news clips.”...
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