- cross-posted to:
- treehuggers@slrpnk.net
Exceprts from the op/ed:
The Southeast Alaska community of Whale Pass opposes a 292-acre sale of old-growth forest and instead prefers the economic benefits of tourism and carbon credits.
Despite the fact that logging will almost certainly make less money and is less than 1% of the economy of Southeast while tourism provides 27%, the state of Alaska says it’s in the state’s best interest to pursue an old-growth timber sale right next to Whale Pass. This is like turning down a multimillion-dollar offer on your home to sell it for a few hundred thousand bucks.
Furthermore, the DNR commissioner explained in a letter to the Whale Pass City Council that “while carbon offset projects will open exciting new sources of revenue for the State of Alaska once the program is up and running, projects on state land are expected to operate in parallel with timber harvests — not take the place of them.” This statement ignores the fact that carbon offsets are only worth money if you are making a real tradeoff to conserve the carbon instead of logging it.
Somehow, making a political point against the Biden administration is more important than maintaining any semblance of credibility for actualizing revenue from the newly created carbon offset program, supporting tourism, the economic sector that is thriving, allowing the community most impacted by the decision to generate immediate revenue and lead the way on carbon credits, and addressing landslide concerns.
But most of the wood from cuting down the tree is sequestered in the houses, furniture, etc that it makes. From my understanding the main problem with forestry as carbon sequessequestration is that it can’t be scaled to the point of having much of an impact, becuse there’s only so much area that was the climate and water to grow trees in the first place.
Where did you hear that? When you cut down the tree to build that house, you’ve created a negative. No amount of storing will make up for the fact that the tree is not there to take carbon out of the air.
Further, it typically uses up a LOT of fossil fuel to get that tree into a house. Most of the tree is dumped as waste. They strip off all the leaves and branches so there is only the trunk to transport. Maybe they save the trunk’s bark as mulch, but then it is generally treated with chemicals. Healthy soil IS carbon sequestration, but it is even better when there are plants (carbon capture systems) living in it. Bark mulch is used to make sure plants don’t grow where they otherwise would. After that, the milled scraps may be turned into particle board or the like with a mix of chemicals and glues. None of this is particularly good sequestration because a lot of fuel has gone into a bulky short-term ‘solution’ that is unlikely to last more than a hundred years or so. We want solutions that last thousands of years.
Lastly, there are lots of places that could have trees, but we’ve already removed them. Ever here the myth about a squirrel being able to move tree-to-tree from the Atlantic to the Mississippi without touching the ground? It probably wasn’t entirely true – not in a straight line, at any rate – but it was probably close to true. Even if an area doesn’t get much rain, consider how the Ascension Island experiment showed that trees can increase the water supply (nat geo also covered this). Pit planting also increases tree range and water availability. Also, note that, “Mixed Forests Store 70% More Carbon Than Monoculture Forests” (see also). The Royal Society has a good piece on the co-benefits for carbon storage and biodiversity.
In conclusion, note that our natural gas and petroleum come from previously sequestered carbon. Now we’re releasing it all at once and simultaneously removing the natural buffer that keeps our planet at temperatures we like. The world will continue no matter what we do, but if we want to keep it livable for humans, we have to stop breaking the environment that supports us.
I looked though your sources, but couldn’t find any figures for how much of the carbon taken in by trees actually makes it deep underground, and therefore out of the carbon cycle. Trees take carbon out of the air and bind it to make the sugars and cellulose that they build with. When they die and are left the vast majority of that carbon is consumed by bacteria which of course put it back into the atmosphere to live. If the carbon does not make it deep underground never to be touched by a living organism again than it is only been temporarily removed for as long as the forest has been there.
60 percent of the trees dry mass and therefore carbon is locked up in its truck, and we are pretty good at getting most of that into lumber. The vast majority of this industrys carbon emissions are in transport, which can be reduced or eliminated, not processing.
Moreover, compared to the alternative of maintaining the forest for thousands of years while also building out of concrete, which takes the production of a nearly equal amount of co2 from the chemical reaction needed to make the material, you are going to see far more carbon entering the atmosphere.
The two things to compare are how much carbon is taken out of the carbon cycle, and across the whole system has that come at the cost of adding more carbon elsewhere.
It took hundreds of millions of years for the forests to sequester the carbon that made up that oil and gas the first time, far more if we are talking about coal, and we’ve released most of them in the last fifty.
If you are talking about the carbon that is actively tied up in a forests carbon cycle, then yes that is more carbon, but that forest needs to be maintained forever for that carbon to truly be gone. You mentioned the forests of the US eastern seaboard, but thouse forests are artificial, or at least have been for thousands of years. You’ve mentioned sources that talk about mixed forests, and thanks to the changes in most environments thouse forests have to be actively managed to keep invasive species out.
Trees take carbon from the air and use it to build. If we can use it to not just build but take the place of carbon aswell, it seems silly not to.
I think we’re just looking at this from different directions. It sounds like you are looking for a way for humans to dramatically reduce atmospheric CO2 – such as with stuff like this. MY feeling is that man-made carbon emissions need to be stopped/captured before entering the atmosphere – at the smokestack or improbably the tailpipe or such – which would require regulations, and no one is going to agree to that until it is too late. Until then, my hope for the world is we stop breaking the stuff that works.
I’m glad you read the squirrel piece that explains that natives managed the Eastern U.S. forests before whites arrived, but I don’t think it is fair to equate that sort of maintenance with what is typically meant today. Forests will maintain themselves, even with invasive species. Ecosystems will change and adapt. The don’t need us. When the last human is dead, I suspect forests will recover (though they may be very different to deal with the changes we’ve made to the environment). The only reason we might need to ‘maintain’ them is because we are messing with them and/or living so close that we care when they burn. If we leave their water supply alone and don’t build near them, they will slowly accumulate carbon for free. Even when they do burn, they leave ash behind, which has a lot of carbon (both organic and inorganic, with percentages varying depending on the fire). Ash weighs almost nothing when compared to the weight of trees, but it is there, as is any carbon-rich root systems isolated from fire by a lack of oxygen. Very slowly, carbon gets stored. It is free. Don’t mess with it.
Okay, so that is great for the long haul but doesn’t help fix all the recent damage. How do we fix the problem faster? I think it will either have to be tech or the solution proposed by comedian Bill Burr :
Of course reducing emissions is the only option, any capture method is going to be insufficient by orders of magnitude. But it’s still something, and unless a forest can actively sequester more carbon from the carbon cycle through deep roots and unconsumed ash than can be by using the lumber and the carbon that the lumber replaced, than it is a worse option where the latter is possible.
We’ve changed the climate to the point where many species of trees can no longer healthily survive where the once did. Now there stressed and vulnerable to blight, which means that if we want it keep the forest there we need to at the very least cull the infected trees, which takes time and effort. While stepping back and letting nature and invasive species thrive may be low effort, it also means a massive loss of biodiversity as local species and the natural ecology are threatened out competed and exterminated, as you noted, this leads to a massive reduction in the forests ability to sink carbon compared to a managed multiculture plantation. While evolution may eventually create new well developed ecosystems, evolution is a process that takes tens to hundreds of thousands of years to start, and that’s a long time to wait to try and get out of a little work.
I also find the population argument silly. There is no inherent need for us to produce vast quantities of carbon, no magic corollary between economic plenty and carbon pollution. Though a combination of wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear we can produce far more carbon neutral energy than we need, and amazingly we can even do it at a large economic net gain compared to fossil energy. With enough energy we can do nearly anything, from transport to pulling carbon from the air, though reducing emission is always going to be significantly better of course.
The problem is that there is a large amount of capital tied to the fossil oligarchy, and it has no intention of going down without a fight. A major part of the way they’ve chosen to fight is to make as much of the focus on individual action as they can. It’s why the term carbon footprint was created by an oil company’s add campaign, becuse they know it won’t work and it keeps people from doing things like talking about stricter regulations on emissions and forcing the companies that can make a significant impact to do so.
We have the food, we can make more water and heat than we could ever need, it’s just nowhere near evenly distributed.
Since the climate has changed and will continue to do so, I’d rather we let new species of everything repopulate areas that won’t support historical inhabitants, with things generally moving towards the poles – but you are 100% right about the high risk of a loss in diversity.
Well, yeah, comedian and all. The only point there was it would cut emissions immediately instead of all the time and work needed to build a different infrastructure.
I totally agree!