17 August 19
FOCUS: Bill McKibben | Don't Burn Trees to Fight Climate Change - Let Them Grow
Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
McKibben writes: "Of all the solutions to climate change, ones that involve trees make people the happiest. Earlier this year, when a Swiss study announced that planting 1.2 trillion trees might cancel out a decade's worth of carbon emissions, people swooned (at least on Twitter)."
Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
McKibben writes: "Of all the solutions to climate change, ones that involve trees make people the happiest. Earlier this year, when a Swiss study announced that planting 1.2 trillion trees might cancel out a decade's worth of carbon emissions, people swooned (at least on Twitter)."
EXCERPT:
“You can get to some pretty big numbers this way,” Moomaw added. “The Woods Hole Research Center found that, if we let secondary forests grow around the world, they would sequester 2.8 billion tons of carbon a year, which is about sixty per cent of the gap between what humans produce annually and what natural systems currently soak up. Instead, we’re increasingly cutting them down to burn for fuel.” Earlier this year, Moomaw helped draft a letter to the European Parliament which made these points, and it was signed by nearly eight hundred scientists, mostly from Europe and North America. So far, the scientists have received no reply; perhaps they should have also sent an ice bucket.
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