After reveling in the incredible beauty of Redwood National Park this week -- through Ken Burns' lovely series on our national parks -- I was pleased to see that the largest private forest owner in 
California is entering the carbon markets with a deal to preserve redwoods and other trees. Sierra Pacific Industries will sell credits for soaking up greenhouse gases to power companies and investors. The deal was reported today by Reuters.
It's encouraging to see that some commercial forest owners are now seeing financial benefits of creating "offsets" to pollution that can be sold to factories and energy companies.
A company spokesperson told Reuters that Sierra Pacific and environmental markets company Equator LLC's Eco Products Fund will develop a 60,000 acre project to sequester 1.5 million tons of carbon dioxide, roughly equivalent to 200,000 to 300,000 cars' pollution in one year.
Sierra Pacific is a third-generation, family owned forest products company.
California's cap-and-trade system will begin in 2012 unless it is pre-empted by a plan at the federal level.
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Senators Barbara Boxer and John Kerry co-sponsored this Senate bill, introduced by Senator Kerry on September 30, 2009. The bill, which has a strong relationship to the House bill H.R. 2454, calls for a greater reduction in the U.S.' greenhouse gas emissions: 20% from 2005 levels of emissions by the year 2020. Both bills are available online.
Cap and Tax is a way to force taxes on poor and middle class Americans that can't afford it.
The financial success of lumber companies is to let the old trees grow, they won;t have to employe anyone but their accountant. Those that use lumber will have to turn to more energy demanding material such as steel and plastic. The tree will eventually fall and decay releasing CO2, but the lumber companies will be green with all the cash they get for not doing anything.
Question is it the older trees or the younger ones that consume the most CO2 and release the most O2? If is the latter then woldn;t the paper companies be greener by harvesing the old and planting million of new trees?
The Nature Conservancy's President and CEO Mark Tercek discusses the important role forests can play in fighting climate change. As part of a soon-to-be-released book by the Center for Business and the Environment at Yale called Carbon Finance: Investing in Forests and Land for Climate Protection, Mark Tercek stresses the need to develop a U.S. federal climate change policy that encourages private sector investment in forest conservation.
http://www.nature.org/pressroom/press/press4209.html
That make sense about trees rigths. I expect the Government to commision a survey as part of the census asking the trees what rights they feel that they are being denied.
I will say to the trees don;t hold back,tell us about any rigths you feel are being violated. I must admit if we can get a single tree to describe a right being violated then we must assume that the current laws and practices aren't violating any of their rights.
"Are forests limitless? " As best I can tell, though this is based on high school science and not what I have heard from Crimatologists or other enivronmental "sceintists", that as long as the sun shines, the rain falls forests can go on forever/they are limitless.
Best guess, that is what is happening in the most environmentally maligned country.
It seems that the areas being deforrested are the countries least vilified by environmentalists.
Wasn;t there something in the all hearalded Kyoto agreement that excempt all of the countries that had the fastest rate of growth in pollution and that the ones where the trees were being consumed fast tehn they were being planted?
Deforestation is clearing Earth's forests on a massive scale, often resulting in damage to the quality of the land. Forests still cover about 30 percent of the world’s land area, but swaths the size of Panama are lost each and every year.
The world’s rain forests could completely vanish in a hundred years at the current rate of deforestation.
Wellllll. That's not exactly cut one plant one, not if we are losing a Panama size chunk of forest yearly and can expect to run out of rain forest in time.
You keep talking about the rain forest being decimated. As best I can tell there are those countries that replant more trees for those that in the their rain forests. Why don't you ever talked about them? Maybe something they are doing might be a model for other countries to use.
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