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.
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!