The "Trillion Trees Act" - Incentives For Old-Growth Logging, Cutting Forest Management Review, More
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Climate scientists and many Democrats on the House committee greeted the proposed tree planting legislation skeptically, saying that the only real climate solution is to cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero as soon as possible. Forests can only be part of a long-term plan to curb global warming after that happens, Yale evolutionary biologist and ecologist Carla Staver testified at the Trillion Trees Act hearing. "Our primary focus must be reducing our dependence on fossil fuels," she said, adding that any plausible attempt to limit global warming within our lifespan must also include forest protection and reforestation. "However, it is also crystal clear that tree planting alone will not fix our ongoing climate emergency," she said.
In February, a coalition of 95 environmental groups sent a letter to Congress opposing the Trillion Trees Act as the "worst kind of greenwashing and a complete distraction from urgently needed reductions in fossil fuel pollution." As written now, the proposed law would count biofuel from forests as carbon neutral, a claim that's contested by climate advocates and scientists, who have said the push to burn wood for fuel actually threatens global climate goals. It would also limit public and judicial reviews of forest management and even create incentives for more logging of existing old-growth forests, which are the best existing carbon sinks, said Alexander Rudee, a forest policy analyst with the World Resources Institute.
"Requiring harvests to increase annually will likely cause a net loss of trees, at least in the short-term, since natural regeneration isn't 100 percent effective, and could increase emissions from burning or decomposing harvest residues," Rudee said.
Magical Thinking
One reason the trillion-tree meme caught on may be that the world wants a simple solution to climate change and is ready for a positive message. Everyone can picture the act of placing a seedling in the ground and helping it grow, a nurturing symbol that must be part of our earliest collective memories as a species. But Colorado State University atmospheric scientist Scott Denning, who studies how carbon moves through the global climate system, said the basic numbers of the trillion trees story don't add up. "No doubt, if you replaced every area of non-forest with forest, you could sequester a lot of carbon," Denning said. "But very little of the world is available for planting a trillion trees. Most of the land that might be suitable is in use for farms and cities. Most of the places that can support forests, like the Amazon, Congo, Indonesia and Southeast Asia, already have forests."
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/26052020/trillion-trees-climate-change
