If carried out correctly - these methods are "worth
doing" - but NOT for the purpose of ameliorating the effects of
profligate carbon dioxide production - they are NOT a cure.
You should also be aware than carbon offsetting schemes
are always someone's business idea, and this aspect can sometimes be
more important than any aspect of "Saving the Planet".
Tree planting - reforestation
Of
these methods, rather surprisingly, reforestation is the most
controversial. It is the one that seems the easiest, straightforward and
should be the most effective, but it is also the one that can be carried
out in such a way as to actually be harmful rather than useful.
Deforestation has been a feature of human
civilizations right from the earliest days when we first realised there
were benefits from cutting down trees - wood to use as fuel, as a
building material and for a million and one other uses. Open land rather
than forest was good for hunting some animals and then later on it was a
way of getting more land for farming.
Planting trees is a good and useful thing to do almost
anywhere in the world. It helps stop soil erosion, has an effect on
climate stabilization on a local and global scale, provides wood for
fuel and building and a habitat for wildlife.
Appropriate tree
planting is always a good thing.
All too often though, the trees that are planted are a
monoculture - just one kind of tree - over a large area. Even worse,
sometimes these are fast-growing non-native trees and the result is a
"green desert" that can actually degrade the soil.
To be useful, trees planted would have to be
maintained in perpetuity (forever), if they were felled and used at
any time, the carbon dioxide they have sequested would simply be
released back into the atmosphere and it may as well never have happened
in the first place. In the worst cases, tree planting carbon-offset
schemes are just ways of getting some subsidized forestry planting for
future use, they can be a way of getting someone else to pay to plant
trees that would have been planted anyway.
Renewable Energy
Helping to fund these schemes will not deal with any
carbon dioxide you have already emitted. Instead of both of us p**sing
in the well, I do it anyway and pay you not to.
However, it can be of increasing value for the future
as such schemes can potentially last indefinitely and they result in NO
further carbon dioxide being emitted over what is sustainable (such as
biomass energy where the emitted carbon dioxide is used by the next
crop).
The thing with a lot of this stuff is that we just
don't really know where it's all going and investing in renewable energy
is the place where it can possibly make the biggest difference in the
longer term.
Energy Efficiency
Doesn't result in any reduction of carbon dioxide, but
helps other people (in developing countries) to act to reduce their
carbon dioxide output. Energy efficient light bulbs are cheaper in the
long run however and so are efficient wood burning stoves, so it's more
to do with poverty than global warming.
It's not
going to stop global warming and is currently as unsustainable as a long
term approach. However it is like the rabbit-caught-in-the-headlights
being able to slow the car down so it has longer to deal with the time
when it's really close when it may have thought about getting out of the
way or otherwise avoid what was previously inevitable.
Almost anything you do involving
transportation, or other energy use such as heating, cooling, lighting,
manufacture of almost any kind of goods (that is by your buying them, not
making them yourself) results in the production of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere. This is by the burning of a fossil fuel - gas, oil or coal to
release the energy (often to generate electricity). So carbon (in the form
of carbon dioxide) is put into the atmosphere that wouldn't have been there
if you hadn't travelled, heated, refrigerated or whatever it was you did.
Now
that will be a controversial answer! So let me explain a little more...
|
