Thread: Need Carbon Neutral Trees Suitable for Firewood/Turning?

Originally Posted by Waldo

Which was why I made my first post in here. The tree grew, it took in CO2, but if at the end of it's life cycle it was burnt - then you're still releasing CO2 into the atmosphere.

Lets see if we can make it simpler: Situation a) carbon goes into plant, carbon is stored 'n' years (sequestered) within tree, tree is harvested (new tree is planted and starts capturing/ sequestering), same amount of carbon released when burnt = carbon neutral. Situation b) carbon goes into plants, plants are buried in large volumes + heat pressure + time (millions of years), forms fossil fuels, man releases carbon from them not at the same rate as sequestered, but within 200 years or so = current problem and most definitely not carbon neutral.

Originally Posted by Waldo

We had the K2K bug (which a bloke I knew took his family up into a commune with his followers at the back of Dungog, NSW because he was scared of what could happen) and now we have Carbon Trading. Not dismissing any endeavours of anyone, just

I assume you mean the Y2K problem. Contrary to the urban myth that it was a myth and a beat-up the way the potential (ie: possible) negative consequences of the Y@K issue was dealt with is a good example of what can be done when a problem is recognised then worked on over a number of years by many people - ie: few if any negative consequences.

Fearful people and armegeddonists will always find reason to run and hide when their ignorance drives their emotions into action, but although there were media stories of potential negatives that were gross exaggerations, mostly what happened was that computer software all over the world was altered over more than ten years to make sure that there were no consequences of significance. And it worked! Laypeople who did not understand the issue might have been annoyed because 'nothing happened', but that was the intended and positive result.

No doubt some people and companies were told porkies and were ripped off, no doubt some carpetbaggers made a killing, but the problem was really those who were industry knew what needed to be done, action was taken to get it done - and it worked. There was no grand world-wide conspiracy on Y2K, but rather world-wide co-operative effort to identify a problem and fix it.

Just like climate change really - the issue is not so much who caused, but looking at the science that tells us what is happening, looking at the science that tells us what can be done to mitigate negative affects and acting on the evidence that points us in a sustainable direction. Warming or not there are facts we know:
a) the Earth is a finite closed-loop system - the original terrarium albeit a large one;
b) we have limited resources and all we do to our air, our soil and our water is recirculated whether we like it or not;
c) so unless we want to poison and ruin our air, water and soils (on which we all depend to survive) we have no choice but to eventually move to understand that closed-loop and to live appropriately to an organism inside a terrarium;
d) that means we move as fast as possible to cease doing what we know is not sustainable (whether than be oil running out in 50 or more years or coal running out in 300) and doing what we know is;
e) we are like the frog in the saucepan of cold water on the stove, if we are smart enough we will realise that we need to jump out before the water gets so hot we no longer can; and
f) it is actually economically smarter to do this sooner than later (unless you are one of the small group of very rich people who own fossil fuel companies).

This does not mean returning to some supposed 'golden age' of superior agrarian self-sustaining lifestyle, but rather a re-think of the way we have started to do things mostly in only the last 30 or 40 years. If we want to retain those changes then we need to do so in smarter ways, by better design, use of new technologies, placing a real cost on our energy uses, converting to a solar economy (wind, sun, ocean, geothermal - all are driven by the sun), placing a real value on what we currently account for as 'externalities' (eg: forests that we do not cut-down) and so on. Even simpler things too - like Billy Connolly's comment on Scotland's bad weather "No such things as bad weather - only wrong clothes!".