Tom's Turn: Notes from our Senior Editor

Breathing Carbon

July 19, 2007

I just received an oddly touching piece of mail that got me thinking. It's from an outfit called Be Green. It announced that an unnamed someone has arranged for a ponderosa pine to be planted "on [my] behalf" to combat global climate change.

The announcement comes with a thick, leaf-shaped piece of what looks like handmade paper, impregnated with seeds. You soak the leaf overnight, then plant it, and pretty soon you have a bunch of organic cilantro to strew over your free-range omelet (the cilantro is organic only if you decline to dose it with bug spray or synthetic fertilizer).

A letter explains that my tree will absorb 650 pounds of carbon over its 40-year lifetime, which is roughly the amount the average automobile emits every time it travels 740 miles. My tree is to be planted in the Kootenai National Forest in Montana, which was hit hard by fire in 2000.

Let's see. Let's guess we have around 300 million motor vehicles in this country that are driven something like 12,000 miles a year, each. That's about 36 billion miles total. If we're going to count on trees to get us out of this mess, it's going to take an awful lot of them to do the job. By my back-of-the-envelope calculation, to absorb 36 billion miles-worth of carbon, one would need to plant something like 20 billion trees a year. That's quite a few trees. If they let the trees live longer than 40 years before turning them into lumber or pulp, that would help. A little.

(Why, one must wonder meanwhile, has the Forest Service let seven years go by without replanting the Kootenai itself?)

This is, of course, a pitch for publicity. They want me to tell you that you can have a tree planted in someone's name for a mere $9.95. Money left over after the tree has been planted will be invested in one of several green energy projects.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for anything that helps slow and eventually reverse global warming, and you can bet that there are thousands of people dreaming up ways to help that can also earn them a buck. More power to them. Just don't think that spending ten bucks to have a tree planted for a friend is going to do the trick.

And one must also wonder why they've chosen Montana in light of a recent study that finds that northern hemisphere trees soak up far less carbon than trees in the tropics. They ought to be planting in Brazil.

And in the long run what happens? Those billions of trees won't live forever. When they eventually burn or decay, they'll release their stored carbon. Then what?

Tom Turner, Senior Editor
yourturn@earthjustice.org