Saturday, August 22, 2009

In Brazil, Paying Farmers to Let the Trees Stand

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/22/science/earth/22degrees.html?ref=todayspaper

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine <levinebar@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 9:38 AM
Subject: re: In Brazil, Paying Farmers to Let the Trees Stand
To: letters@nytimes.com


To the Editor:
As urgent as it is to stop deforestation, we must keep track of what it can accomplish. If the world went "carbon neutral" today, and if we restored the world's forests to their state in 1800, we would still have a greenhouse gas problem. We have spent 200 years pumping carbon from fossil reserves into the atmosphere and oceans, and we need to recapture that carbon. With our current technology, that means letting plants fix carbon from the atmosphere as cellulose, and then sequestering that cellulose in forms that won't get back to the atmosphere, either as biochar or as anthropogenic peat.
Barry Levine

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