For Carbon Emissions, A Goal of Less Than Zero

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/26/business/businessspecial2/26negative.html- Hide quoted text -

---------- Forwarded message ----------From: barry levine <levinebar@gmail.com>Date: Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 10:15 AMSubject: For Carbon Emissions, A Goal of Less Than ZeroTo: letters@nytimes.com

To the Editor: If all human activity were carbon-neutral tomorrow, and if we restored all the world's forests to their state before the Industrial revolution, we would still be 200 years in the hole on carbon. After two centuries of pumping carbon from fossil reserves into the atmosphere, we have to take those gigatons of carbon out of circulation. This need not require planting new crops, nor strip-mining the plankton on which so much marine life depends. Currently, photosynthesis fixes carbon at about twenty times that humankind releases it. At steady-state, all of that goes futilely back into the atmosphere through the actions of cellulases in ungulate guts and soil fungi. If we were to intercept five percent of that cellulose (as waste newsprint, or bagasse, or sawdust or lawn clippings, or rice straw) and bury it, we could offset the current human contribution to atmospheric CO2.Barry Levine1142 Brown AveLafayette, CA 94549