OPINION: A timber town calls out the state’s climate credit double standard
OPINION: A timber town calls out the state’s climate credit double standard
OPINION: A timber town calls out the state’s climate credit double standard
Exceprts from the op/ed:
The Southeast Alaska community of Whale Pass opposes a 292-acre sale of old-growth forest and instead prefers the economic benefits of tourism and carbon credits.
Despite the fact that logging will almost certainly make less money and is less than 1% of the economy of Southeast while tourism provides 27%, the state of Alaska says it’s in the state’s best interest to pursue an old-growth timber sale right next to Whale Pass. This is like turning down a multimillion-dollar offer on your home to sell it for a few hundred thousand bucks.
Furthermore, the DNR commissioner explained in a letter to the Whale Pass City Council that “while carbon offset projects will open exciting new sources of revenue for the State of Alaska once the program is up and running, projects on state land are expected to operate in parallel with timber harvests — not take the place of them.” This statement ignores the fact that carbon offsets are only worth money if you are making a real tradeoff to conserve the carbon instead of logging it.
Somehow, making a political point against the Biden administration is more important than maintaining any semblance of credibility for actualizing revenue from the newly created carbon offset program, supporting tourism, the economic sector that is thriving, allowing the community most impacted by the decision to generate immediate revenue and lead the way on carbon credits, and addressing landslide concerns.
Doesn’t the timber need to be removed and persevered for it to actually sequester any significant carbon? Otherwise surly most of it will just re enter the atmosphere during the next fire.
Live trees take carbon dioxide out of the air. By letting them live, you are keeping the current balance. If you cut them down, you've made a negative. When trees die, some of their sequestered carbon goes back into the air as they decompose, but a good quantity becomes soil, enhancing the environment for more growth.
If you want to reduce atmospheric carbon, create a new forest with a variety of trees (not a mono-culture). Alternately, you COULD try to cut down and sequester the biomass of existing trees, but good luck getting that done without the fossil fuel emissions from the job outweighing what you've sequestered.
But most of the wood from cuting down the tree is sequestered in the houses, furniture, etc that it makes. From my understanding the main problem with forestry as carbon sequessequestration is that it can’t be scaled to the point of having much of an impact, becuse there’s only so much area that was the climate and water to grow trees in the first place.