![]() ![]() For all intents and purposes, in the short term, wood is just another fossil fuel, and in climate terms the short term is mostly what matters. As an M.I.T. But eventually will be too long-as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made clear last fall, we’re going to break the back of the climate system in the next few decades. Eventually, if the forest regrows, that carbon will be sucked back up. Burning wood to generate electricity expels a big puff of carbon into the atmosphere now. ![]() I hadn’t done the physics.” Once scientists did that work, they fairly quickly figured out the problem. Moomaw, a climate and policy scientist who has published some of the most recent papers on the carbon cycle of forests, told me about the impact of biomass, saying, “back in those days, I thought it could be considered carbon neutral. ![]() In 2009, Middlebury College, where I teach, was lauded for replacing its oil-fired boilers with a small biomass plant I remember how proud the students who first presented the idea to the board of trustees were. And, as that tree grows, it will suck up carbon from the atmosphere-so, in carbon terms, it should be a wash. But the logic went like this: if you cut down a tree, another will grow in its place. Trees, of course, are carbon-when you burn them you release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. As concern about climate change rose during the nineteen-nineties, back when solar power, for instance, cost ten times what it does now, people casting about for alternatives to fossil fuels looked to trees. The story of how this happened begins with good intentions. “Big logging groups are up on Capitol Hill working hard,” Alexandra Wisner, the associate director of the Rachel Carson Council, told me, when I spoke with her recently. And the practice could be on the rise in the United States, where new renewable-energy targets proposed by some Democrats and Republicans in Congress, as well as by the E.P.A., treat “biomass”-fuels derived from plants-as “carbon-neutral,” much to the pleasure of the forestry industry. “Biomass makes up fifty per cent of the renewables mix in the E.U.,” Rita Frost, a campaigner for the Dogwood Alliance, a nonprofit organization based in Asheville, North Carolina, told me. Across much of Europe, countries and utilities are meeting their carbon-reduction targets by importing wood pellets from the southeastern United States and burning them in place of coal: giant ships keep up a steady flow of wood across the Atlantic. So it may surprise you to learn that, at the moment, the main way in which the world employs trees to fight climate change is by cutting them down and burning them. Someone tweeted, “This should be like the ice bucket challenge thing.” Earlier this year, when a Swiss study announced that planting 1.2 trillion trees might cancel out a decade’s worth of carbon emissions, people swooned (at least on Twitter). And last month, when Ethiopian officials announced that twenty-three million of their citizens had planted three hundred and fifty million trees in a single day, the swooning intensified. Of all the solutions to climate change, ones that involve trees make people the happiest. ![]()
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