Climate alarmists demand that we fill the land with forests in order to combat global warming. That is not a sustainable policy.
Trees only extract carbon dioxide while they are growing strongly. Once the forest is choc-a-bloc with mature trees, there is no net removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Trees, branches and leaves fall and decay, others replace them.
For carbon-extraction forestry to be sustainable, the trees must be logged, milled and put into long-term storage by conversion into poles and posts, beams and girders, floors and furniture, slabs and sleepers. These will lock up the carbon for decades, even hundreds of years, by which time the climate will have moved on naturally and the green hysteria will be shrieking about something else.
With good forest management, loggers and millers will rejuvenate the forest, produce valuable timber products and restore our once-great forestry industry – creating a real green industry out of a green subsidy industry.
Moreover, if forests are planted around coal-burning power stations, the trees will grow faster in the plant-friendly carbon dioxide being produced by the power plant.
Using sawmills to lock-up carbon is much more sensible than the zero-benefit high-cost schemes to pump carbon dioxide underground.
Viv Forbes
Rosewood
