If everyone were talking about global warming and actively mitigating it, then I’d be talking about how to end abortion.
Call me weird. I’m a big girl and I’ve been a nonconformist all my life, and have taken ridicule after ridicule.
I stand up for righteousness no matter what. (Okay, not now you’ll call me arrogant, and you’re probably right
.)
Okay. How’s this? One of my favorite activities is forestry. Through professional foresters and publications, as well as old timber guys, I have learned what the most useful trees are in my region for a lot of different purposes. Some produce fruit or nuts upon which wildlife depend. Some produce furniture-quality wood. Some produce railroad ties or crate material. Some produce veneer-quality wood. Some hold the ground in place around washes and streams. Some provide filtered shade for pastures and leaves that break down quickly. Some produce leaves that resist breakdown, but build up deep soil over decades.
There are trees that are noxious. There are trees that will never grow well. There are trees that are diseased. Now, cutting them down and burning the extraneous branches will, indeed, produce CO2. Sure will. But if they’re reduced to charcoal that’s then plowed under or even lightly spread, they are soil-building, water-retaining, soil-enriching and produce ground cover that eats CO2,
But always, always there are the “adolescent” trees, the fast growers, that gobble up carbon like teenage boys eating nachos at a superbowl party.
But in doing it, I use a Bobcat with a tree shear. And it uses a lot of diesel fuel. But I can get more done in a half day than ten guys with chainsaws going all day. And because I clear room for the “fast growers” and also for their carefully selected successor “sprouts”, I create useful lumber and turn a lot of CO2 into stuff that will eventually be put in houses and their carbon will be locked in for decades or longer. Those benefits will last for generations.
So, on balance, should my diesel fuel cost double what it does now? Should it cost so much that nobody can afford to do forest improvement anymore? Should the factories that produce bobcats be shut down?
I also raise cattle on the side. Raising cattle uses very little energy of any kind. The grass eats CO2. That carbon goes into the bodies of the cattle. People eat the cattle and lock it within human beings. Those human beings are eventually buried in the ground, for the most part. (yes, I know, cows belch methane, but so would the wild animals that would inevitably replace them if we got rid of them)
So, on balance, should the little gasoline I use in my pickup (and it sure isn’t much) cost twice or more what it does now? Should it cost so much that I, and others like me, just don’t do it anymore?
I’ll just admit to you that MMGW is not persuasive to me. But let’s lay that aside for a moment. One of the problems I have with GW enthusiasts is that I am not persuaded they know all the uses of fuel that emits CO2. I’m not sure they know what captures it and impounds carbon. I am reasonably certain they don’t know that over this huge land there are a lot of people who are doing a lot of things that actually combine environmental friendliness and utility to mankind, both of which efforts can be thwarted by reducing supplies of energy and increasing their cost.
Now, I’m not looking for government “help” in doing any of that stuff, and receive none. There are thousands upon thousands of people who do things like this on almost a daily basis, though, who could use the help. The people who love the land most and know it best are those who live on it and work on it.
The current government wants (in Obama’s words) to make utility bills “skyrocket”, presumably to curtail emissions, and discourages fuel production. But do you know that the government pays farmers and ranchers exactly nothing to plant trees? It pays farmers to grow corn and to not grow corn. It pays them to raise tobacco, to plant cotton and to not plant cotton. Billions and billions of dollars go to those things. But to plant trees or to introduce charcoal to the soil? No.
So, would it not make more sense, perhaps, if one is going to write to Romney, to encourage, not making energy more expensive or rare, but doing things like planting trees for silvopasture, erosion resistance, charcoal soil building, etc, thinning, culling and clearing, and allow it to be done with reasonably-priced fuel? In the long run, I think we would all be better off for it.
