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Harry Rosenfeld: Save a tree, save a planet

Nature is ready to help U.S. to combat global warming.

By HARRY ROSENFELD Albany Times Union, Albany Times Union

Last update: July 25, 2009 - 9:34 PM

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Twenty years ago, President George H.W. Bush said "Every tree is a compact between generations."

At the time, he was taking issue with the man he succeeded in the White House, the icon of the GOP, Ronald Reagan, who famously misread science in denouncing trees as an environmental threat. Reagan's press secretary joked about "killer trees."

Fast forward to George W. Bush, who in the last days of his administration once more managed to distinguish himself from his father. The younger Bush rescinded a reform instituted by President Bill Clinton, and increased logging rights in Oregon's old growth forests. Last week, President Obama's Interior secretary, Ken Salazar, restored the Clinton rules.

The Salazar announcement was a response to environmentalists' concerns to protect the watershed and fisheries, as well as endangered birds. He might well have invoked with equal justice the danger of logging to global warming and the great benefit that derives from preserving long-lived trees.

Cutting down trees results in the release of stored carbon in the form of carbon dioxide, which impacts dangerous climate change. According to tree advocates, an acre of mature trees absorbs the carbon dioxide created by driving 26,000 miles. Trees not only gather in carbon dioxide. In exchange, they exude pure oxygen into the air. Very old trees do this better than more newly planted ones. Planting trees is valuable for many reasons, but it does not do the number on carbon dioxide that old-growth forests do.

According to a study, carbon dioxide isn't only absorbed by the leaves, branches and trunks of trees. Trees also sequester carbon deep in the soil in which they grow. And over hundreds of years, that adds up.

When those trees are logged, all the stored carbon is released again into the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas.

That is why the protection restored to the Oregon forests is a weapon in the fight to diminish global warming. It should also be a signal for wider application of wiser management to what remains of America's and the world's shrinking old-growth forests.

And if reforestation means to replant where older trees have been harvested, then the process of releasing the carbon locked up in the Earth is only accelerated.

Nature stands ready to serve humanity by preserving the environment from self-inflicted abuse. Instead of spewing foul gases into the air, renewable sources of energy are there to be exploited.

European companies are getting together to produce energy through solar power. As their continent is short of deserts, they are looking to develop much-needed clean electricity by setting up solar-power plants in the Sahara desert.

While costly, this is regarded by them as a worthwhile investment that might eventually provide up to 15 percent of Europe's needs and also serve markets in the developing world.

Their venture underlines a natural American advantage. The United States doesn't have to go abroad, it has more than enough deserts to serve as the bountiful supplier of endless sunshine. But at present, the industry is cutting back just when the economic stimulus should be supporting development of this kind of enduring benefit to the nation and climate.

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