Emissions policy update

New studies indicate we can't count on trees to effectively absorb extra greenhouse gases. Read "Sink hopes sink" from Nature Science Update. It weakens the argument of some policy-makers that we should be able to compensate for increased gas emissions by planting more forests.

This was the very argument the United States tried to use last fall in international talks aimed at combatting global warming. The US wanted to include carbon dioxide soaked up by its forests in its targeted cuts to emissions. It sounds like a speculative attempt at avoiding responsibility. At least that's what the EU thought, and rejected US proposals. The summit broke down in disarray and disaster, with everyone pointing fingers and no one making any commitments.

Propaganda alert

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency web site on global warming says: "At the global level, countries around the world have expressed a firm commitment to strengthening international responses to the risks of climate change. The U.S. is working to strengthen international action and broaden participation under the auspices of the Framework Convention on Climate Change." Strengthen? Of course, this is one of those propaganda websites your mother forgot to warn you about.

Here are a couple more informative, less self-serving websites about global warming:

1. Global Warming: The Cooler Heads Coalition: a wide range of articles on the the scientific, political and economic aspects.
2. The New Scientist: global warming: latest news on this issue.

The US policy reflects an age-old, flawed notion that we can manipulate nature to suit our purposes. It's the same thinking which led to the massive and widespread use of pesticides in an attempt to wipe out insects during the two decades following World War II. When Rachel Carson attacked this irresponsible practice in Silent Spring, Robert White Stevens defended it with this statement: "The crux, the fulcrum over which the argument chiefly rests, is that Miss Carson maintains that the balance of nature is a major force in the survival of man, whereas the modern chemist, the modern biologist and scientist, believes that man is steadily controlling nature."

How quaint

In his introduction to Carson's book, Vice President Al Gore said Stevens' statements "now sound not only arrogant but as quaint as the flat-earth theory."

Gore may think so, but he is overlooking the powerful persistence of human ignorance, which still manages to manifest itself in policy. The idea that we can keep emitting gases and manage our atmosphere by planting more trees, a concept which brought down the emissions talks, was perpetrated during the Clinton-Gore Administration.