T
ake an environmental group (please!) … any environmental group … and ask what it thinks about global warming. Here’s what the Center for Biological Depravity Diversity has to say about it:
The Earth is heating up, and the overwhelming scientific consensus is that human activity is at the heart of the matter. Fossil fuel combustion — which drives most cars and power plants — is producing a critical mass of greenhouse gases that has already shifted the planet’s climate system into new and dangerous territory.
The Center has built an aggressive and highly successful litigation and lobbying campaign to address global warming. First and foremost, we take direct legal action to protect species and places across the globe that are in the vanguard of climate-change extinction.
Well, that’s sure nice. Here in California, the Center is using the unproven excuse of global warming to file lawsuits that have succeeded in stopping development and water supply projects. But the Center’s global warming initiatives, like all Greenie initiatives, are smashing headlong into their forest initiatives, leaving them stuck in a serious policy conundrum.
Here’s the Center’s statement on its forest initiatives:
Ancient forests are the lungs of the planet, absorbing vast amounts of carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen for life. They’re also our richest repository of biodiversity, home to more than half of all known species worldwide.
But these forests are disappearing fast. Logging, mining, livestock grazing, recreation, urbanization, and other threats have destroyed 80 percent of the world’s ancient forests in the past few centuries. Deforestation is now the number-one cause of species extinction. And in the United States, ancient forests on public lands continue to be liquidated by timber corporations.
To save our country’s most species-rich habitat, the Center seeks to protect and restore forest ecosystems throughout the Southwest, southern California, the Pacific Northwest, the Northeast, and southeastern Alaska. We bring a potent combination of litigation, policy advocacy, and collaboration to protect forest-dependent species, challenge misguided logging proposals, and restore forests degraded by a century of mismanagement.
To “save the forests” the Center routinely sues the U.S. Forest Service challenging any program to actively manage forests through thinning to reduce fire risks. By its own accounting, the Center wins 50 percent of the appeals and 40 percent of the lawsuits against these projects, for a total success rate of 70 percent.
The result is pretty simple to see: Forest fires have become more intense. Greenies blame this on global warming, but they really have their litigation to blame – and now it’s become obvious that their lawsuits have led to massive spikes in greenhouse gas emissions. Thomas Bonnicksen, PhD, has just completed a study for The Forest Foundation that evaluated the emissions from four California wildfires. It has the snappy name, Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Four California Wildfires: Opportunities to Prevent and Prevers Environmental and Climate Impacts.
The study uses a “forest carbon and emissions model” to study the supposed climate impact of four fires that together burned 144,825 acres of forestland. Litigation against forest thinning made the average tree density in these forests 350 trees per acre, while Bonnicksen says 50 to 60 trees per acre better represents a forest in its natural state. This greater density lead to bigger, hotter fires, and more greenhouse gases.
Consequently, when the massive amounts of fuel in these forests burned, they released an estimated 9.5 million tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere just from combustion. That is an average of about 63 tons per acre. However, combustion is only part of the story because dead trees also gradually release CO2 as they decay. CO2 emissions from decay are generally three times greater than emissions from combustion because large quantities of wood and other plant material remain unburned after a forest fire.
Combining combustion and decay emissions, FCEM estimates that these four fires will emit a staggering 38 million tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The fires released one fourth of the gases during combustion, and post-fire decay will release the remainder during the next 100 years, most of it during the next 50 years.
To put these emissions from combustion and decay into perspective, they are equivalent to adding an estimated 7 million more cars onto California’s highways for one year, each spewing tons of greenhouse gases out the tailpipe. Stated another way, this means 50 percent of all cars in California would have to be locked in a garage for one year to make up for the global warming impact of these four wildfires.
Yet Greenie groups with forest programs continue to litigate to stop any thinning program that would reduce these massive carbon impacts. They can’t help themselves. Cutting trees is no different – worse, actually – than cutting down people in their theology, so they continue to fight thinning programs even while they fret about global warming.
On the other hand, they’re good at raising money for both programs, so they get to stuff their coffers full of contributions from their easily manipulated members.
hat-tip: Jim
SCRATCH John Edwards off the list of potential vice-presidential candidates. The former White House contender, who had been hoping to get the nod from Barack Obama, is in the midst of a full-blown sex scandal.
