EU: Our Members need 'increased wood' A Brussels talking-shop operated by the EU has called for greater efforts by European countries to grow more trees, as this would remove carbon from the atmosphere and mitigate global warming. The call was made in a statement headed "European Union should increase the use of wood", issued by the 344-member European Economic …
What we need are leaves rather than trees as it's the leaves that do all the work. The more oak forests the better. Unfortunately they take ages to grow. Most of the fast growing trees do more harm than good as they leech nutrients from the soil or prevent other plants from growing with their shadow.
Where's the icon of the chap with a pipe, beard and sandals?
You don't living trees to sequester carbon. Trees have this wonderful and useful by-product called wood. Making more use of wood as a building material, properly made doors, furniture and in place of CO2-intensive materials like concrete would help. There are limits of course, but the average house could use a lot more wood. Also the w3aste material from wood can be used in a number of other ways such as insulation. Now this can't go on for ever - there are only so many houses and building, so much furniture and so on and eventually it will go to waste and rot down, but it could make a significant one-off contribution.
It's also possible to stop wood rotting down fully and releasing the CO2 by burying it, but it would be much better to use the stuff. A sensible scheme with a representative price for CO2 production (or sequestering in the case of using wood) would (apologies) allow for a lot of automatic market adjustment.
" Of course, once felled or otherwise dead, the carbon eventually returns to the air through decomposition: "
This process can be slowed with the judicious application of creosote. There's a lot of uses for wood in civic spaces -- fences, bollards, signposts, paving material, park benches, planters, decorative cladding for buildings -- and this would not only slow the release of carbon from felled trees, but also reduce the emissions involved in the production of metal, concrete etc alternatives.
However, it might be more expensive and need replacement more often -- are we willing to put our money where our greenie consciences are...?
As Charlie Clark touches on above, the fastest growing trees are pines like spruce etc arguably do more harm than good when planted in places where they wouldn't naturally occur- their needles are indigestible to almost everything and they acidify the soil to reduce competition from other plants, so conifer plantations greatly reduce biodiversity. Plus they aren't native to most of the EU, including the UK.
If this leads to a Europe- wide call to increase native forests it would be a very good thing. Would give the beavers something to eat too. Oh, and reintroduce wolves to Scotland while you're at it; the overpopulation of deer is one of the main hindrances to the regeneration of natural woodlands and machine gunning them from helicopters like the kiwis do will probably never happen here, unfortunately.
saw two years [or so] ago that forest hold in heat... there fore they promote global warming.
and read else where an acre of grass produces more oxygen then an acre of trees .
So I guess the best forest would be an orchard, trees spaced with grass in between .
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