Pro-corporate right wing politicians get itchy when they see an old growth forest. In their view, all that wood is just an economic resource going unused. People don’t like to hear about cutting down the world’s biggest and oldest trees simply for profit, however, and so these politicians have come up with an environmental veneer for their plans to allow huge areas of old growth forest to be destroyed.
Not cutting down old forests makes global warming worse, they say. Mature forests, they claim, don’t pull as much carbon dioxide out of the air as young forests. So, if you want to protect the environment, you need to allow big corporations to cut down old growth forests and replace them with tree farms of little seedlings.
Could it be true? Could old growth forests be partly to blame for accelerating global warming? Recent research says no.
A cooperative study by the University of Washington and the U.S. Forest Service indicates that big, old trees still grow and act as carbon sinks, in spite of what right wing politicians and their affiliated think tanks have claimed. Old growth forests don’t promote global warming. They help fight it.
(Source: Seattle Times, November 27, 2007)
i heard this b/s on the radio and almost went off the road screaming at the radio! What drivel!! You know, we’re more and more having to listen to completely wrong, anti-science language being twisted into policy by these “think-tanks” and spin-meisters. This is why i’m so sure we’re about doomed to extinction as a species – these people peddle this crap via the right-wing owned media to the masses who, dumbed down as they are (living in the U.S. in these times), don’t know the difference and support whatever seems plausible on the surface.
These namby-pamby environmentalists are so stupid.
“Do no harm,” blah blah blah.
Answer me this one, Einstein:
How is the environment supposed to recover if we don’t damage it in the first place?
It’s just like doctors. Doctors SAY they want us to heal. But they’re completely unwilling to do what it takes for us to heal.
Take a regular leg, for example. Is it healing? No. It’s pretty much just staying the way it is. But a BROKEN leg can heal in a matter of weeks.
If doctors really wanted us to heal, they should obviously break our legs.
And if environmentalists really wanted the environment to recover, they should obviously cut down old growth forests.
It makes perfect sense!
swell
hilarious!