I love trees. I REALLY love trees. There was a special old sycamore at a nearby park when I was a kid, and when we went for walks my dad would run up ahead and hide, and then do a voice for the tree, so my sister and I could talk to it. His name was 'Neat Tree.' We were not idiots, we knew it was my dad, but we still looked on the tree affectionately as a kind of sentient and benevolent entity. I cried when I saw that the magnolia in front of my childhood home had been cut down. I believe it is morally wrong to remove trees from your property for flippant or merely cosmetic reasons. I have been known to literally embrace trees (though to be honest, it's normally something I have done while not entirely sober).
I just wanted to establish my tree-hugging credentials before making the following statements. I have no problem with the idea of trees being cut down to supply paper in wood products. I think we should use trees for energy whenever possible. In fact, I think that a robust and diverse market for wood and paper products is extraordinarily good for the environment.
How can these attitudes coexist? Read more below.
My previous two diaries on environmental issues addressed contamination, by metals and pesticides. I was going to doing my next diary on mercury, but I decided to change it up and do a diary on an issue of natural resource management, instead of pollution.
Trees are awesome
I am going to expand more on just how fabulous trees are, beyond my very emotional response to them.
Trees provide a huge range of environmental benefits. For one, they act as a kind of natural water storage: they absorb water from the soil when it is wet, and slowly release water after they have processed it. This helps to mitigate the effect of drought, and keeps soil from becoming too dry. This is important; when soil becomes too dry, rain events are more likely to cause flooding or high stormwater flows. Even when high stormwater doesn't cause flooding, it can seriously erode stream channels and wash a greater numbers of chemicals and sediments into waterways. So in general, trees are one of the best water/stormwater management tools we have.
Trees also help to mitigate climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide. Trees are the second largest carbon sink in the world, next to the oceans. Planting trees is the cheapest way to remove carbon from the air. An acre of forest can sequester 4 to 5 tons of carbon each year.
Trees in urban areas can also help to mitigate what is know as the 'heat island effect'. Impervious surfaces like pavement absorbs a lot more heat from the sun that trees or other plants, which reflect more light. This causes cities to be much hotter than rural areas--as much as 22 degrees hotter during the evenings. This causes much greater energy use as air conditioners have to work more to keep interiors cool. It can also raise the temperature in surface water, and causes greater formation of ground-level ozone. Some have even theorized that these heat islands can alter local weather patterns, changing the paths of storm.
Adding nice, reflective trees, which cover a far greater area than other plants and can overhang roads, roofs, and other surfaces, are an excellent way to mitigate heat islands.
So why cut them down!?!?
One of my best friends was appalled when I told her that I thought it was a good thing for there to be a healthy demand for wood products, up to including a demand for wood as biofuels, and was supporting some lobbying groups in their efforts to loosen up the biofuels definition so wood products would qualify as a renewable fuel. This would have an especially large impact in Georgia, my home, where we don't have the opportunities for solar and wind that can be found elsewhere, but we do have tons of trees.
She has a classic mis-structuring of the question. In her mind, she was thinking that the choice was whether or not a tree would be left happily growing on it's hilltop, or chopped down and pelletized. But this isn't the actually choice when we are talking about trees, especially in a rapidly developing state like Georgia. The choice instead is between a managed tree farm or the conversion of forested land to strip malls and McMansions. Tree farms are not bad places environmentally. They have most of the benefits of trees listed above (except for their effect on heat islands, since tree farms are not normally found in urban areas). On a typically farm, only a small percentage of the trees are harvested each year, since, unlike other crops, they must grow for many years before they can be harvested.
Environmentally, they are a far preferable source of renewable energy than corn or sugar. Corn does have the significant advantage that it can be readily converted to transportation fuel; though there is currently a lot of energy surrounding the development of transportation fuels made from wood and switchgrass, aka cellulosic ethanol, I have my doubts as the the long-term viability of that particular renewable energy. But if wood is pelletized and used to generate electricity or in home, public, or distributed heating systems, it is an excellent alternative.
And yes, some carbon is going to be released when the pellets are burned. But NOT ALL. A lot of the carbon that is absorbed by trees is sequestered into the soil, not kept in the trunk. And even that carbon that is released is carbon that was absorbed from the atmosphere, not released into the air from deep below the Earth's crust. So it is a very worst carbon nuetral, but in reality, significantly better than neutral.
One massive caveat
Wetlands and old growth (WOG) forests need to be protected at all costs. Distinctions need to be made between managed forests or 20-year old pine stands and virgin hardwood forests or sensitive wetland areas. Any regulations that allow wood to qualify as a renewable fuel needs to distinguish these resources from managed forests, because a virgin forest is not really renewable--not in a human lifespan. But I think that can be done without shutting off all forests, which earlier renewable regs have done.
The other side
I want to be fair, and mention that there are many very smart people who disagree with me on this issue. There is a story about them here. However, I believe I refuted many of these points already. I did want to include that side of the story, though, since some of the people that disagree with me are smarter than me.
However, many of the people who have lobbied against allowing wood products to be treated as a renewable fuel are not really environmentalist, but are paper products producers like Georgia Pacific. They are not interested in protecting the environment; in fact, many of the industrial solvents they use when making paper products are FAR worse for the environment than cutting down some trees have ever been. However, they are worried about there being more competition for wood and wood products, as they no longer own most of their forest land (they used to), and do not want the prices of their feedstock to raise. Unfortunately, the paper products multinationals have managed to take in some well-intentioned environmentalists, and convinced them to push for regulations that will prevent wood from being treated as a renewable fuel.
Where it stands now
What do I mean when I say 'treated as a renewable fuel'? That can mean a lot of things, depending on the regulation. Many states have Renewable Portfolio Standards, that require a certain amount of the energy used in the state to come from renewable sources. There have been many discussions of instituting a federal RPS. There are a host of different tax credits and other programs to subsidize renewable fuels. Also, biomass could be treated in myriad different ways by any final cap-and-trade system (or other climate change action that may be implemented should cap and trade fail to pass).
I hope that this short essay has helped to at least explain some of the issues involved in my personal favorite energy source.