52 million trees = 1 factory

Monitored and developed by Kathleen Jannaway from an item in New Scientist.

In an innovative agreement which could be more widely copied, an American power company in Virginia has agreed to plant 52 million trees in Guatemala to absorb the amount of carbon dioxide that will enter the atmosphere from a new power station that it is building.

'An American power company has agreed to plant 52 million trees in Guatemala to absorb the carbon dioxide from a new power station that it is building'

The US Department of Energy have recently published a report on the work of Gregg Marland, a research worker at Oak Ridge National Laboratory which includes the statement that 'new forests covering 7 million square kilometres could absorb all the release of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.' This area, as big as the US minus Alaska, may seem impossibly large to appropriate for new forests until it is realised that 30 million square kilometres world wide are at present used for deliberately bred livestock who also eat a large proportion of the crops from the 15 million square kilometres of crop land. Trees of the right species could yield maximum food per acre without the disturbance of soil required by arable farming. Energy forests could yield gas, electricity and liquid fuel, giving out no more carbon dioxide than they had already taken in.

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