Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Carbon-zero program hopes to cut emissions

With evidence growing that people are changing the Earth's climate, one conservation group is working to make a small correction to that trend.

The Conservation Fund, a national conservation group, is meeting this weekend in Las Vegas. The cars and planes and hotel electricity and everything else that the people in such groups use all need energy produced by burning fossil fuels, which puts carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which accelerates global warming.

The group, however, believes it has hit on a way to keep the meeting "carbon neutral," without any net increase in the amount of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases going into the air.

To zero out the emissions, the group is planting hundreds of trees in the Mississippi Delta that will soak up carbon from the atmosphere.

Larry Selzer, Conservation Fund president, said the effort makes sense for the 20-year-old group. The carbon-zero program illustrates to others what can be done to help ease the burden of atmospheric emissions while providing habitat for plants and animals in areas deforested by both human activity and natural catastrophe.

"Nothing like this has ever been done before," Selzer said.

The group calculated that for about 100 people who will attend the meeting, a little more than 360 tons of carbon dioxide will be generated. To lock up that much carbon, the group will have to plant about 270 trees, he said.

The process is called carbon sequestration, and scientists and conservationists believe that while it will not solve the global warming problem, on a large scale it could make a dent in more than 7 billion metric tons of the greenhouse gas that the Energy Department estimates is produced annually.

"We will be the first carbon-zero meeting in the country if not the world," Selzer said. "We're focusing our attention right now on the lower Mississippi Valley ... There was a tremendous amount of timber that was knocked down in the storms.'

Selzer said the Las Vegas-related effort is part of a larger, ongoing drive to get companies to contribute to tree-planting as a method of cutting carbon emissions. He said several large companies are participating, and that the Conservation Fund is committed to planting 1 million trees a year for the next five years.

The group is working with Atlanta-based Environmental Synergy Inc. on the planting effort.

"Trees take carbon dioxide out of the air," explained Joe Wisniewski, Environmental Synergy chief executive officer. "As a tree grows, more and more carbon dioxide is taken out.

"Carbon dioxide is one of the air pollutants that is alleged to cause the greenhouse effect. It's global warming, climate change, anyway you want to put it."

Wisniewski said his company has planted more than 20 million trees in the last six years, mostly in the Southeast United States. Much of the targeted areas have been former agricultural areas that are no longer productive. Others have been specifically identified because of their potential for restored habitat.

"We'll work with state and federal organizations like the (U.S.) Fish and Wildlife Service. These trees decrease soil erosion, help water quality, and provide habitat. Theres a variety of good things that happen. We try to re-create the ecosystem that was once there."

The area that the Las Vegas effort will benefit is home to rare animals that include the ivory-billed woodpecker, a bird that until recently was thought by many to be extinct.

Wisniewski said his company is working with the Conservation Fund as a partner.

"They do the land deals, we plant the trees. They are a terrific partner."

Selzer and Wisniewski want to enlist more companies in the long-term effort but admit that it can be a tough sell in the United States. Right now, companies might reap a publicity benefit, but there is no law requiring them to make caps in carbon dioxide emissions. That could change.

The Chicago Climate Exchange, launched about two years ago, allows companies to buy and sell "credits" for taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, Selzer said. Right now the exchange does very little business, but if the United States enters into a domestic or international agreement to have carbon caps, that could change.

"Many of us believe that's coming, and probably sooner rather than later," Selzer said. "Right now, people are doing it for reasons of corporate responsibility."

A Las Vegas scientist said that although the effort is modest, any move to sequester carbon is a move in the right direction.

Stan Smith, a UNLV ecologist, has been studying issues of greenhouse gases and global warming. He said young forests can take up a lot of carbon dioxide.

"It's certainly better to plant trees than not to plant trees," Smith said.

Older forests, while providing the growth that pleases people aesthetically, paradoxically don't provide the emissions benefits that younger, quickly growing forests give us, he said.

Smith warned that if the trees eventually are burned or are allowed to decay, the carbon once locked in them will be released again to the atmosphere. The hurricanes that over the last few months hit the Gulf Coast, however, may have provided one real benefit to the climate.

"There were huge blowdowns of forests after the hurricanes. That starts a lot of secondary growth and starts sequestering huge amounts of carbon."

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