It sounds great. Campaigns are underway with the goal of planting trees around the globe; the World Economic Forum has an initiative to plant 1 trillion new trees. The aim of these programs is to reduce climate change, encourage biodiversity, and provide local employment. But, according to Benji Jones at Vox, “There’s just one problem:…
Tag: Forests
The West Is a Fire Plain. Get Over It.
Guest author Randal O’Toole has a degree in forestry from Oregon State University and has spent several decades studying forest policy. He is the author of six books, including Reforming the Forest Service, and author of The Perfect Firestorm: Bringing Forest Service Wildfire Costs under Control, a Cato Institute Policy Analysis. Every summer, smoke from…
Don’t Cut Trees in the Tongass. Go Fishing.
The Biden administration is proposing a broad ban on most commercial logging in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, a 16.7-million acre forest that has been a political football for decades. “Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the proposal would provide $25 million for community development and would allow Alaska Natives and small-scale operators to continue to harvest…
The Fantastical World of Carbon Offsets
In a tongue-in-cheek article in RealClearEnergy, Steve Milloy observes that Norway has figured out how to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions while still building up its oil and gas production by 40 percent, providing a lesson for the rest of the world. Norway is buying “carbon offsets” in the African country of Gabon, paying the Gabonese to…
Trump Allows More Logging in Tongass National Park
Tucked away under all the election news is a major deregulatory action by President Trump. The U.S. Forest Service has removed logging restrictions on about 9 million acres of the Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska. The action is sweeping but, on the other hand, it will not change what happens in the forest very…
Some Problems with the New York Times
This post is about how preconceived ideas, in this case ideas about climate change, corrupt reporting. A skilled reporter from the New York Times, Marguerite Holloway, went to western Massachusetts to see what was wrong with the trees there. She found a number of problems but her description and analysis are riddled with assumptions about…