Big Lungs and Big Liars

As a child growing up and learning about life – partly through the wonderful instructions of my parents and partly through the education system, I learned that trees took in the carbon dioxide we breathed out, and through a process called photosynthesis – they gave off oxygen which we breath in. To Humans carbon dioxide was not beneficial for growth and survival and oxygen was necessary for life, as we know it on planet Earth. The trees needed the carbon dioxide – therefore we worked together – symbiotic! 

Whoopee- it was at that early stage in my life that I became a lover of trees.

Just how much carbon dioxide does a tree take in (absorb) in a year seems like a fairly easy question to research. In the past ten years I have heard many stories of carbon sequestration being applied, on properties where people would normally be family farming. This limits what the landholder can do with their property, all in the name of saving the planet from so called Global Warming (AGW). If it were as simple as planting one tree per person on the plant to achieve a neutral balance I am sure most would rush out to their local nursery today.

Then there is the push to buy carbon offsets for industry to neutralize the effects of their carbon emissions. Talk about a money making scheme. It isn’t working in Europe and it will not work in Australia either!  How many trees do they need to plant, buy, or lease to neutralize say a ton of carbon emissions. I am sure someone with a computer and a mathematical bent will have done some modeling (fudging) to come up with a satisfactory answer.

Getting a scientifically proven answer seems quite difficult, but in the USA at the Conservationfund.org where they say they have: scientific research, conducted by third party expert organizations including Winrock International, TerraCarbon and the Fish and Wildlife Service and (they) vary depending on tree species and geographic location, they give us the following figures.

In the particular area they are reporting about: the Fund and its partners plant approximately 302 trees per acre, which will sequester an estimated 361 tons of carbon dioxide over 100 years. Therefore, on a per planted tree basis, each tree absorbs an estimated average of approximatelyone ton of carbon dioxide over its lifetime.

Much of the reading I did seemed to be saying that what carbon dioxide a human breathes out was already part of the natural cycle and has no bearing on the additional CO2 they are claiming is polluting Earth’s atmosphere. So if that is correct, reducing the number of people of the planet will have no effect on the carbon cycle – or the amount in the atmosphere. They are claiming our industry, driven by coal and gas and oil is what we have to concern ourselves about. Hence I speculate the push for ‘clean green energy sources’.

But what about the loss of trees in the great rainforests of Amazonia? They were called the ‘lungs of the planet’ when I went to school. There has been a dramatic decrease in the number of trees that are decarbonising our planet.

Looking for facts and figures from an unbiased source is particularly difficult. Just about everyone has some bias. The farmers, the natives, the government all have their own agendas to be sure. What was left to me to choose from? I decided to go with information from the South American Travel Experience Website. Yes they will still have a bias, encouraging tourism, but less of a bias than some other sources.

More than 20% of Earth’s oxygen is produced in this area, thus the name “Lungs of the Planet” With 2.5 million square miles, the Amazon rainforest represents 54% of the total rainforests left of the planet

An estimated number of 2,700 million acres of the rainforest are burned each year

Commercial logging is the single most important factor for Amazon rainforest deforestation, followed by cattle grazing and other reasons we will review shortly…

Amazon rainforest is disappearing at an alarming rate, and the same applies for all the remaining rainforests in the world.

Once it covered 14% of earth’s surface, now only 6%. Experts estimate they could disappear within 40 years.

Amazon rainforest alone is vanishing at a rate of 200,000 square miles a year – out of 2.5 million square miles, embracing nine South America countries or 2/3s of the continent. Main reasons for the vanishing rainforest include…

Commercial logging:
Logging tropical hardwoods for exportation (teak, mahogany, etc) as well as other timber for furniture’s, ply wood, etc , followed by other wood-related industries such as chipboard and cardboard. In addition, the paper industry requires a massive amount of pulpwood trees. In order to satisfy the world’s demand, more and more of the rainforest is burned to the ground and replanted with pulpwood trees.

Cattle grazing:
Ranchers need more pastures for their livestock. It is estimated that to raise one steer consumes two acres of the rainforest.

Amazon rainforest covers 1.2 billion acres – 200,000 of them are burned every day at a rate of at least one per second.

Grazing land degrades fast due to the lack of gradients and overgrazing, which means new rainforest land needs to be obtained to satisfy their needs.

Farming:
It is estimated that less than 10% rainforest land is suitable for conventional agriculture. Soon gets exhausted after 3 or 4 crops due to its poor-gradients condition and the lack of sustainable cultivation practices.

As a consequence, farmers move deeper into the rainforest in search of new, fresh land. Soybean is the largest crop.

Road building:
Since the 1970s, more than 9,000 miles of road have been built through the rainforest, endangering the environment as well as the lives of native Amazon tribes.

Need I put more here? I don’t think so. Mankind is easily recognizable as the perpetrator of the raping and destruction of this great rain forest. A television program I watched last evening had a South American Rancher blaming human greed for meat as the cause of the deforestation! He would have us all eating GMO Soy Beans probably – that is for another blog!

But the entire planet is suffering because of this and yet very little is being reported in the current main stream media about this damage to our Natural Cycle. Our oxygen supply is being reduced as I write this, and yet governments around the world are blaming it all on manmade global warming.

Of course Amazonia (South America) is not the only place on the planet where deforestation is rampant. Indonesia is suffering under a very similar situation, where big money is more interested in land than it is in maintaining planetary equilibrium. And let us not forget what is happening also in Siberia.

The childhood tales of the Rain Forests being the lungs of the planet have long since stopped being talked about, except in blogs such as this, where the author is considered a crackpot. Instead we are daily indoctrinated with misinformation from government and industry sources whose sole Reason D’ Entre appears to be the accumulation of power, wealth and prestige unto themselves. The general public are so misinformed that they believe what is told to them via infomercials, between the sports programs on their television sets and the government controlled media.

Back in the days of the Ancient Roman Empire, the plebeians (that is you and I) were kept ‘dumbed down’ by a very similar ploy.

In bad times, or during political unrest, there was always the risk of the Roman ‘mob’ rioting or rebelling against the upper classes.

Bread and circuses

The Emperor Augustus was well aware of this risk and was keen to keep the poorest plebeians happy enough and reasonably well fed so that they would not riot. He began the system of state bribery that the writerJuvenal described as ‘bread and circuses’.

Free grain and controlled food prices meant that plebeians could not starve, while free entertainment – such aschariot racesand gladiators in amphitheatres and the Circus Maximus – meant that they would not get bored and restless.Bribery it may have been, but it often worked. (bolding mine) 

Our Planet is being taken apart little by little by the powers that be, and we the voting taxpayers have little or no say in what is happening. If we do get angry, organize marches, rallies or convoys then they are considered to be of no consequence, and the elected officials carry on regardless. This is happening at the Local level, the National level and the International level, and yet we are considered not sufficiently intellectual or important enough to relay this information to, let alone have an opinion about it. The Government fears the power of the internet – when it is used to circulate blogs like this one. They will do all in their power to restrict our access in due time if we allow them to.

Our Planet needs Big Lungs but does not need Big Liars!