Westerman touts the benefits of his proposed Trillion Trees Act
As experts escalate their warnings about the need to combat climate change, U.S. Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-District 4, has proposed a solution to combat carbon emissions: planting more trees.
An Aug. 9 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which the United Nations called a “code red for humanity,” predicts that temperatures in around a decade will likely go farther than what world leaders have tried to prevent, according to The Associated Press. https://bit.ly/3DJ71gP
The report said warming is already accelerating the rise of sea levels and worsening extreme weather conditions, such as heat waves, droughts, floods, and storms. These trends will continue to worsen, and some harm, such as dwindling ice sheets and rising sea levels, will be “irreversible for centuries to millennia,” it said.
The report attributes nearly all of the warming that has happened so far to emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide and methane. It also directly attributes climate change to human activity.
The Trillion Trees Act aims to remove carbon from the atmosphere by storing it in trees. The act was first introduced in February of 2020, though it was never passed. On April 19, Westerman, a forester, reintroduced the act, which has 101 co-sponsors, including three Democrats. Its latest action is listed as being referred to the House Subcommittee on Conservation and Forestry on June 15, according to Congress.gov.
Westerman told The Sentinel-Record the bill was based on a report that said planting 1 trillion trees globally could remove 205 gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere. The legislation, he said, would help the U.S. contribute as part of the World Economic Forum’s global Trillion Trees Initiative.
The Trillion Trees Act is divided into three sections, according to a document from the House Committee on Natural Resources.
The first, Regeneration, involves actions such as directing the Secretary of Agriculture to establish National Forest Carbon Stock Targets in order to increase the amount of carbon stored in domestic forests and raising the cap on the Reforestation Trust Fund to address the Forest Service’s reforestation backlog. https://bit.ly/38DaSxx
“You’ve got a lot of areas that have been burned by forest fires that need to be replanted,” Westerman said. “Talking about shade, there’s a lot of urban areas that could have a lot more trees planted that do create shade and help lower the temperatures … quite a few locations around this country where we could plant more trees here and expand the forested acres around the U.S.
“But more important than that, we need to take care of the forests that we’ve got so that we’re not burning up these national treasures like you’re seeing out West.”
The second, Management, involves adding carbon sequestration as a goal to existing programs like the Forest Health Protection Program, according to the document, as well as streamlining environmental review “for the protection of wildland-urban interfaces, watersheds, and critical infrastructure and the restoration of wildlife habitat on federal lands to improve forest health and resiliency and reduce the amount of carbon emissions from catastrophic wildfires.”
The last section, Utilization, involves incentivizing “sustainable residential and commercial buildings through the creation of a new, transferable tax credit,” among other things, according to the document.
“The cool thing about wood is it stores carbon as long as it’s there, so by weight, lumber is about 50% carbon, and when you put it in a building, you’re storing carbon and sequestering it,” Westerman said. “And where that tree was harvested, another tree is growing up, pulling more carbon out of the atmosphere.”
The document from the House Committee on Natural Resources links to a study titled “The global tree restoration potential” in Science magazine as evidence of the premise that planting one trillion new trees globally would sequester more than 200 gigatons of carbon. https://bit.ly/3BzVVsu
The study includes a clarification that reads in part:
“First, in the original version of the Report, the authors stated in the abstract and in the main text that tree restoration is the most effective solution to climate change to date. This was incorrect. They meant that they know of no other current carbon drawdown solution that is quantitatively as large in terms of carbon capture.
“They did not mean that tree restoration is more important than reducing greenhouse gas emissions or should replace it, nor did they mean that restoring woodlands and forests is more important than conserving the natural ecosystems that currently exist. The authors acknowledge that climate change is an extremely complex problem with no simple fix and that it will require a full combination of approaches.”
The study still contends that restoration of forested land on a global scale could help mitigate climate change by storing the equivalent of as much as 25% of the current atmospheric carbon pool.
Westerman considers the goals of the act to be the biggest piece of the puzzle in addressing climate change.
“Nothing is as large-scale and as low-cost and economical as trees in pulling carbon out of the atmosphere,” he said “So, if you shut off all fossil fuels today, which is totally impractical to think you could do that, what are you going to do about the carbon that’s in the atmosphere? Well, trees are the mechanism that pulls that out.”
The legislation involves the U.S. Forest Service and Department of Interior assessing how many trees could sustainably be planted in the country, he said, with the rollout being planned over the course of several decades.
According to David Stahle, distinguished professor with the Department of Geosciences at the University of Arkansas Fayetteville, the Trillion Trees Act alone isn’t enough to combat the climate crisis, but it is an effective measure.
“It’s a long-term contribution to the problem, a definite contribution, but it’s very long term,” Stahle said. “The concern is that the anthropogenic (human-caused) forcing of climate is so large that more immediate measures are going to be required as well. But it’s a good thing. It’s a good thing and it ought to be supported.”
More immediate measures, Stahle said, involve encouraging energy innovation and further efficiency for fossil fuel use.
“Everything that we can do to lessen the emission of fossil fuel-based carbon dioxide into the atmosphere needs to be done,” he said.
Westerman said the demand for fossil fuels isn’t going away overnight, and supports looking for new energy sources and making fossil fuels cleaner as well.
While much of the country has gotten warmer, Stahle said Arkansas is part of the area in the southeastern United States known as a “warming hole.” It has not seen the same warming temperatures as other parts of the country, though it has gotten wetter.
An August 2016 report from the EPA notes that, as the atmosphere warms, evaporation increases. This can lead to droughts in some areas, while others may experience increases in heavy rainstorms and rainfall, such as in Arkansas. The report attributes the lack of warming in Arkansas to sulfates, or air pollutants that reflect sunlight back into space. https://bit.ly/3teC3Iy
“Now sulfate emissions are declining, and the factors that once prevented Arkansas from warming are unlikely to persist,” the report states.
The report also states that changing the climate is likely going to result in more damage from storms, reduced crop yields, and increased heat and the chance of heatstroke.
The city of Fayetteville’s website says in its section on climate change: “Arkansas has a strong history of agriculture, timber, outdoor tourism, and food production — industries that all depend on the hospitable climate of our beautiful State. To preserve our legacy and be stewards of our future, Arkansans need to be leaders in the fight against climate change. Our economic stability, environmental purity, and social stability rely on preserving the natural resources around us.” https://bit.ly/3n2Kc1E
Though not every region of the world will experience the effects of climate change in the same way, Stahle said all of global society will suffer the consequences. The most serious of these risks is sea level rise, but he also pointed to fires in the West and droughts in South America.
On Friday, President Joe Biden made his way to Louisiana after it and several other states were battered by Hurricane Ida, according to The Associated Press. Biden pledged federal help to states affected by natural disasters, saying he would urge Congress to pass his almost $1 trillion infrastructure bill, which intends to ensure the country’s infrastructure can withstand damage caused by extreme weather. https://bit.ly/3n1Vfs6
“The past few days of Hurricane Ida and the wildfires in the West and the unprecedented flash floods in New York and New Jersey is yet another reminder that these extreme storms and the climate crisis are here,” he said Thursday. “We need to be much better prepared. We need to act.”