Thursday, April 23, 2009

Bound to Burn (City Journal) & More to Come

A thought provoking article in the City Journal, "Bound to Burn".

Humanity will keep spewing carbon into the atmosphere, but good policy can help sink it back into the earth.

If we’re truly worried about carbon, we must instead approach it as if the emissions originated in an annual eruption of Mount Krakatoa. Don’t try to persuade the volcano to sign a treaty promising to stop. Focus instead on what might be done to protect and promote the planet’s carbon sinks—the systems that suck carbon back out of the air and bury it. Green plants currently pump 15 to 20 times as much carbon out of the atmosphere as humanity releases into it—that’s the pump that put all that carbon underground in the first place, millions of years ago.

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