healthmyths
Platinum Member
- Sep 19, 2011
- 28,998
- 10,505
- 900
The fact is the USA trees,plants,etc. can capture more CO2 then the USA emits...
"The U.S. landscape acts as a net carbon sinkit sequesters more carbon than it emits.
Two types of analyses confirm this:
1) atmospheric, or top-down, methods that look at changes in CO2 concentrations; and
2) land-based, or bottom-up, methods that incorporate on-the-ground inventories or plot measurements.
Net sequestration (i.e., the difference between carbon gains and losses) in U.S. forests, urban trees and agricultural soils totaled almost 840 teragrams (Tg) of CO2 equivalent (or about 230 Tg or million metric tons of carbon equivalent) in 2001 (Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks).
This offsets approximately 15% of total U.S. CO2 emissions from the energy, transportation and other sectors. Net carbon sequestration in the forest sector in 2005 offset 10% of U.S. CO2 emissions. In the near future, we project that U.S. forests will continue to sequester carbon at a rate similar to that in recent years. Based on a comparison of our estimates to a compilation of land-based estimates of non-forest carbon
sinks from the literature, we estimate that the conterminous U.S. annually sequesters 149330 Tg C year1. Forests, urban trees, and wood
products are responsible for 6591% of this sink.
http://www.ncrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/jrnl/2007/nrs_2007_woodbury_001.pdf
