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In 2013, California enacted a well-known law that increases greenhouse gas emissions, but allow companies to eliminate their amount of waste by investing in forests across the country – the idea that trees absorb more carbon dioxide into the air. The policy is seen as a way to address climate change, and give businesses flexibility to reduce their pollution.
Eight years later, however, there is a serious problem: By last week, there were more than 41,000 wildfires across the country, burning more than 4.6 million acres — a small rock about the size of New Jersey. And more than 150,000 hectares of these have been found in West Coast forests that have to deal with corporate pollution.
When the original plan was developed, California thought that some forests would be burned naturally. But experts say the amount of forest set up in so-called “reservoirs” has not diminished the amount of trees that burn during climate change.
And companies that set up forests to deal with greenhouse gases and appear to be more responsible are not pressured to spend more money when wildfires burn out the worst. Consequences: Fires are now burning the air-reducing functions that are necessary to deal with the climate problem.
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Ignoring the Dangers of a Wildfire
When forests burn, they emit carbon dioxide. This is why California’s carbon-recovery projects were designed to dedicate 2% to 4% of their forests as rainforests. But the growth of these reservoirs “is not in the best interests of the forests in the United States due to climate change,” said William Anderegg, Assistant Professor, University of Utah and senior author. paper 2020 which assessed climate-hazardous hazards on carbon emissions.
Anderegg has found that the risk of wildfires and wildfires in the U.S. nearly doubled between 1984 and 2000 – an increase caused by climate change. According to him, 2% to 4% of California’s carbon-managed forests were insufficient to rehabilitate wildfires, even before calculating climate change.
“If you look at history alone I think that all these years ago it looks like the 2010s – the lowest estimate – [wildfire] the risk is 10 percent, ”he said. “But the risk, if you read about climate change, is in the range of 20 to 30%.”
A recent wildfire has confirmed Anderegg’s warnings. This season of fire alone, a burning fire key components of a number of California projects located around the West Coast, including approximately a quarter of Klamath East’s work in Oregon and 12% of Colville’s work in Washington state.
Such shortcomings need to be covered by the fact that all carbon jobs offer a license at the same price range, just as insurance companies use the risks to protect against losses only.
But according to Bodie Cabiyo, a PhD graduate of UC Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group, “most of the forest resides in western forest-loving forests, such as California.” This means that the area has not been adequately isolated to deal with fire hazards for the next 100 years.
These protective pools have another problem. A recent research and CarbonPlan’s non-profit climate-generating project found that California’s natural resources that run forests are being significantly enhanced, so that it is said to be emitting 30 million tons of gas which has not yet happened.
Such experiments also apply to components that have been developed to deal with wildfires.
“Buffer pools have a history that has already been promoted,” said Barbara Haya, CarbonPlan’s chief research officer and director of the Berkeley Air Sales Project. This means that these ponds may not be enough to deal with forest gas.
Representatives a California Air Resources Agency, (CARB) which runs the cap-and-business program, did not respond to a request for comment.
“We Have Bought a Burning Forest”
Major corporations have been selling money in the rainforest to achieve air quality reduction – and many of these companies boast in public trying to convince customers and retailers that they are environmentally friendly businesses.
Now some of the projects are emitting smoke – but companies that have used this following the program should not buy additional forests to be destroyed if they burn their dams.
For example, Microsoft, in public he boasted its economic potential in carbon production. This included big money in Klamath East in California, a protected forest operated by a forestry company that lost nearly 100,000 of its 400,000 hectares at the Bootleg Fire in Oregon.
“We have bought trees from the burning forests now,” said Elizabeth Willmott, Microsoft’s carbon program manager, He said at the carbon footprint earlier this month. “We do not want this to force us to give up spending on natural resources … [but companies must] be very careful about its risks. ”
Similarly, BP, a global oil and gas company, will soon insulted his carbon offsets later spending more than $ 100 million to buy 13 million loans from the Colville carbon project in Washington state. But this summer, about 50,000 acres of 450,000 acres of work were burned to the ground.
Last year, a California working group worked on reforming state law he surrendered a report acknowledging the prioritization of fire testing activities in forestry activities, among others.
But Anderegg at the University of Utah said the work group’s performance was disrupted by a business venture that benefited from carbon offsets, including timber companies. And earlier this year, a number of environmentalists have resigned, says Anderegg, because “the group doesn’t care about their own interests.”
According to Haya, director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, there are no number of projects or budget calculators that could solve the California California carbon emissions program: Companies are choosing to plant forests because they allow them to avoid difficult but more important work to reduce their emissions.
Anderegg said: “If we want our climate to work properly, we have to look at the evidence and see if we have to rely on that error,” Anderegg said. “Direct air reduction will be more effective and less risky.”