twenty years later


[click image]


...

I was right there in an MRC muckity-muck's office, listening to her talk about how she was investigating the possibiility of selling carbon credits instead of harvesting timber on their vast cutover holdings.

They really were trying to do their uppermost level best to restore a healthy forest. Maybe they still are, but I'm not paying attention anymore.

Anyway, my very first response was skepticism about it having any effect on carbon levels, and every reason to believe that the big polluters would exploit the hell out of this, even though I was and am positive that higher saturation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a boon for all plantlife, ergo us. The next concern I voiced was that if timber companies could successfully make their money leaving the trees grow, that would be the death knell for the vestiges of competent loggers and mill workers.

She said she was hoping for a blend of carbon offsets and timber harvesting, but said it probably wouldn't pan out, or even end up penciling out, so we moved on with our discussion.

This was nines, the goddam star environmentalist of the turn of the century, advocating for solidarity between humans and planet, and this is nines, the goddam enfeebled old lady, wondering why so few of us are out there having these kinds of discussions in an effort to be good to our home and each other.

And for the hundredth time, the whole actual "inconvenient truth" is that global mean temperatures have little or no intersection with warming or cooling of the atmosphere. I admit, Al Gore had me going there for a few years, but, unlike the brainwashed children, I ended up checking his science. It was bogus. Doesn't matter a whit what kind of pigs were oinking about it. They were right.


pipe up any time....