Guest Opinion: Ignoring easy climate fixes to eye big government programs - The Intelligencer

I do believe that climate change is taking place. In fact, it has been taking place for all of Earth’s life — billions of years.

What I disagree with, as do many scientists, is the extent of the man-made contribution and what to do about it.

But, the real issue of the day is what we should do about it.

It seems the whole focus of the “green” politicians around the world and those self-appointed gurus (movie actors and such) is that we must turn total control of our society over to the government and pursue programs that may very well destroy the economies of the civilized world. Many of these approaches are longer term and so it will be many years before we know whether they actually will be successful in solving at least part of the problem.

We are constantly bombarded by opinion and propaganda whenever there is a climate event. Every day we hear that a hurricane or flood or whatever is due to climate change. You would think that some of these events have never happened before and we forget that some of the very worst natural disasters happened many years ago.

And yet there are solutions right at hand that are mostly ignored. For example, when the Brazilian forests were burning recently, there was some mention that because of the destroyed trees, we would see an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (not good) since trees which convert this gas into oxygen had been destroyed. But the obvious corollary to this is that, therefore, if we add more trees, we will get more carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere (a good thing)! But nobody mentions this.

One incredibly good announcement during the recent State of the Union address (but buried by all the other drama) was that the current administration would be supporting the “Trillion Tree” initiative. This is a program highlighted at the earlier World Economic Forum in Davos. The “trillion” is based on calculations that show this many new trees would neutralize the carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere. We know how to plant trees; we know the best ones to plant; and we do not need a yet undiscovered technical break-through to start doing this on a serious basis.

Another easy step is to stop doing counter-productive programs in a misguided effort to protect nature from man. The best examples are the prohibition over the years of controlled burns (which prevent the accumulation of massive amounts of tinder on the forest floors) and logging (which removes easy to burn dead trees as well allows the creation of fire break lanes) in government-owned forest lands. Active programs in these two areas greatly reduce the chance of massive fires as well as increase the ability to fight and eliminate fires that do occur. Major forest fires whether in Brazil, California or Australia not only pump contaminants into the air but reduce the number of oxygen creating trees thus multiplying the negative effects.

It is curious that these two basic and perhaps unsophisticated approaches have not gotten more discussion in the national media and have not found champions in those opinion leaders who have a lot to say about everything else. Maybe this approach is not intellectual or cerebral or technical enough?

The philosopher/monk Ockham once observed that when all solutions predict the same result, the simplest one is the way to go. There is no reason this shouldn’t apply to what we do regarding climate change.

Dick Sakulich is a retired manufacturing executive. He lives in Doylestown and is a member of the Intelligencer/Courier Times editorial board.

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Guest Opinion: Ignoring easy climate fixes to eye big government programs - The Intelligencer
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