When the Tories released their Clean Air act, the biggest shot across the bow that the other parties made had to do with the reduction of green house gases with targets going out to 2050.<\/p>\n
Well Lorrie Goldstein has done a bit of very smart math that may make people like Elizabeth May head for a washcloth to wipe the egg off their faces.<\/p>\n
“Green” celebrities often claim to reduce their carbon imprint to zero when flying around the world by buying “carbon offsets”. One popular way of doing this is by planting trees.<\/p>\n
Let’s do the math. It takes 15 trees 40 to 50 years to absorb five tons of carbon.<\/p>\n
A return flight from Toronto to Vancouver injects 5.4 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per passenger. Carbon dioxide takes 50 to 200 years to dissipate naturally.<\/p>\n
Therefore, to absorb most of the carbon dioxide caused by one passenger taking one domestic round-trip flight across Canada in 2007, requires planting 15 trees today that won’t complete the job until<\/strong>, assuming none is destroyed by fire, disease or insects. If they are, they’ll release their carbon back into the atmosphere.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
(bolded emphasis mine)<\/p>\n
This is one of those tidy little facts you keep in your pocket for when an environmentalist complains about the Tory play taking 45 years to reach fruition.<\/p>\n