The Impossibility Of Cutting Greenhouse Emissions

The news media has been abuzz recently with a new genre of news story - carbon fraud.  The German automaker Volkswagen has admitted to purposely designing software to make its engines appear less polluting, both for diesel and for gasoline engines.  Now it turns out that China, either intentionally or not, has dramatically understated how much coal it has burned over the last 15 years.  The European Union has a "renewable" energy mandate that is causing it to cut down American forests for fuel - producing more carbon emissions than if European coal was burned!  The stories of carbon fraud are becoming more numerous as the incentive to lie about emissions become stronger.  Unlike something like deforestation of the rainforest, there is no satellite or other system capable of monitoring carbon emissions.  We can measure carbon in the atmosphere (see below), but we can't really tell its source with any real accuracy.

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as measured by the NOAA, increasing steadily for the last 50 years with the sawtoothed shape because of absorption by plants.

What are we to make of this carbon cheating?  Well, there is an economic parable called 'Tragedy of the Commons' that might be illustrative.  In medieval England, many small landowners of a village, all of whom owned livestock, owned land surrounding a large grassy area called a commons.  These small landowners were of course allowed to graze their livestock on their own land, but were also allowed to have their animals graze without restriction on the commons.  What happened with this arrangement?  The obvious - the villagers all grazed their livestock on the commons before letting their livestock on their own private land.  Because of this, the commons was soon ruined, turned to a grass-less mud filled wasteland as grass was pulled up by the roots, while the privately owned land remained pristine.

Say that everyone in the village realized the problem and came to an agreement - you can only graze your livestock one day a month on the unfenced, unguarded commons.  Some villagers would be responsible and abide by the agreement, but some would invariably cheat - perhaps taking their livestock to graze at night or when others were away.  The result would be the same - a muddy, ruined commons.  The only way to stop the cheating would a large wall around the commons (not practical) or an incredible police state monitoring the villages and their flocks at all time.

The utility of this parable to greenhouse emissions is obvious.  The Earth's atmosphere is in every sense a 'commons' - every nation and every person has access to it.  We cannot restrict a country from it for abuse or deceit.  Eventually, regardless of how little in greenhouse gases we emit as individuals or even as a nation, our work can be completely undone by others.  What good would it have done in the above parable for one landowner, seeing the ultimate fate of the commons, to only graze his animals there once a month? None - his sacrifice would have been meaningless in the context of everyone else's abuse.

So, what can be done?  Is the world doomed to much higher greenhouse gas concentrations because the atmosphere is a common area, with no real restrictions or controls?  No!  While the atmosphere is a commons, land is not and is frequently privately owned.  Is there anything that can be done on land to pull carbon out of the air?  Yes - we can plant giant, long lived trees - we can plant sequoias..

Giant sequoias, Sequoiadendron giganteum, the largest tree and the largest living thing on earth, once covered much of the world.  They thrived on the higher carbon dioxide concentrations available then as well as warmer temperatures, two conditions we are likely to see replicated soon..  These trees are very fast growing and can still, if planted correctly, be grown in almost all temperate areas.

What is more, the largest of these trees, called General Sherman, is so large that is has sequestered over an average American's lifetime of carbon emissions - over 2.2 million pounds of carbon.  Sequoias also live for thousands of years, with many now alive growing at the time of Christ.  This longevity means they will to continue to store as well as continuously sequester carbon for centuries.


We tried to plant these trees many times here in the Midwest without success before discovering a device that could water, nurture, and protect the tree without our intervention.  This device, the Groasis Waterboxx PlantCocoon, is shown with a sequoia tree below.

Two years' growth of a sequoia with the Groasis Waterboxx PlantCocoon.  No water was manually added to the Waterboxx or the tree after planting - not once - and the tree has thrived after the Waterboxx was removed.  

We have had a one hundred percent success rate planting sequoias with the Waterboxx here in Indiana, and plan to continue planting elsewhere.  Can our success be replicated?  Yes!  If every set of grandparents came together and planted one sequoia tree each for every new child in their family (for a total of two trees per new child), we could one day see all carbon emissions offset by growing trees.  If more than two trees were planted per new child, we could see America's net carbon emissions decrease, even if we couldn't directly measure it.  What's more, sequoias tend to grow faster as they age.  Sequoias are well adapted to survive common threats like forest fires and have few pests.  Sequoias can do what no other tree can - pull carbon reliably from the atmosphere at an increasing rate, and store it for thousands of years.

Companies, countries, and even continents will continue to lie and mislead about their carbon emissions.  Future "climate agreements" will just make this mendacity more likely as the incentive to cheat increases.  As this happens, a  person's individual carbon emissions will become meaningless in the face of widespread cheating.  We can decrease total carbon dioxide in the atmosphere only by removing it from the atmosphere - and the best way to do this is by planting long lived and massive trees like sequoias.

If you want to buy a small sequoia tree, we recommend Giant-Sequoia.com.  If you want to take the effort and try to plant from seed, we recommend this site.  To purchase a Waterboxx to grow a sequoia here in the United States, visit Dew Harvest at www.dewharvest.com.

We would love to read your comments below.  

Decrease Your Greenhouse Gas Emissions By Gardening

There are five major gases that are thought to warm the Earth's atmosphere - water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone.  Water vapor is emitted by plant life as well as many other natural processes, has many good effects, and is not something that can (or should) be easily decreased.  Three of the other four gases (carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and ozone) are all produced to a certain extent by transportation using fossil fuels.  Methane is produced in significant amounts by anaerobic digestion of organic material in landfills.

How can the average person decrease their production of these gases without harming their standard of living?  Most proposed solutions to the pollutants listed above are terrible for the economy or extremely expensive for the average person - electric cars are hardly affordable and solar panels aren't yet practical, for example.  A simpler solution is, however, available.  A well meaning person can engage in a nature based activity that may save money, get them exercise, and improve their health - that person can plant a garden.  

Gardens allow food to be grown essentially at the point of consumption.  Grocery store bought produce can travel a great distance to market, up to 1,500 miles in one study.  It is much less energy intensive to transport seeds than to transport whole fruits and vegetables.  Some plants (called heirloom) produce true breeding seeds in their fruits, so a one time seed purchase would be all that was needed for a lifetime of produce.

 Also, garden fruits and vegetables can generally be left on the vine until the gardener is ready to eat them.  This greatly decreases the energy needed to preserve produce (in refrigerated trucks, cooled grocery stores displays, and in the consumer's refrigerator).

Produce available in stores is bred to be transported and shelf stable - not to be tasty.  This produce is often picked before ripe, transported "green" and ripened with a gas treatment.  This means that is is frequently less palatable than home grown produce.  Thus, people are much more likely to discard bland store bought produce than they are to discard better tasting produce they took the effort to grow themselves.  As the song says - "there are only two things that money can't buy - and that's true love and homegrown tomatoes".

So, growing your own produce can decrease the greenhouse gases the come from refrigerating and transporting that produce - carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and ozone.  What about methane?  Methane isn't a pollutant released during typical food transport - it is actually the key component of natural gas and a fuel source.  Methane is produced by the average person's garbage when organic matter is discarded into a landfill.  In that landfill, there is insufficient oxygen for aerobic digestion so the organic matter undergoes a process of anaerobic digestion.  This anaerobic digestion produces methane - which is thought to be a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.  This methane is sometimes captured and used for energy, but frequently it leaks into the atmosphere.

How can methane production from household garbage be prevented?  Composting can decrease methane production dramatically.   A huge amount of household waste can be composted, from leaves and grass clippings, to coffee grounds and filters, to banana peels, melon rinds, eggshells, and even paper plates.  What shouldn't be composted is animal products other than eggshells, (meat, cheese, etc), oil, or pet droppings (this last is vitally important).

Composting is something that happens naturally, and if you put the compostable materials listed above in a heap you would eventually find it turned into rich soil.  However, you can dramatically speed the process up by turning your compost pile or buying (or making) a compost tumbler.

People have very little incentive to compost unless they have a garden in which to use their newly produced soil, so gardening and composting are great complements to one another.

Isn't gardening hard work, with tilling, watering under the hot sun, for hardly any produce?  Not anymore!  Two great advances have made gardening enjoyable, easy, and extremely productive in almost every climate.  Raised bed gardening (popularized as "Square Foot Gardening" by the brilliant Mel Bartholomew) has eliminated the need to slowly improve and yearly till the soil.  This was only half of the battle however - as watering the raised bed garden still took significant time.  Then an even more brilliant device called the Groasis Waterboxx PlantCocoon (or Waterboxx) was used in raised bed gardens.  This device, the Waterboxx, collects and holds dew and rainwater and slowly releases it to the roots of a growing plant.

A Waterboxx growing Roma and cherry tomatoes.  Although the Roma tomato was destroyed in a storm, the cherry tomato plant went on to produce over 1500 tomatoes in one growing season - all without ANY watering after transplanting outside with the Waterboxx.

So, gardening can help you get fresh, great tasting produce all while helping the environment.  If you want to get started, we suggest reading Square Foot Gardening and trying out the Waterboxx PlantCocoon.

We would love to see your comments below.