As someone who took the action recommended by both the Kyoto and Copenhagen climate scientist and 5 years ago planted over 500 trees on trust lands in Brunswick, Topsham, Bath and Woolwich. It involved the Bath Rotary, the Viles Arboretum, and several high school community service projects.

Trees are a cure for global warming. “An approximate value for a 50-year-old oak forest would be 30,000 pounds of carbon dioxide sequestered per acre,” said Timothy J. Fahey, professor of ecology in the department of natural resources at Cornell University. “The forest would be emitting about 22,000 pounds of oxygen.”  

A tree can absorb as much as 48 pounds of carbon dioxide per year and can sequester 1 ton of carbon dioxide by the time it reaches 40 years old. Citation after citation, while they vary, attest to the overwhelming finding that trees remove large quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere. Tree planting has greater carbon sequestration potential than other land use, between 2.2 and 9.5 metric tons of CO2 per acre per year.
When DOT clear cuts 31 acres of them we have a major disaster perpetuated by the Mills Administration. This clear cut along Route 1 eliminated the ability to convert 960,000 pounds of CO2 to oxygen and stored carbon.
All we can do it complain to our faux green governor to never do it again without a measurable offset that will also cleanse the air and even the rain. Please telephone her office with your pleas. and if you want more precise calculations of the loss goto https://www.itreetools.org/tools and download proven tools to calculate the losses. 

Frank Heller, 

Brunswick 

Comments are not available on this story.