Carbon banking may help companies save face & “look responsible”

Forests may fast become a new form of currency if an experimental business model in California takes hold worldwide. Scientists are controlling the way some forests grow in order to maximize the amount of carbon they absorb. Those forests will eventually become carbon banks, and some companies in California are purchasing shares in them to offset their carbon emissions.

To encourage larger tree growth the scientists are trimming smaller competitors out of the way, and that creates its own fallacy – the dead trees then release their carbon back into the atmosphere. So is there a net gain?

Right now there’s a lot of measuring going on in an effort to answer that question. Much of the answer lies with creating very large trees, and redwoods are very good at growing. Forester Jordan Golinkoff says “redwoods are kind of amazing, they can grow hundreds and hundreds of years and still be measurably increasing in size and growing,” according to NPR.

To be specific, a 25 inch diameter redwood captures about a ton of carbon. That’s pretty compelling to a company looking to improve public perception through carbon banking, and would become even more important if limiting emissions and carbon credits becomes international law.

While carbon banking doesn’t address or reform fundamental business processes that create an excess of carbon emissions, it at last allows us a way of reacting to the problem responsibly. It also provides versatility for the land because large trees can be grown to support carbon banking while smaller trees are pruned and sold as lumber.

Currently the experiment claims credit for absorbing 350,000 tons of carbon, which is the same as removing 80,000 cars from the road for a year. Those sorts of numbers speak loudly in an economy with increasing pressure to produce high quality products without destroying the environment.