GOP Climate Plan: Drill, Baby, Drill – Plant, Baby, Plant

Associated Press:

As Speaker Kevin McCarthy visited a natural gas drilling site in northeast Ohio to promote House Republicans’ plan to sharply increase domestic production of energy from fossil fuels last month, the signs of rising global temperatures could not be ignored. Smoke from Canadian wildfires hung in the air.

When the speaker was asked about climate change and forest fires, he was ready with a response: Plant a trillion trees.

The idea — simple yet massively ambitious — revealed recent Republican thinking on how to address climate change. The party is no longer denying that global warming exists, yet is searching for a response to sweltering summers, weather disasters and rising sea levels that doesn’t involve abandoning their enthusiastic support for American-produced energy from burning oil, coal and gas.

“We need to manage our forests better so our environment can be stronger,” said McCarthy, R-Calif., adding, “Let’s replace Russian natural gas with American natural gas and let’s not only have a cleaner world, let’s have a safer world.”

The Biden administration has also boosted exports of liquefied natural gas to Europe after Russia, one of the continent’s largest suppliers of energy, invaded Ukraine. Democratic President Joe Biden has also said that coal, oil and gas will be part of America’s energy supply for years to come.

Scientists overwhelmingly agree that heat-trapping gases released from the combustion of fossil fuels are pushing up global temperatures, upending weather patterns around the globe and endangering animal species. But the solution long touted by Democrats and environmental advocates — government action to force emissions reductions — remains a non-starter with most Republicans.

Enter the idea of planting a trillion trees. A 2019 study suggested that planting trees to suck up heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere could be one of the most effective ways to fight climate change. Major conservation groups, and former President Donald Trump, who downplayed humanity’s role in climate change, embraced the idea.

Associated Press, July 4, 2019:

The most effective way to fight global warming is to plant lots of trees, a study says. A trillion of them, maybe more.

And there’s enough room, Swiss scientists say. Even with existing cities and farmland, there’s enough space for new trees to cover 3.5 million square miles (9 million square kilometers), they reported in Thursday’s journal Science . That area is roughly the size of the United States.

The study calculated that over the decades, those new trees could suck up nearly 830 billion tons (750 billion metric tons) of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That’s about as much carbon pollution as humans have spewed in the past 25 years.

Much of that benefit will come quickly because trees remove more carbon from the air when they are younger, the study authors said. The potential for removing the most carbon is in the tropics.

“This is by far — by thousands of times — the cheapest climate change solution” and the most effective, said study co-author Thomas Crowther, a climate change ecologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

Six nations with the most room for new trees are Russia, the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil and China.
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Planting trees is not a substitute for weaning the world off burning oil, coal and gas, the chief cause of global warming, Crowther emphasized.

“None of this works without emissions cuts,” he said.

Nor is it easy or realistic to think the world will suddenly go on a tree-planting binge, although many groups have started , Crowther said.

“It’s certainly a monumental challenge, which is exactly the scale of the problem of climate change,” he said.

As Earth warms, and especially as the tropics dry, tree cover is being lost, he noted.

Science, May 8, 2020:

A plethora of articles suggest that tree planting can overcome a host of environmental problems, including climate change, water shortages, and the sixth mass extinction (1–3). Business leaders and politicians have jumped on the tree-planting bandwagon, and numerous nonprofit organizations and governments worldwide have started initiatives to plant billions or even trillions of trees for a host of social, ecological, and aesthetic reasons. Well-planned tree-planting projects are an important component of global efforts to improve ecological and human well-being. But tree planting becomes problematic when it is promoted as a simple, silver bullet solution and overshadows other actions that have greater potential for addressing the drivers of specific environmental problems, such as taking bold and rapid steps to reduce deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions.

Huffington Post:

House Republicans on Wednesday advanced an appropriations bill for federal environmental agencies that would boost development of the same fossil fuels driving the myriad disasters that have ravaged the Northern Hemisphere this year.

The legislation includes sweeping funding cuts for the Environmental Protection Agency, the Interior Department and the White House’s Council of Environmental Quality. It would mandate numerous additional oil and gas lease sales, both on- and offshore, and would advance mining development, including in an area near Minnesota’s iconic Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness where the Biden administration has banned such extraction.

The legislation would also torpedo and stonewall protections for wild animals, and would rescind more than $9 billion provided by the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s signature climate law that Democrats passed last year.

Wildfire management is among the few programs that would see a significant rise in funding under the plan. Funds for the three main agencies that serve federally recognized tribes ― the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bureau of Indian Education and the Indian Health Service ― would remain roughly similar to last year.

With Democrats holding the White House and a slim majority in the Senate, the GOP plan has virtually no chance of becoming law in its current form. But it acts as a clear statement of the Republican Party’s environmental priorities in an era of accelerating climate change and biodiversity loss.

In an opening statement during Wednesday’s markup, Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), chair of the appropriations committee’s interior and environment subcommittee, introduced the 14-year-old daughter of his chief of staff. He voiced concern about her and other children’s futures — not whether they will have a recognizable planet to live on, but what failing to rein in government spending would supposedly mean for their retirement.

“I don’t know how you tell your children and your grandchildren that Social Security and Medicare will be there for you,” Simpson said. “If we don’t get [spending] under control, all we’re doing will be for naught.”

Associated Press:

Still, Curtis said he has seen an eagerness among Republicans to engage on the issue since he started the Conservative Climate Caucus two years ago. The group has grown to 84 Republicans, representing over one-third of the GOP conference.

Curtis said he decided to launch the caucus after he struggled to respond when asked about climate change by constituents in Utah, where he represents a district marked by ski resorts and national parks.

“I would get a lot of these young people who would come to town hall meetings and I would see the disappointment in their eyes when I didn’t have a good answer for them,” Curtis said. “I felt like, in many ways, we were losing a generation of Republicans on this issue.”