- Tree cause more pollution than automobiles do." -- Ronald Reagan, 1981
Biologists all know this (the source is CBC News):
The world's trees, shrubs and other plants do produce massive amounts of hydrocarbons - nine times as much as do automobiles, by some counts.
Those gases, most notably isoprene, are major ingredients of ozone, a lung irritant linked to asthma and other serious respiratory ailments.
Ozone formation also requires a second ingredient: nitrogen oxides, a byproduct of the combustion of fossil fuels. A major source of those gases is the tailpipe of just about every car, truck and bus on the planet. [Catalytic converters were introduced on a wide scale in 1975 to decrease production of nitrogen oxides.]
A forest of 10,000 of the trees emits perhaps 22 pounds of hydrocarbons an hour - the equivalent of spilling a dozen gallons of gasoline and allowing it to evaporate, according to an estimate by the University of California Cooperative Extension.
Those emissions can contribute to ozone formation wherever there is enough sunlight and a ready source of nitrogen oxides.Wow, I miss Ronald Reagan.
Haha I knew you'd take the bait on that one.
ReplyDeleteGotta love it.
I also love how you're forgetting the biggest reason why trees are actually better for the environment than cars.
Troll bait FTW
The best part of blogging is how much I learn.
ReplyDeleteThe reason I started the blog was simply for me to figure out the Bakken and try to keep things straight.
I could have done it on Word documents, but it would have gotten unwieldy. HTML works best and could have been kept private, but I wanted to share it with others.
I love the "give and take" on certain political issues and the environment is one that particularly interests me, as you can tell by my frequent posts on the subject.
With regard to comments, I post 90% of them, but I don't post comments that don't add anything to the discussion.
Without question, trees are better for the environment than automobiles.
But I did not know that trees produce that much hydrocarbon. Reagan had a lot of one-liners that had a lot of truth behind them. Like Steven Chu, current SecEnergy, Reagan thought in derivatives and "unintended consequences" -- which I am frequently unable to do, but that's why I blog. Others point out things I miss, and I can't begin to tell you how many great investment tips that the blog has generated for me and for others, although that is not the purpose of the blog.
And yes, I do try to bring new readers to my blog. Google search engines are great.
Thank you very much for taking the time to comment and coming back to the blog on a regular basis.