Urban Cooling: From Congestion Tax to Metro Transit Levy!

摘要

Tim Colebatch is right ["Warming: it's time to come clean," Age, 18/01], it is indeed time to cool our lifestyle. News from Nature ["Methane emissions from terrestrial plants ..."12/01] however, indicates that the "green deserts" [trees] we're now planting as "greenhouse offsets" may not be the substitute for changing our energy-use patterns because trees generate methane and methane is 40 times more "powerful" as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Remarkably, the cover story in the current issue [Fall, 2005] of Yale University's Environment Yale, "As a Remedy to Global Warming, Do Forests Matter?" written without knowledge of the Nature article, suggests that plantations will struggle to substitute for planetary deforestation let alone compensate for fossil fuel use and that for complex ecological reasons it would be better to stop forest removal rather than plant ecologically simple tree crops.