Flying clouds the real climate culprit {forest destruction} (BBC)

[eppur_se_muova]

VIEWPOINT
Martin Wright

The aviation industry has become public enemy number one for environmental groups, says Martin Wright. But, he argues in this week's Green Room, they should focus their efforts on "the real elephant in the room" - forest destruction.
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It is already the largest single source of carbon emissions after energy, contributing up to 10 times as much as aviation.

The Stern Report, no less, warned that rainforest destruction alone would, in the next four years, release more carbon into the atmosphere than every flight from the dawn of aviation until 2025.

Burning forests produces a particularly nasty double whammy of warming. As they burn, they send vast swathes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And once they're gone, they can't soak up the carbon from industry, cars and power plants.

But despite all this, people get far more exercised over the evils of aviation than they ever do over forest loss.
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more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7201114.stm

[pitohui]

1. i agree but forest destruction won't be stopped because of $$$

every tree ever chopped down was chopped down because there was a buck in it for somebody

it's fun to pick on airlines, they are incompetent, rude, uncomfortable, give poor service and poor performance, and everybody hates them, and they smell bad too, plus they're in bankruptcy half the time and just generally piss people off so it's easy to get people behind cursing the aviation industry as the great satan of the world

but when it comes to trees...well...at the end of the day we couldn't even save our own forests, take a drive around the country sometime, you can go hours and see nothing but agricultural desert or pine tree desert, a few "real" trees might be planted at a state welcome center but that's about it

once we destroyed our own forests we lost the moral authority to tell anyone else what to do

[patch1234]

2. tax on international jet fuel is zero

tax on jet fuel for domestic (US) flight is four cents a gallon