Talk:Vatican Climate Forest

Scam?
Calling this possible future forest "symbolic" may be putting it too nicely! -69.87.203.121 (talk) 16:48, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

www.popsci.com/environment/article/2008-07/carbon-discredit?page=3
 * Carbon Discredit
 * By Kalee Thompson
 * Popular Science July 2008 p.58

Russ George knew how to fight global warming: Grow rainforests' worth of plantlife in the open ocean, plantlife that would suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. He had the boat, the money and the team to make it happen. Everything was going according to plan—that is, until the environmentalists mobilized

On land, storing and mitigating atmospheric carbon is already big business. In Europe, any corporation that emits an excess of CO2 has to pay about $30 a ton for it on the European Union's carbon market, the world's largest. That market doesn't allow credits from carbon-sequestering projects known as "sinks" (at least not yet; the value and trustworthiness of all such efforts is the subject of heated debate). But the credits can be sold on voluntary exchanges, or directly to consumers and businesses that want to reduce their carbon footprint.

These kinds of voluntary efforts have already made trees grown to sequester carbon into a fast-expanding business, as George knows well. The Planktos CEO was also a founder of KlimaFa, a company that plans to suck up carbon by growing forests in a national park in Hungary. KlimaFa made international headlines last summer with a donation of carbon credits to the Vatican that, George claimed, would cancel out all of the papal state's 2007 emissions (despite the fact that no trees have been planted yet). The move was marketing genius: Even without the full blessing of the scientific community, George could now claim to be doing God's work.