Environmental Ponderance

US News and World Report
Issue, 25 February 2008

"Wide Open Spaces for Sale", Page 9, and "Rethinking the Environment", Page 18

Unused property could be used to plant trees and algae to offset the carbon produced by urban sprawl. One thing that keeps coming to mind is Fort Carson with the "red rock" yard landscaping. This was supposedly put into place because of a draught several years ago. Why not plant some form of carbon muncher? (In a recent article, it is estimated that deforestation is contributing 25 to 30 percent of the global warming problem.) In fact, why doesn't Colorado lead the way and launch a new green practice that requires each municipality to sustain enough foliage to offset greenhouse gases produced? For example, we know that every gallon of gas contributes 19 pounds of carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere. My car uses about 13 gallons a week, so I am guilty of 247 pounds of CO2 per week, or 12,844 pounds per year. And that is solely for my car. That does not include electricity usage in my house or any of the other contributing factors. (When I came home on environmental morale leave, R&R, I payed like $150 in carbon credits at http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/sgw_tellafriend.asp. This money is supposed to go into research and development for clean energy.) I am curious how many trees I would be required to maintain to offset my carbon contribution.

One reason for not implementing this initiative is the use of water in an already strained environment. We are seeing more draughts as global warming escalates. How about reutilization? The system I've been thinking about for some of my future experiments is a dual transport system, one for black water and one for grey water. The grey water is put into a filtering system and cycled through a reservoir before being piped to reclamation areas, such as a tree reserve. Next question, what is the cost-benefit ratio? What will be the positive and negative ecological impacts?

This also brings up the, "But how do we pay for it?" question. Taxes, of course. Add another nickel or dime to each gallon of fuel and use that for the reserves and for clean fuel alternative research, such as wind turbines, hydraulic power plants, and solar energy. Where is the initiative that says, "Colorado will be clean energy by 2025," or some other such thing?