Sunday, October 24, 2010

Trees are good

A version of this story appeared in today's local paper.
Trees do a great job cleaning up the air.
What are the implications for policy?

2 comments:

Loren Albertson said...

These types of findings can allow the government to create market incentive for planting more trees/plants/etc. Subsidies, tax breaks, standards, etc set by the government could require major pollution sources to have so many acres of plants to help absorb the air pollution. The government could also provide subsidies to farmers, developers, or other industries NOT to develop an area and allow the natural vegetation to absorb some of the air pollutants from outlying areas. This process is common near coal plants where carbon sequestering is absorbed by nearby algae ponds.

Unknown said...

As Loren previously stated, this will create a HUGE incentive to allocate funds towards forest conservation and national park reserves. The one problem is that, as found by the research, the trees can absorb TOO much and literally kill themselves. We must be careful of a somewhat pseudo-tragedy of the commons. In which factories begin to emit more toxins believing that some one somewhere has planted a plot of trees. Whereas, a factory across the world is increasing pollution while believing the same thing.