No, I’m not talking about California’s wild fires, but there could be a case made for how better forest management could foster a healthier environment, including less combustibles ending up as CO2. Instead, the imperative to figure out how to fight, to end underground coal fires.
Stacey Feldman discusses this (The Truth About Coal Fires) over at Solve Climate’s blog. “A key point: underground coal fires in China alone” might be contributing more CO2 into the atmosphere than the US auto and light truck fleet!
Considering that many of these fires that have been burning for decades (in India, for example, there is at least one that has been burning for over 90 years), figuring out better ‘underground’ fire fighting approaches should become a global priority.
Although extinguishing these fires would be costly, it would reduce carbon emissions without the major disruptions to individual national economies mentioned above. And it would further benefit nations by eliminating the loss of their coal fields. As such, it might be possible to work out some international cost-sharing arrangement to attack those fires now, without waiting for all nations to agree on a wide-ranging treaty to limit carbon dioxide emissions.
Sounds like something to work on starting, well, now …