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Letter: Population wise, Williams Lake a world leader fighting global warming

Williams Lake residents have been bombarded with dire warnings of global warming.

Editor:

Williams Lake residents have been bombarded with dire warnings of global warming, so the question is: how does Williams Lake stack up against the rest of the world? Is Williams Lake doing its fair share?

These are questions many of us find ourselves asking.

Greater Williams Lake and area, according to my calculation represents, give or take a digit or two, .0000000000001314 per cent, of a world population of 7,390,000,000,000 people.

Let’s just say in, world population, the population of the greater Williams Lake area is virtually invisible.

So, according to my calculation, if everyone in Williams Lake quit driving their vehicles, and if everyone quit heating their homes and offices, and if we shut down all of our local industries we would not make an infinitesimal dent on global warming.

But, we want to do our fair share, so how do we stack up on that score?

One tree — and we certainly have oodles of them — can remove 12 kilograms of carbon dioxide annually, and that equals removing 17,600 kilometres of car emissions.

It seems we need to do as the Romans did; we need to line our highways with trees.

One hectare of trees can remove 32.12 tons of particles and carbon dioxide annually.

Our lawns and ranches, 232 square metres of turf, absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and release enough oxygen for a family of four to breathe.

The process is called photosynthesis. Photosynthesis gives plants and trees the means to take in carbon and use solar energy to generate oxygen.

American history teaches about a character that was called Johnny Appleseed and, actually, he did exist.

His real name was John Chapman. He was born in Leominster Massachusetts in 1774; his dream was to produce so many apples that no one would go hungry.

What he did not know at his time, was that planting trees would remove carbon dioxide from the air and produce oxygen.

With today’s knowledge, maybe we all need to be planting trees.

Evergreen trees work best because they work year round.

To encourage tree planting our B.C. forestry service should have an annual day of giving free seedlings.

As it now stands population wise, Williams Lake and area is an absolute world leader in reducing atmospheric carbon and fighting global warming. We should, and can, take great pride in this.

Hooray for greater Williams Lake.

Doug Wilson

Williams Lake