White house report on climate change

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Originally Posted by bae

In my case, I harvest real trees off my own land, trees that will have to be culled anyways for forest health. I walk out with a saw, and 5 minutes later I have a Christmas tree. Once Christmas is over, I usually use the tree for a pole for expedient construction, or it becomes part of the firewood pile. I have to think that's better than a fake tree.

Pretty much zero impact, since if I didn't harvest it, it'd burn down or decay anyways on its own. Net carbon change: zero.

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That's great. When I was young I used to cry when the tree was dragged out to the curb--SO ignominiously. I had come to think of it as my friend and it was being treated with no respect whatsoever. And I still think it is so ridiculous to put them in landfills. When we lived in a rural area, we just "recycled" the tree in the woods behind our house.

There are definitely two ways to look at it, but at this point, now that my kids are adults, I'd almost rather have no tree than an artificial one. I did have an artificial one for several years, because my MIL worked in the Macy Trim-A-Tree shop and I got it for free, so it's not that I'm hard-core against them. I just don't want to be bothered with a fake tree at this point. It would just be another thing in the garage 11 months of the year.

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Originally Posted by freein05

I am with bae on this one. I have always questioned if Pirus was good for the environment because of issues with the batteries. This comes from a liberal green person.

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The study I remember was looking at total environment costs from manufacture to disposal and pretty much agreed that it was not better, or maybe worse than an efficient all gas vehicle. Some of those environmental costs were not associated with greenhouse emissions, so if you only looked at that aspect, the Prius came out on top as being better. At least that's how I remember it. Not to defend the Prius, but one could argue in it's favor.