The United States is an urban-industrial society. This means we are a nation of machines — cars, airplanes, factories, ships, lawn mowers, hot water heaters, and machines that generate electricity for us to use. Most run on fuels that contain carbon and send carbon to the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide, an invisible and odorless gas. Each of us in the U.S. is responsible for the production of 2.3 tons of carbon to conduct our lives every year. About half of that comes from our cars.

Because American society is more urban and industrial than much of the rest of the world, each of us in America is responsible for putting a lot more carbon into the atmosphere than others who live on this planet. Here’s how we rank compared to some other parts of the world. These numbers are the tons of carbon that are emitted to the atmosphere producing the goods, services and transportation each of us enjoys. The number is tons per capita — how much each of us is responsible for each year.

USA . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2.3 tons                     Japan . . . . . . . . . . . .0.9 tons

Canada . . . . . . . . . . . .1.8 tons                     China . . . . . . . . . . . .0.2 tons

USSR: . . . . . . . . . . . . .1.6 tons                   India . . . . . . . . . . . . .0.1 tons

W. Europe . . . . . . . . . .0.9 tons

Being in first place on this list means that we Americans must do all we can to reduce carbon in the atmosphere. Why? Read on. . .

You’ve heard of the “greenhouse effect” that some scientists say is leading to a hotter and hotter planet. These scientists believe that the excess of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases we’ve put into the atmosphere will heat the air causing sea levels to rise and could possibly contribute to the flooding of several large cities. In addition, there may be more severe storms, more severe droughts, food and water shortages, and possibly more starvation and sickness around the world. You’d like to do something about this? You’d like to help reduce the suffering that might occur with global warming and climate change? It won’t be difficult, but it will mean making a commitment over a period of time — just like to a friend, to a brother or sister, to a wife or husband, or to your child.

You can reduce the amount of carbon you put into the atmosphere by conserving electricity, conserving energy for home heating and cooling, and using your car more efficiently. You can also plant and care for trees. How can trees help?

Trees and other green plants grow using the carbon from atmospheric carbon dioxide. Therefore, the larger trees grow, the more carbon they remove from the atmosphere. If you plant and care for trees you can take personal responsibility for your carbon and do your part to prevent global warming and climate change.

Good question! It depends on how old you are and what other steps you take to reduce the amount of carbon you release into the atmosphere. For example, if you’re now 20 years old, you will need to plant and care for 80 tree seedlings to remove and store the amount of carbon you’ll be responsible for during the rest of your life. If you are 50 years old, you will need to plant and care for 500 seedlings. As you can see, the sooner one gets started in life, the fewer trees are required. If you take steps to reduce the amount of carbon you produce, you will need to plant fewer trees.

A newborn baby requires only 50 seedlings to sequester all the carbon for his or her lifetime. The reason it’s good to get started early in life is that trees, at first, grow and store carbon in small amounts each year. When they are about 10-20 years old, they enter the fast-growing period of their lives and store increasingly more carbon each year.

Yes. In addition to reducing your energy usage and carbon emissions, you can care for young trees. Many trees die in the first 10 years of life. So, you can protect and water these young trees during this very critical phase to insure they will survive to their most productive years of carbon storage. Let’s figure out how many young trees you can “steward” (a nice term that covers many kinds of care you can give a tree) for them to absorb your carbon? In the chart below, find your age (or estimate between the ages listed) in the left column. The columns to the right tell you the number of trees you need to steward for the rest of your life based on the present tree size. Nursery trees are about 1 inch in diameter, sold in 15 gallon root ball containers. Ten year old trees are about 3 inches in diameter.

It means you need to steward fewer trees. As a rule of thumb, if you find trees that are twice the diameter of 10 year old trees, then you can cut in half the number of trees you’ll steward for the rest of your life.  Furthermore, if you can keep a grand old tree from dying, you’re preventing all that carbon from returning to the atmosphere. The death of one 70 year old tree will release over three tons of carbon back into the atmosphere. Every year you can keep that old tree from dying is a big help.

No. That’s why it’s important to begin planting new trees. In American cities and towns there are about 1-1/2 billion trees. That’s just about 6 trees for each American. If every American chose to take responsibility for his and her lifetime carbon emissions through stewardship (which would be wonderful), there wouldn’t be enough established urban trees to go around. So we’ve got to plant a whole bunch more.