[jae471]

Which means that the US is doing twice as much as the other civilized nations to reduce global warming. Paper (and the CO2 it takes to grow it) that ends up in landfills is removed from the biosphere for quite a long time. What we NEED to be doing is RECYCLING LESS PAPER, and land-filling MORE.

Huh? Are you trying to say that because we use more paper, we grow more trees, which reduces CO2? Or that we should simply remove the carbon from the system, via a landfill.

[crz]

One acre of young healthy growing timber/trees removes about 13 tons of gasses and dusts from the air each year. In turn it/they release as much in Oxygen into the air. In contrast, an old age forest which is stagnant and in the process of dying, will do nothing, an old growth forest is the end cycle of a stand. Do humans keep growing the older they get? its the same with all living things. Cant tell the fruits and nuts that though.

[Wonder Warthog]

"Huh? Are you trying to say that because we use more paper, we grow more trees, which reduces CO2? Or that we should simply remove the carbon from the system, via a landfill."

Both, actually. Recycling ANY carbonaceous material that comes from a plant is "bass-ackwards" from the perspective that we want to "reduce the greenhouse warming effect" (not that I believe that the current warming has anything to do with a human-induced cause--I think changing solar intensity, epicycles in the earths orbit, and the newly discovered contribution from cosmic rays explain it handily).

To do that, we need to 1) use nuclear power far more intensely, 2) move to a hydrogen-based transmission and storage system, and 3) STOP recycling paper and cardboard.