65,000 iles of interstae highways With a grass width of 52 feet, and 5,280 feet to the mile, we find that we have about 6.35 acres of tillable land for each mile of interstate. 65,000 miles times 6.35 acres gives you 4.1 million acres. At the second link (above) they talk about planting swichgrass for making ethanol (not yet commercially feasible) but you could plant a fast growing variety of tree there and harvest it (and replant of course) and they could be used in ethanol production or other industrial applications which are starting to use bio-mass as a fuel source.
An acre of
Tulip trees (Liriodendron tulipifera) planted in New York, stores about
12,826 lbs (or 5,830 kiloGrams) of CO2 per yr so the 4.1 million acres would store 567 Billion lbs of CO2 per year (or 283 million tons).
According to the Environmental Defense Fund transortation emissions of CO2 comes to
302 million metric tons of CO2 per year, which I believe translates into 332 million English/American (2,000) tons.
NOte 283 million tons of CO2 stored each year by the tree plantings along inter-states as caculated above comes to about 85% of the total transportation emissions per year. And that works out to about 4% of the World's total carbon emissions.
Hm-m-m-m-m. IF my calculations are right this sounds promising.
