Dana Rohrabacher wants to yank down old trees and get rid of the rotting wood in rainforests. | AP Photos Do trees cause global warming?

Looking for a solution to global warming? Maybe start clear-cutting many of the world's forests, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher says.

The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs oversight subcommittee made it clear during a Wednesday hearing that he doesn't believe in man-made global warming.


But if it were true — and most of the world's scientists agree it is — Rohrabacher said he's hit on an answer by tackling the 80 to 90 percent of heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions "generated by nature itself": Namely, yank down old trees and get rid of the rotting wood in rainforests.

"Is there some thought being given to subsidizing the clearing of rainforests in order for some countries to eliminate that production of greenhouse gases?" the California Republican asked Todd Stern, the top U.S. climate diplomat and lead witness at the hearing. "Or would people be supportive of cutting down older trees in order to plant younger trees as a means to prevent this disaster from happening?"

Stern promised to deliver a technical expert from the State Department to get at the heart of Rohrabacher's questions. But he also tried to correct the record by pointing out that the focus of global warming policy actually centers on keeping the world's trees standing, especially in places like the Amazon, Congo and Indonesia.

He didn't bite on the merits of Rohrabacher's argument that trees cause global warming, which was reminiscent of Ronald Reagan's much-lampooned statement that trees cause pollution.

"I didn't want to be commenting on stuff I'm not expert on," Stern said afterward, adding: "If he wants to talk about the effect of rotting wood or whatever, we're happy to have someone come up who knows about it. I don't."

Jay Gulledge, a senior scientist at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, said Rohrabacher is correct that 80 to 90 percent of gross greenhouse gas emissions do come from nature, with humans producing the rest. But it's that small percentage that is changing the Earth's climate — not to mention that trees help absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in huge quantities.

"How he's using it is totally off the wall," Gulledge said. "It's beyond the pale. It makes no sense."

Rohrabacher delivered several other curveballs at the hearing, which seemed preordained to draw controversy thanks to its title: "UN Climate Talks and Power Politics — It's Not About the Temperature."

The subcommittee chairman complained about the locales of the annual U.N. conferences, most notably the 2007 meeting in Bali, Indonesia, where representatives from many countries famously booed the Bush administration when it momentarily opposed a deal to launch another round of climate talks.

"There, in one of the most opulent resort areas of the world, a playground for the rich, I might add a great place for surfers around the world to go to, there in this tropical paradise came people from all over the world, in their private airplanes, chartered airplanes," Rohrabacher said of the Bali negotiations. "A plan was drawn up to impose what has to be looked at in retrospect as a lower standard of living for a large number of people on this planet."

Stern didn't respond to Rohrabacher's criticism of the U.N. conference locations, which in recent years have ranged from frosty Poznan, Poland, and Copenhagen to sunny Cancun.

But he defended what the talks have accomplished in recent years, namely a softening of a key piece of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the 1992-era treaty negotiated by the George H.W. Bush administration. The agreement required rich nations to make binding commitments to reduce emissions, while developing powerhouses like China and India avoided having to do anything similar.

At the Copenhagen talks in 2009, world leaders agreed to keep working on a new climate treaty in which developing countries would accept binding requirements in exchange for access to tens of billions of dollars in foreign aid, starting with a $30 billion Green Fund and a longer-term $100 billion annual pool filled with public and private financing.

Rohrabacher repeatedly pressed Stern for specifics on the $100 billion total, including how it would differ from the other short-term account and what the U.S. contribution would be.

Stern explained that the U.S. contribution is still up in the air, though most of it would likely come from private donations. He said the funds would be disbursed only to countries that agree to open up the books on their emission reduction programs. And he tried to correct Rohrabacher on the lingo.

"It's not a fund, per se," Stern said. "It's a total of $100 billion of resources that would be mobilized for climate change."

House Republicans have routinely challenged the Obama administration's climate change policies, passing legislation that would restrict the EPA's regulatory powers and zero out funding for a number of domestic and international science programs.

But speaking with reporters after the hearing, Stern warned of major diplomatic fallout if House Republicans succeeded in forcing the United States to disengage on the international climate stage.

"This is seen to be one of the core issues, frankly, facing humanity, and for the United States to take itself out of the game and sit on the sidelines would be very detrimental to our overall standing and leverage and credibility in the world," he said. "We're obviously not doing that. We're doing just the opposite."

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 8:16 p.m. on May 25, 2011.