Greening ain’t easy…
Lest you thought fixing global warming was all about driving less and buying better lightbulbs (and believe me, I was plenty comfortable with that assessment), this great article in last week’s New Yorker lays out just how many ways there are to tackle the program and the political forces yanking at the sleeves of each.
One scary example: Did you know about "carbon colonialism?" Because I sure didn’t.
Just two countries—Indonesia and Brazil—account for about ten per
cent of the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere. Neither
possesses the type of heavy industry that can be found in the West, or
for that matter in Russia or India. Still, only the United States and
China are responsible for greater levels of emissions. That is because
tropical forests in Indonesia and Brazil are disappearing with
incredible speed.
“It’s really very simple,” John O. Niles told me.
Niles, the chief science and policy officer for the environmental group
Carbon Conservation, argues that spending five billion dollars a year
to prevent deforestation in countries like Indonesia would be one of
the best investments the world could ever make. “The value of that land
is seen as consisting only of the value of its lumber,” he said. “A
logging company comes along and offers to strip the forest to make some
trivial wooden product, or a palm-oil plantation. The governments in
these places have no cash. They are sitting on this resource that is
doing nothing for their economy. So when a guy says, ‘I will give you a
few hundred dollars if you let me cut down these trees,’ it’s not easy
to turn your nose up at that. Those are dollars people can spend on
schools and hospitals.”
The ecological impact of decisions like that are devastating.
Decaying trees contribute greatly to increases in the levels of
greenhouse gases. Plant life absorbs CO2. But when forests
disappear, the earth loses one of its two essential carbon sponges (the
other is the ocean). The results are visible even from space. Satellite
photographs taken over Indonesia and Brazil show thick plumes of smoke
rising from the forest. According to the latest figures, deforestation
pushes nearly six billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere
every year. That amounts to thirty million acres—an area half the size
of the United Kingdom—chopped down each year. Put another way,
according to one recent calculation, during the next twenty-four hours
the effect of losing forests in Brazil and Indonesia will be the same
as if eight million people boarded airplanes at Heathrow Airport and
flew en masse to New York.
From both a political and an economic perspective, it would be
easier and cheaper to reduce the rate of deforestation than to cut back
significantly on air travel. It would also have a far greater impact on
climate change and on social welfare in the developing world.
Possessing rights to carbon would grant new power to farmers who, for
the first time, would be paid to preserve their forests rather than
destroy them. Unfortunately, such plans are seen by many people as
morally unattractive. “The whole issue is tied up with the misconceived
notion of ‘carbon colonialism,’ ” Niles told me. “Some activists do not
want the Third World to have to alter their behavior, because the
problem was largely caused by us in the West.”
Oy.