Know your CDMs from your SBSTAs 12 June 06

Mark,

as you say the issue of carbon credits for forestry and carbon sink projects is controversial. That’s because the Kyoto approach to forests is deeply flawed and destructive: It includes Annex I country (ie rich countries’) forests into carbon counting, allows carbon credits for afforestation abroad, but not for protecting old-growth forests in the South, and thus creates a recipe for rainforest destruction. After all, rich countries can improve their carbon budgets by improving their own forests and importing illegal rainforest timber instead.

My fear is that many NGOs and campaigners now shy away from the whole issue of carbon credits for forests and want to channel everything into clean energy.

This would be a complete disaster!

I spent some time last month reading up about carbon emissions from tropical deforestation, for one of the workshops at the CCC Conference. The best source is here: http://www.environmentaldefense.org/documents/4930_TropicalDeforestation_and_ClimateChange.pdf

It’s 123 pages, so here are three figures instead:

If we want to have any chance of avoiding more than 2 degrees C global warming, then humans must emit no more than 238 billion tons of carbon this century (my back of an envelope calculation, I must admit). That’s assuming that we can get up to 450ppm and still avoid 2 degrees C warming, and that 7 billion tons of carbon emitted per year will give no more than 2ppm annual increase in CO2 levels. Quite optimistic assumptions.

Even without a (quite likely) die-back of forests as a result of logging and canopy-thinning, business-as-usual is expected to lead to 85-130 billion tons of carbon emissions this century. And, in the worst case, and additional 50 billion tons of carbon could be lost from Indonesia’s peat alone.

Hence our chances of avoiding catastrophic global warming without including rainforest protection into a climate change agreement are pretty close to zero.

The Coalition of Rainforest Nations are pushing for an urgent amendment to the Kyoto Protocol:http://www.rainforestcoalition.org/

Their proposal is called ‘compensated reductions of deforestation’. Not a very catchy slogan, but the only proposal I have seen anywhere which has a real chance of protecting rainforests and restoring Indonesia’s peat (see the long paper above for a scientific discussion). It would channel billions of dollars into rainforest protection, have a clear verification process and binding commitments, be based on science, and be the only agreement which would bring at least some developing nations into the Kyoto process before 2012 (with real targets which, though adopted voluntarily will then become binding). Many scientists have endorsed the proposal, as have many rainforest nations, Brazilian NGOs (who came up with it), and Brazil is at least ‘cautiously supportive’.

If there is enough pressure in Nairobi this year, then it could be adopted and come in from 2008. It takes a 75% majority of the ratifying nations – and so far Russia are opposed (seems to have something to do with their own forestry policy, I think).

But so far there is hardly any awareness, let alone support for this, at least not in this country – although the stakes are extremely high!

Is this something you might be able to support? I really fear that one of the last chances to stop the vicious cycle of global warming and rainforest destruction, which both feed on each other, will be lost if governments, without any public or NGO pressure take the ‘easy option’ of doing nothing largely because they don’t want to offend Russia.

Mark, you mention CDM Watch.

May I put in a little plug here for Biofuel Watch, recently founded to campaign against unsustainable development of biofuels. Almost straight away we have received an inquiry from SinksWatch.

We are concerned by the recent analysis of the potential for biofuels by the Worldwatch Institute, whose gung-ho tones seemingly conflict with those of its founder Lester Brown and major European environmental groups.

And let’s not forget Esso’s Price Watch – see also here. That big tiger is watching in more ways than one!

Yes, I’m also very concerned about biofuels and the Worldwatch analysis. I’ll try and post something on here tomorrow.

Almuth – I haven’t read the full report (123 pages is beyond me at the moment!) – so can you just clarify the figures? Are you saying that half of our 2C CO2 budget (85-130 billion tons out of 238 billion tonnes) would be accounted for by tropical deforestation alone, irrespective of fossil fuel emissions?

Also, how do you calculate your 2C budget? I’ve been trying to do a similar thing for Six Degrees’ final chapter, though without actually using my own figures – I’m trying to rely on what’s already out there in the literature. The question of probabilities is also very vexing!

Nice to meet you at the CaCC conference, by the way. I was surprised, because for some reason I thought you were a bloke!

Since it’s not possible to say exactly how much carbon emitted leads to how much warming, here are some more certain figures instead:

Greenhouse gas emissions from tropical deforestation have been estimated as 25% of the total (up to 23% of CO2 emissions according to the 2001 IPCC report, but a slightly higher total figure because deforestation goes hand-in-hand agricultural expansion which, in the tropics, is linked to very high nitrous oxide emissions).

But, the 2001 IPCC report says nothing about tropical peat fires – that’s because there were virtually no peer reviewed studies until after it was published. Maximum estimate for Borneo’s peat fires was 2.5 billion tons of carbon in 1997/98, or 40% of total global carbon emissions – with an estimate of a 15% contribution to global carbon emissions annually (more one year, less the next). If that 15% figure is correct, that gives you a maximum possible contribution of 40% total emissions from ‘land use changes’, mainly in the tropics. Okay, it’s a guess (we’ll have to see what the 2007 IPCC report will say) but there is quite a lot in Nature about the peat fires which backs this up.

And, of course, even if we wanted to go by the UK government’s belief that reducing total emissions by 60% would be enough (which I doubt), that means the whole world would have to stop burning fossil fuels completely to reach even that target, unless deforestation and peat fires are tackled, and fast!

Almuth

Your figure of <=40% of CO2 emissions coming from peat fires is the same as Lovelock gives in
The Revenge of Gaia. I’d been hoping that was an exaggeration, but it appears it isn’t
(like so many depressing things in the book.)

This makes trying to stop Americans and Europeans driving and flying an act of very secondary importance.
It is also and act of very secondary difficulty.
Are the members of a proudly emerging nation going to listen to anything we suggest?
Islamic people are even less likely to be interested in what the West has to say
- and most of these are both.

It’s painfully ironic that so much of the burning off has been done,
so as to more easily plant palm-oil palms for biofuel.

It’s as though the human race unconsciously wants to commit suicide.

Mein Gott.

This is off-topic (more appropos for below), but I just read a great book review in THE HINDU (one of the better newspapers in the world) on GUARDIANS OF POWER: THE MYTH OF THE LIBERAL MEDIA, by David Cromwell and David Edwards, at http://www.hindu.com/2006/06/20/stories/2006062002381000.htm

It mentions env issues & GW, but they are only part of a much wider problem. Here goes:

“Putting the media under the scanner” by Arvind Sivaramakrishnan

A VERY senior United Nations official once observed to this writer that several NGOs had made the world take seriously issues such as the international trade rules, the destruction of the environment, and much else. At that time, some of the world’s largest corporations admitted their discomfort at being questioned over their involvement in such matters. That the questions were put by ordinary people was part of the corporations’ problem, because the press that published the questioning are themselves part of the international corporate establishment, a part which David Cromwell and David Edwards, in a most welcome examination of the mainstream press, describe as “less a window on the world and more a painting of a window on the world.” (David Cromwell and David Edwards, Guardians of Power: the myth of the liberal media, Pluto Press 2006). Cromwell and Edwards, editors of the journal Media Lens (www.medialens.org) , trace the current state of the press to the industrialisation of newspaper production in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The high costs of newspaper production meant that the thousands of small newspapers produced by ordinary people disappeared, to be replaced by large corporations, which in turn have been taken over by even larger ones. The Murdoch empire is well known, but it is less widely known that CBS are part of Westinghouse and that NBC are owned by General Electric. Westinghouse and GE are both heavily involved in weapons production and nuclear power. Professional journalism, with its own certifications and canons, also emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But, as Cromwell and Edwards show, professional journalism is a screen between the media’s corporate owners and its public consumers. Furthermore, it is a barely-noticed fact that the professional media take their central task as reporting what the powerful and the very wealthy think; some of the famous names quoted are astonishingly frank about that, and apparently unaware of the meaning of what they are saying. Secondly, professional journalists often talk of the need to `hang’ their work on major events like wars, scandals, or disasters. Longer-term systematic analysis and information do not figure. Thirdly, corporate advertising so dominates the financing of the mass media that certain subjects are simply not covered. Even the law prevents certain kinds of action by corporations; environmentally sound action is illegal if it damages the profits a company is legally obliged to demonstrate to its shareholders. (That environmentally sound action turns out over a longer period to produce better returns is apparently ruled out by the practice of short-term quotation of returns.) No conspiracy Cromwell and Edwards insist that there is no conspiracy here, and no intentional complicity on the part of professional journalists. There is rather, a very widespread sense among the professionals that the world is as the powerful and the wealthy say it is and that all other accounts are somehow marginal or constitute some form of fringe dissent. That Cromwell and Edwards are scrupulously careful, maintaining unfailingly politeness and accurate in their exchanges with famous editors and journalists — many of whom respond with vituperation or silence — gives their analysis greater weight. The authors’ examples of journalistic submission to power would be farcical but for the mass slaughter that has gone almost unreported. The obvious example is Iraq, over which the repeated and accurate assertions by figures such as the U.N. weapons inspectors Scott Ritter and Hans Blix that Iraq had been fundamentally disarmed by 1998 were almost never reported. It is scarcely believable that the same journalists who had reported in 1998 that the weapons inspectors had been removed on British and American orders openly said in 2003 that the inspectors had been thrown out by Iraq. Needless to say it is the long-term, often meticulously calculated, destruction wrought upon entire peoples that receives least attention from the mainstream press; even some professional journalists have expressed disquiet about this, with one BBC reporter saying his editors wanted no `explainers’ over Iraq, only `bang-bang stuff’. One result is that the world’s public have been kept largely ignorant, for example, of the effects on ordinary Iraqis of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Thoroughly researched and intensively peer-reviewed work like the study published in The Lancet showing the excess deaths caused by the 2003 invasion as being around 100,000 were instantly dismissed by the U.S. and U.K. governments as “flawed,” with the mainstream press dutifully echoing the criticisms and not attempting serious evaluation of the criticisms or the research. A similar elision had occurred earlier over research reports showing excess Iraqi infant mortality caused by a decade of sanctions as about 500,000. Behind the scenes, the U.S. and the U.K. were engaged in the calculated destruction of the U.N.’s oil-for food programme, ensuring that nine out of ten contracts would be approved but the tenth, which was essential for the other nine, rejected. The U.N. assistant secretaries-general, Denis Halliday, who called this genocide, and Hans von Sponeck, who made this public, were simply ignored by the mainstream press. Much the same would hold for the barely-reported use by the U.S. of depleted uranium in armour-piercing shells; about 350 tonnes of the substance are scattered over the war zones in Iraq in nothing less than a form of nuclear war. Cromwell and Edwards go on to find even nastier implications in those silences, which amount to the complicity of much mainstream journalism with established power. In respect of Afghanistan, Cromwell and Edwards conclude that “the suffering of impoverished brown-skinned people in Third World countries just does not matter very much to established corporate journalists.” The prospect of mass starvation caused by allied bombing — and the consequent 3000 deaths a month in Afghanistan — received next to no attention in the mainstream British press, in sharp contrast to the intensive, varied, and detailed coverage of the floods of refugees in Kosovo in 1999; but on that occasion, NATO governments wanted coverage to help them justify bombing which — even on the U.S. State Department’s evidence — caused the refugee crisis by provoking a savage and indiscriminate backlash by the Serbian government against all Kosovans. Sections of the mainstream press even argued for pre-emptive bombing, and in response Cromwell and Edwards cite Noam Chomsky as saying this would be like advocating that the British government bomb cities such as Boston, where Northern Ireland paramilitary groups were suspected of raising funds. Sadly, the complicity goes even further. In 1999, the Clinton administration refused to discuss an Australian proposal for an international force for East Timor, and the mainstream press assisted, saying East Timor was “too far away.” Nobody reminded Tony Blair of his earlier comment that “genocide can never be a purely internal matter.” Indonesia’s then dictatorship was very brutal and a big buyer of western armaments. Cromwell and Edwards identify similar journalistic amnesia in respect of Haiti, and show how the likes of Clinton, Blair, and Reagan — whose funding of Latin American death squads in the 1980s was barely mentioned in his obituaries — can be assured of an almost repulsively hagiographic press. Inevitably, work so as detailed and attentive raises wider questions, and the chapter on corporate plotting against environment-protection movements is terrifying. The authors even call this “the ultimate media betrayal.” Fortunately, it seems that at present the climate-change deniers and their corporate cronies are on the defensive in face of the evidence. Furthermore, various eminent journalists, such as the ex-BBC reporter Rageh Omaar, who gained a substantial reputation during the invasion of Iraq (for reportage which Cromwell and Edwards criticise), have pointed out that much of the news showing foreign correspondents against an Iraqi background is neither shot in Iraq nor gathered by western reporters. Those few still in Iraq stay in the Green Zone, and use film shot by Iraqi freelancers; the backdrops are provided in the studios back in the western world. Omaar, now with Al Jazeera TV, is clearly troubled by this tendency and intends to assist Al Jazeera — itself not always popular with Middle Eastern governments — in showing a more complete picture (Ian Burrell, interview with Rageh Omaar, The Independent, May 15, 2006). Others are blunter. The novelist A.L. Kennedy, writing in The Guardian on May 1, 2006, says “no source that hyped the pre-Iraq invasion [expletive deleted] has handed itself over to The Hague as complicit in crimes against humanity (àa Radio Milles Collines in Rwanda).” The philosopher and environmental campaigner George Monbiot concludes in The Guardian on July 13, 2004 that “news has become the propaganda of the victor.” The audience can also have an impact. Despite the aggressive reactions of eminent journalists to criticism, Cromwell and Edwards note that accurate criticism has an effect on subsequent reporting, and they have considerable confidence in the ability of the many fine journalists working for non-mainstream media to maintain the kind of quality they argue the mainstream press lacks. In the end it is up to us to be alert and interested followers not only of events but of who reports them, and how and for whom they do so. If we allow the mainstream press to get away with the things Cromwell and Edwards show them doing, they will continue to do them, and we shall end up captives and victims of unaccountable power and its servants.

(Dr. Sivaramakrishnan is lecturer in Social Sciences and Law at Tauntons College, Southampton, U.K.)