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N O V E M B E R
 2 0 0 9Issue 34
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GUYANA - A MODEL OF FOREST PROTECTION THAT COULD SOLVE THE CLIMATE CRISIS
A Copenhagen deal must enable countries like ours to generate an income by conserving forests rather than cutting them down The UN general assembly this week is going to change the world. This is because quiet conversations in meeting rooms and corridors around the UN complex will shape the world's climate negotiations in Copenhagen in December — and all of our lives, and those of every generation that follows. And this is all going to happen because of trees. This week, among the talk of recession and growth, defense and terrorism, economic stimuli and trade sanctions, world leaders will discuss one of the key solutions that we need to focus on to tackle climate change — the world's forests. Deforestation is responsible for almost 20% of the world's carbon emissions – more than all of the cars, planes, ships, trucks and trains on earth put together. On top of this, forests and other biological systems are the only viable only way of actually removing CO2 from the atmosphere. So stopping deforestation is one of the most obvious and immediate solutions to climate change. The particular solution the UN will discuss centers around a set of ideas called Redd (Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) that looks set to be a key pillar of the forthcoming Copenhagen climate agreement. Redd should help to lay to rest one of the greatest mistakes of modern times — the failure to include a mechanism for protecting forests in the Kyoto protocol. Redd should be good news for Guyana, because we have a lot of trees, and a bold plan to make these trees the economic generator of our nation by offering their services in removing CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it for the nations who have been generating the emissions.  In fact, more than three-quarters of our nation is covered with trees, and we have been able to keep it that way while many similar nations have suffered from rampant deforestation. But Redd will only work if the governments of the world provide the money to make conserving forests a viable alternative to cutting them down, and it is essential that the UN delegates realize this. A recent report estimated that Guyana could generate approximately $500m a year by cutting its forests – money that is desperately needed for healthcare, education and infrastructure in a poor nation such as ours. But the world needs our forests to prevent climate change – what should we do? Since I last came to New York to call for forest conservation a little over a year ago, the world has lost an area of forest the size of my entire country – more than 15m hectares, with huge impacts on the climate for many years to come. This has not happened out of malice or ignorance, but because most of the world's forested nations have no alternative but to generate income by cutting their forests. Of course, tackling deforestation is only one issue that the international community needs to address in order to stop climate change. Fundamentally, the Copenhagen agreement must involve commitments to reduce global carbon emissions to keep the temperature rise to at most 2C by 2050. But forest conservation is an essential part of the solution and, if Guyana's model is adopted for Redd, it will overcome this and put the planet on a new path, where protecting forests is more economically prudent than cutting them down, and where we will have a chance to prevent climate change from defining this century — and prevent our generation being remembered as the one that failed.  GUYANA COULD USE FOREST PROTECTION CASH - BUT NOT UNDER FALSE PRETENSES Unlike in Brazil and Indonesia, there is no pressure to turn the rainforests of Guyana into farmland The bargain implied in the UN's program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation (Redd) could indeed be good news for Guyana, as its President Bharrat Jagdeo suggested earlier this week. But what Jagdeo fails to appreciate is that a bargain has two sides. In exchange for cash for adaptation to climate change, donor countries will want to see that Guyana reduces its forest carbon emissions verifiably. Today, poorly controlled mining for gold and diamonds, and high-grade timber for Asian factories are the main causes of deforestation and degradation. My estimate is that tropical rain forests of Guyana emit 11.4m tones of carbon a year from these sources and from agricultural clearance. President Jagdeo has repeatedly assured the gold miners and timber loggers that their activities can continue as usual or perhaps with a bit of extra law enforcement. He wants the donor money, but is unwilling to explain to the people of Guyana that they would need to change their approach to forest use. About one quarter of the working population depends on the mining and logging, so stopping or curtailing those activities implies a massive change in livelihoods. Nowhere does the president explain this to the people, nor has there been any public calculation of the costs of such a transformation. What the president promotes within Guyana is an "avoided threatened deforestation" scheme, with money given to Guyana in return for it protecting forests deemed under threat of being chopped down. But his scheme is based on the improbable scenario of government-sponsored destructive logging and mining which would destroy about 4% of the country's forests, or about 1.5m acres, every year for the next 25 years, followed by conversion to agricultural land. Yet the soils under the forests are among the least fertile on the planet, there is no significant agricultural demand for these soils (the rate of deforestation in Guyana due to agriculture is currently about 0.1% a year) and there are no trials to demonstrate the ecological sustainability or financial profitability of such a scenario. Unlike Brazil and Indonesia, there is no large rural population crying out for more farmland. So the presidential appeal for money to conserve forests in the face of threats is false: there are no such threats, unless some planned road building in the forest interior of the country is even more careless than usual. Guyana's National Agricultural Research Institute has been conspicuously silent during the frequent presidential speeches on his avoided deforestation scenario. The core of Jagdeo's call is simply an appeal for money, mainly for adaptation to climate change. Such adaptation would take the form of emergency measures to mend the country's crumbling sea defences (90% of the population, the economy and the agricultural land is on a coastal plain below the level of high tide), to rehabilitate the drainage and irrigation schemes which have been silting up for decades, and to build new roads and to improve the profitability of current low-technology agriculture. This is fine for a short-term national development plan, but it has nothing to do with saving or protecting the country's forests through Redd. Future donors for Jagdeo's plan need to be aware of Guyana's low rating in most international indices of national governance. Transparency International rates Guyana at 126 out of 180 countries in terms of perceived levels of corruption, and its ranking has declined over the four years of assessment. Another reason for caution is that the president has created new units in his own office to handle climate change money, thus avoiding oversight by the National Assembly, even though his office is censured annually and at length by the auditor general on its inefficient use and incomplete reporting of public finances. Guyana is the second poorest country in South America, and certainly could make use of more Redd and donor aid. But not on the false premises raised by the president and not through his office. |
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US PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA IN THE NEW GLOBAL WARMING FIGHT Stonewalling by opponents means key legislation is unlikely to be in place by the Copenhagen summit
Barack Obama's efforts to forge a new American consensus around the need for action on climate change has run into a brick wall of Republican opposition, with senators threatening a boycott of a proposed law to cut carbon emissions. The Senate opens a three-day blockbuster of hearings this week, calling 54 administration officials and environment experts to try to push ahead on a climate change law before a meeting in Copenhagen that is supposed to produce a global action plan on climate change. With that deadline looming, Obama has made his most forceful appeal to date for Congress to act on climate change. The president said on Friday that Americans had now arrived at a point of convergence on the need to move towards cleaner energy. "I do believe that a consensus is growing," he said. Those still not persuaded, he said in a speech at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), were outside the mainstream. "The naysayers, the folks who would pretend that this is not an issue, they are being marginalized," Obama said. "The closer we get, the harder the opposition will fight and the more we'll hear from those whose interests or ideology run counter to the much-needed action that we're engaged in." But a threat by a powerful Republican senator to stay away from bill-drafting sessions diminishes the already slim hopes that Congress will pass a law reducing US greenhouse gas emissions before international negotiations in Copenhagen in December.  James Inhofe, the Oklahoma senator who gained notoriety for calling global warming a hoax, told reporters late on Friday that he and fellow Republicans on the environment and public works committee might refuse to participate. Inhofe said Republicans would stay away from bill-writing sessions unless they got enough time to review more than 800 pages of proposals in detail. That stay-away would deny the committee a quorum. "We're not being unreasonable," Inhofe said. "The only leverage we have is the quorum leverage, and if we get stonewalled, we'll use it." Republican opposition to climate change legislation is not rock solid. Last week, a leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, wrote a column in the New York Times in support of legislation. "Global climate change is not a religion to me but I do believe carbon pollution is harmful to the environment and I want to find a way to fix that problem," Graham said on Friday. Such divisions – and the unrelenting timetable – have discouraged even the biggest supporters of the climate change legislation. Last week, John Kerry, who helped write the bill, admitted for the first time it was unlikely to pass before Copenhagen. However, Obama appeared to be just getting into the fight, indirectly accusing the business lobby that has spearheaded the fight against climate change of cynicism. Obama's claims of an emerging national consensus were undermined by a poll last week showing a sharp decline in the number of Americans convinced that there was solid scientific evidence of global warming. Only 57% of Americans believe that the Earth's atmosphere is warming – a sharp fall from the 77% in 2007, said the poll of 1,500 people by the Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press. GREEN VENTURE FUND RAISES $ 1 BILLION A Silicon Valley investor with a penchant for green technology raised $1 billion for a new venture fund. His vision: Science experiments and clean technologies to lower earth’s carbon footprint. A well-known Silicon Valley investor with a penchant for green technology companies has raised more than $1 billion for two new venture funds.
Vinod Khosla, the California businessman who has spent hundreds of millions of his own money on clean-tech deals, said Khosla Ventures will fund start-ups that focus on clean energy, sustainability and information technology. It will make investments of up to $15 million from its main $800 million fund and offer seed money to the tune of $2 million to early-stage ideas from its smaller $275 million fund. “It’s really geared toward science experiments,” said Khosla, the founder of Sun Microsystems. “The goal there is very much to take risks that nobody else will take.” In trying economic times, it is certainly a lofty goal. The National Venture Capital Association said Khosla’s fund has amassed more capital than any other venture capital firm since 2007. It’s also the largest first-time fund since 1999. And because of shrinking returns, investors have been favoring small funds and staying away from bigger, riskier deals with alternative energy companies. Venture capitalists put $513 million into 83 clean-tech companies in the first half of 2009, down from $2 billion into 139 companies last year, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. But it’s just the latest endeavor for Khosla, a prominent entrepreneur from India who dreamt of starting his own technology company when he was 16 and first heard about Intel starting up. At age 20, Khosla tried – unsuccessfully – to start a soymilk company geared toward customers in India who lacked refrigerators. But by the time he earned a business degree at Stanford University in 1980, he was well on his way. He started Sun Microsystems in 1982 and later joined top venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In 2004, Khosla left the firm to spend more time with his children and to take on “science experiments,” including “social impact” ventures. In the five years since, he has invested more than $400 million of his own money into companies that reduce dependence on coal and oil or increase energy efficiency. One of his investments is a company that’s working on compressor-free air conditioners, while another, Calera, makes “green cement for a blue planet” by taking the carbon dioxide from burning coal, driving it through water, converting it to carbonate and producing cement. For Khosla, it’s “really about reinventing the infrastructure of society, which is the only way we’ll get the carbon footprint down,” he said. “We’re not afraid to fail.” BIOFUEL FOR COMMERCIAL FLIGHTS BY 2010 : IATAThe International Air Transport Association (IATA) said Friday it would approve biofuels for commercial flights by 2010 in a bid to drastically reduce the industry's carbon footprint.
Paul Steele, who heads IATA's environmental initiatives, told reporters in New Delhi biofuel would be certified "by the end of next year". Certification is widely regarded as a first technical step that could eliminate some of the investment uncertainties clouding the use of high quality biofuels in aviation. "For the first time, air transport has the possibility of an alternative to traditional jet fuel," said IATA chief executive Giovanni Bisignani. IATA estimates aviation biofuel could reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent "on a full carbon life-cycle basis" and that it would save 600 kilogrammes (176 pounds) of emissions per flight on a Boeing 747-400 plane. Steele said recent flight tests by carriers intended to "decouple traffic growth from emissions growth" had shown biofuel and traditional fuel could be successfully blended without changes to aircraft engines.  But airlines face the challenge of controlling costs and procuring biofuel without affecting the food chain, he added. Biofuels are controversial as critics say widespread production could affect food crops, exacerbate global shortages and strain water supplies. Bisignani said biofuel was only a part of IATA's strategy to achieve carbon-neutral growth and eventually zero carbon emissions.He urged nations to treat the aviation sector as a separate entity ahead of international climate change talks in Copenhagen in December aimed at finding a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. "If not, we face the risk of uncoordinated competitive government taxation that won't reduce emissions but will be harmful to global economic development," said Bisignani. |
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