Environment Forum

Making REDD work for illegal loggers

It took just 30 seconds to fell the tree. Hendri, 27, a skinny Indonesian from Central Kalimantan on Borneo island, skilfully wielded the chainsaw more than half his height. The result is a thunderous crash and a tree that is quickly cut into planks on the forest floor near by.

And the reward for this effort? About 125,000 rupiah, or roughly $12 per tree measuring 30 cm or more in diameter. Hendri and the three other members of this local gang of illegal loggers make about $45 a day (not including expenses and bribes) cutting down between 4 and 5 trees and slicing them into planks with a chainsaw, using no protective gear. They work for about 10 days at a stretch.

Their work is tough and highlights the challenge of finding alternative livelihoods in communities surrounding projects that aim to save large areas of forest in the fight against climate change.

Another member of the gang, Maulana, 40, explained he didn’t like the work but he had six children to feed. If given a choice, he said he’d switch to growing rubber or managing a small area of palm oil if given the seedlings and land. Just a hectare of palm oil would be enough to meet his needs. That was preferable than the dangerous work cutting down trees in the steaming, flooded peat swamp forest, he said.

Indonesia has emerged as one of the leading countries in a U.N.-backed scheme that hopes to reward developing nations with carbon credit payments in return for saving forests, particularly carbon-rich peatlands found in southern Borneo.

Called REDD, or reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation, the idea is to pay for reductions of greenhouse gases, such as the carbon dioxide that forests absorb to grow and release in large amounts when cut down or burned. The greater the amount of carbon prevented from being emitted, potentially the greater the rewards in a scheme that could eventually be worth $30 billion a year in annual trade in CO2 credits, the United Nations says.

In Central Kalimantan, there are a number of large REDD projects, including where Hendri and his workers were operating. But project developers know that their investments will only pay off if the loggers are found new jobs, such as rangers, guides for ecotourists or given assistance to set up their own cash crops, such as rubber, rattan or even quick growing timber.

from Global News Journal:

Driving carmakers to distraction over emissions

Europe's nominee to be climate chief surprised car manufacturers last week by saying she thought EU policymakers might have been too soft on them when carbon-capping rules were set in 2008.

Connie Hedegaard's forceful intervention during hearings for the European Commission raised the possibility of a renewed push by Europe to legislate car emissions if the Dane is approved by the European Parliament for the post next month.

The exisiting rules were hard-fought-over in 2008, with big European auto nations such as France, Italy and Germany arguing that a slow transition to tougher targets was necessary to protect jobs in a sector that is not only one of the EU's biggest employers but already feeling the heat from the economic crisis.

If new emissions caps were brought in, Big Auto and its army of lobbyists would swing back into action, pitting themselves against environmentalists and industries with an interest in tighter curbs, such as car parts suppliers and aluminium producers, who promise to cut the weight of future cars.

Most experts and policymakers think it is unlikely Hedegaard will reopen such an emotive debate to change the 2015 targets for cars, which are now written into law.

But she may instead use the option of a review in 2013 to fight for tougher targets for car makers to meet by 2020.

The current rules set a target of reaching 95 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre by 2020, about 40 percent below today's average -- but it is merely an "aspirational target", not a legally-binding one.

Newsweek’s Green Rankings: Perception meets reality

Newsweek, encroaching on territory usually mined by activist groups like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, has unveiled its innaugural NEWSWEEK Green Rankings, which ranks the 500 biggest U.S. companies based on their “actual environmental performance, policies, and reputation.”

The magazine pointed out that compiling such a list was a challenge “because comparing environmental performance across industries is a bit like analyzing whether Tiger Woods or LeBron James is the world’s greatest athlete—there’s an inevitable apples-and-oranges element.”

Still, it believes it’s system makes sense. To come up with the greenest company, the magazine assigned each a “Green Score” that was then compared to the average score of the collective group. You can find out more about Newsweek’s methodology here. But, in terms of weighting, Impact and Policies were each given 45 percent and Reputation received 10 percent.

The results? I’ll let you be the judge. But I found it noteworthy that the top two overall are also the top two PC makers in the world — Hewlett-Packard and Dell. And five of the top 10 are tech companies, blamed for manufacturing products that end up contributing to mountains of electronic waste in developing nations.

What do you think? Will the rankings affect who you do business with? What would your green rankings look like? Leave your comments in the box below.

from UK News:

‘Green’ expert sees red over UK climate pledges

Professor Sir David King, the British government's former top scientific adviser, is no stranger to controversy.

He ruffled feathers on both sides of the Atlantic in 2004 when he described climate change as a more serious threat to the world than terrorism.

Earlier this year, he said the Iraq war may come to be seen as the world first’s “resource war”, based on oil rather than weapons of mass destruction.

“taking cars off the road”, or climate tokenism?

There’s no shortage of references these days in corporate and government reports to earnest, new steps to fight climate change. Often they promise to make carbon emissions cuts equivalent to taking millions of cars off the road…

For example, take Europe’s fourth biggest single source of carbon emissions, Britain’s Drax coal plant. It said in March that as a result of efficiency improvements it had cut carbon emissions equivalent to taking 195,000 cars off the road.  But of course that was a cut against a theoretical projection of rising emissions — not an absolute cut.

Take a similar announcement from Canada this week. The oil industry in Alberta is busy trying to extract oil from tar sands. That is a far more polluting, energy-intensive way than just sucking the stuff out of oil wells, because steam must first be injected into the sand to make the oil flow. Now Alberta is experimenting with a technology, called carbon capture and storage, with three test projects which by 2015 would “achieve annual carbon dioxide reductions equivalent to taking about a million vehicles off the road”, the province says.

Funnily enough, 2015 is also the year when a U.N. panel of climate scientists says global greenhouse gas emissions worldwide must stop rising to limit global warming to 2-2.4 degrees celsius, a widely perceived threshold for dangerous effects (page 20 here). It seems a little disingenuous — in that wider context — for  Alberta to talk of taking cars off the road from test projects to trim carbon emissions under a wider programme to expand one of the most polluting forms of oil drilling known to man.

The wider context does seem relevant if we’re not to pat ourselves on the back as catastrophic climate effects creep up. And it may be especially relevant this year, as climate talks and rhetoric ratchet up ahead of a meeting in December in Copenhagen, meant to seal agreement on a new climate pact to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

from FaithWorld:

U.S. conservative Christians sound “cap and trade” alarms

America's social and religious conservatives are turning up the heat as they galvanize heartland opposition against the latest example of President Barack Obama-inspired "socialism" -- a climate change bill that aims to reduce fossil fuel emissions, which most scientists have linked to climate change.  

The Democratic Party-led House of Representatives passed the bill on Friday. It would require large companies, including utilities and manufacturers, to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases associated with global warming by 17 percent by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050, from 2005 levels. It must still go through the U.S. Senate, where its ultimate fate remains uncertain despite the Democratic majority there.

Conservative Christians, a key base -- if not THE base -- for the out-of-power Republican Party, are among the biggest skeptics of human-induced global warming. In the eyes of many environmentalists, they were part of an "unholy alliance" with the energy industry that enjoyed its zenith under former president George W. Bush, who pulled America out of the Kyoto Protocol aimed at cutting emissions in the developed world. The Bush administration was widely seen as hostile to any attempt to cap emissions as well as the science behind it.

Conservative Christians are sounding the alarm bells about the climate bill, which represents Obama's first major legislative victory and which Republicans see as a major opportunity to gain political ground ahead of the 2010 congressional elections. You can see our coverage of this issue here.

Republicans are calling it a "job killer" while the Cornwall Alliance -- a conservative Christian coalition -- has described its cap and trade provisions, which allow companies that pollute less than their limit to sell some of their permits to others struggling to meet such green requirements, "as the largest tax hike in history." Analysts have said such arguments may appeal to voters especially against the backdrop of the current recession.

California gas stations defy new pollution rule

Wednesday is the deadline for California’s gas stations to install sophisticated nozzles and hoses to control vapor emissions at the pump, and the Los Angeles Times reports that some one in five station owners are in open defiance of the new state order.

Gas station owners say that the new equipment is so expensive that buying it during the worst economic slump in decades would put them out of business.

“It may be necessary to protect public health, but it’s unaffordable,” James Hosmanek, who owns a Chevron station in San Bernardino, told the newspaper.

Hosmanek, who has already laid off eight employees as his business struggles to survive the recession,  said banks and equipment lenders have rejected his requests for some $60,000 in loans he would need to buy eight new nozzles and hoses and that “even if I could get the funding, I couldn’t make the payments.”

He told the Times that the owner of a Shell station down the street complied with the new order by putting the equipment on credit cards, a solution he calls “financial suicide.”

Hosmanek and his fellow resistance fighters are hoping for a last-minute reprieve with the help of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who last week asked the state legislature to give the station owners another year to comply. And a Democrat Assemblyman has introduced legislation that would provide $8 million in grants to the stations.

But public health and environmental groups are fighting back, saying that the gas stations have long known the new rules were coming.

Is California really banning black cars?

Has it come to this in California? Is the Golden State really banning black cars from its famous freeways, as reported in various auto industry blogs – and even The Washington Post – on the grounds that they require more air conditioning to cool?

The answer, a slightly exasperated spokesman for air quality regulator the California Air Resources Board tells Reuters, is an emphatic “NO.”

CARB spokesman Stanley Young calls the story a “very unfortunate case of misinformation from the blogosphere” stemming from proposed draft regulations that have since been put on the back burner by the agency.  But even those draft regulations, he says, never contemplated a ban on black cars.

Young says the report being circulated on the Internet was released in February as the board mulled over proposals for reducing greenhouse emissions from vehicles, including one that automakers make their cars more reflective — with the goal of reducing the amount of air conditioning used by drivers and passengers and, in turn, the amount of fuel consumed and greenhouse gases produced.

He says the draft regulations would have required a more reflective glazing on car windows and paints with a higher “reflectivity.” But he adds, flatly:  “This regulation did not propose banning or restricting any colors.”

“We wanted to see if the principle of reflective paints, which are now used on homes and buildings, could be applied to cars,” Young says. “We did some extensive research and examined all the possibilities and in the end we discovered that darker colors presented a problem.  And because at this point we didn’t have a solution that was cost-effective and technologically feasible, in this round we’ve decided to focus instead on the windows. We’ll address paints down the road.”

Young says the board may bring back car paint proposals in the next few years, perhaps when technology improves.