Beggaring your Neighbour

The one gross global behavior of the developed and even the developing world has been the persistent rigging of so called free markets to the disadvantage of the powerless. The practice was never condoned internally, yet is blightly applied to them foreigners without a wince.

The massive agricultural subsidy systems deployed in both the USA and Europe are too well documented to bear much further comment. That the same practices spring up again and again everywhere is an offense against the economic nature of the human condition and certainly perpetuates global poverty by actually removing volatility and opportunity from the affected populations.

The only relief from this nonsense has been the drawing down of this rural impoverished population into manufacturing work. This process will be complete worldwide over the next generation.

This rant is inspired by the amazing nonsense of the rules imposed on the European carbon credit system. Once again these cash transfers are kept within the internal currency regime lest any of it leak out into the foreign woodlands where it may do some good.

A fraction of the money envisaged is ample to halt the process of deforestation worldwide. It is also that easy.

My point is that we have a creditable universal human need to globalize our response to loading the atmosphere with CO2 and to properly globalize through free and at most fairly managed trade the global economy. Yet everywhere we turn, some weasel will try to rig the game.

When that happens the unempowered are sacrificed and their economic potential diminished. What communism did for a third of the world’s population, this behavior continues to do for the last third.

It also gives us no credibility when we sit down with the local strongman and chisel on the pittance we pay for some of his people’s production that he has commandeered.

Do you not think that everyone would sit up and take notice if a foreign government agency stepped up to the plate and purchased all the vulnerable forest lands in Brazil? Do you not also think that the Brazilian Government would feel empowered to actually establish improved forest management in concert with these new citizen agencies?

What many do not realize is that the acquisition of a major resource is normally looked on favorably by developing countries simply because much better practice is also imported as a matter of course. No Canadian mining company will ever dump cyanide into a river, yet next door hundreds of artisan miners are dumping mercury and paying no taxes. Governments have learned this.

Right now a simple decision to allow the carbon credit system to be applied globally to sustain forests everywhere will swiftly create a lively market for forest lands and eventually demand for forest improvement itself. It really is that easy and the cheapest way to get started.

Today, there is almost no place left that such a program would be resisted by the local thug. We are not talking about farmland here. We are talking about both untouched forest and the local forest commons that is been continuously damaged all of which is easily settled.

Once this global economic protocol is established worldwide it is simplicity itself to extend the credit system to support the production of biochar. We even have boots on the ground and a natural auditing system in place. By the way, recall that biochar is produced from non woody plant material and is not predominantly charcoal which is produced from wood. This eliminates the necessary grinding cycle and other related difficulties.

Green Vatican Shows the Way

It is perhaps fitting that the one organization on earth that is mandated to think in terms of centuries should actually get this issue right. I launched this blog to focus attention on the need to integrate good forest management into our agricultural economy. That was before I discovered biochar and its capacity to manufacture carbon rich soils that will persist for centuries with moderately sensible practice.

The real message here is further into the article. The simple purchase of all the globe’s vulnerable forest lands is completely within the scope and financial ability of even a country such as Canada. There is no need to either play the USA political game or to suck up to other allies and their internal politics. Canada, for one and a lot of other countries such as China has a lot of good reason to do just that.

Such land does not even need to be turned into parks, nor should they be. It is enough to ensure that catastrophic clearing in prevented as a matter of course and restoration practiced by any lessees. Direct forest ownership leads rather quickly to forest maintenance and restoration as a matter of good practice and sustainable husbandry.

In fact, it quickly quells discontent from the massive CO2 emissions of these countries. I just never understood that the purchase price was currently so reasonable.

As I have posted before in the very beginning, forest management in the developed world in particular needs to be partnered with funding agencies able to operate and finance over a century or more. That means a government agency in the early going, but likely a very happy private industry a couple of decades down the road as the quality of the long term finance paper improves. The economic life cycle of woodlands prohibits a mere human from being able to carry the responsibility forward.

So I want to cheer the Pope loudly for his not so symbolic action, and I want my readers to get the word out that their country can buy all the threatened rainforests in the world by themselves and that they damn well should. This is not so much a great leap forward as putting a line in the sand that keeps us from continuing to go backwards.

How the pope is saving Earth

Benedict's Hungarian forest plan will cut emissions and power Vatican City.

By Glenn Hurowitz

July 14, 2008

Pope Benedict XVI, like many world leaders, has spoken passionately about the urgent need to protect the planet from climate catastrophe. But unlike his fellow heads of state, the pontiff has actually created a carbon-neutral economy -- and done it cheaply and quickly.

The Vatican announced last year that it would restore 37 acres of forest in Hungary that had been cut down in the Middle Ages. Those growing trees will absorb enough carbon dioxide to offset all the pollution from the fossil fuels used to power Vatican City.

The reason this "Vatican model" succeeded while other countries struggle to achieve even modest emissions reductions is because of the unique qualities of forest conservation and restoration. Compared with other methods of reducing climate-changing pollution, such as switching to wind, solar or geothermal power, it's fast and relatively cheap. That's true on a small, Vatican City scale as well as a massive American scale.

It's particularly true when it comes to the carbon-rich tropical forests that act as the Earth's lungs, breathing in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen. These forests are being logged and burned at a terrifying pace by big agricultural, biofuels and mining companies. Between August 2007 and April 2008, for instance, big ag and its cohorts destroyed a whopping 2,300 square miles of the Amazon, releasing 300 million tons of CO2 into the air in the process. Compounding that disaster, the treeless land generally loses its capacity to absorb the greenhouse gases produced by the world's fossil fuel consumption.

The good news is that stopping that destruction -- by purchasing the land outright or paying landowners and others to conserve it -- is a bargain. Because of the low cost of tropical land, protecting these forests can cost as little as $1 per ton of CO2 saved and almost never more than $10 a ton. (For comparison, cleanups based primarily on energy now trade for more than $40 a ton on European markets.)

As a result, the World Bank and others estimate that global deforestation could be completely halted for the relatively tiny sum of $11 billion to $15 billion a year. That one move alone would eliminate 20% of total global warming pollution.

Despite the urgency of the problem -- and the ease of the solution -- forest conservation has, until recently, been the forgotten stepchild of climate legislation. For many years, policymakers (particularly in Europe) were nervous that polluters would abuse the system by using low-cost overseas forest conservation projects as an excuse to avoid cleaning up industrial pollution at home.

But forest conservation needn't be an end. It should be a beginning. Again, we can look to the Vatican as a model. The pope didn't stop with his Hungarian forest. This year, he's planning to unveil an array of solar panels atop the huge Paul VI Audience Hall, which will provide enough electricity to light, heat and cool the building year-round. The pontiff is using forest conservation the right way: not as a method to avoid a clean-energy revolution but as a way to achieve immediate gains while other progress is underway, including the greening of Catholic Church operations around the world.

That should be the model for the United States (and other industrialized nations too). Although comprehensive climate change legislation is considered dead for this year, it's likely that Congress and President Bush could cobble together a consensus to authorize the $11 billion necessary to halt worldwide deforestation for 2009. That would keep 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere -- equivalent to the United States' entire annual emissions -- and save 30 million acres of forest from destruction for the foreseeable future. It would send a clear signal to American voters (and the world) that although the details still have to be figured out, the federal government can deliver real action on climate change.

This isn't as pie-in-the-sky as it might seem. Bush already has approved several significant tropical forest conservation projects in Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama and elsewhere. With this deal, Bush could legitimately claim that he'd done far more, far sooner, for far less money to stop global warming than either the Kyoto Protocol or the failed congressional climate bill would have.

By following the pope's example, even Bush might qualify for a bit of eco-sainthood.



Glenn Hurowitz writes about the environment at Grist.org. He is the author of the book "Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party."