Thursday 15 December 2005

The most promising new initiative to emerge from the Montreal round of climate talks is a plan to compensate countries for preserving their intact forests. Unlogged forests are like the Fort Knox of carbon. They store vast amounts of it away, creating a new value. We like gold that glitters and carbon that stays out of the atmosphere.

About one third of all the carbon that exists on the earth's land surfaces is locked up in the Amazon rainforest. A recent study by scientists at UC Irvine found that trees in the Amazon forests are much older and more slow-growing than thought - up to half of all trees greater than 10 centimeters in diameter are more than 300 years old. That means that once logged, these forests and their carbon store are not easily replaced.

The forest is far more than just the trees. In the tropics, the soil contains as much carbon as the vegetation itself. The ancient trees provide the structure, anchoring the complex, multi-layered ecosystem that feeds carbon into soil. According to David Suzuki, 75 percent of all land surface carbon globally actually resides in soil.

Scientists estimate that destruction of forests accounts for about 25 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

The American economy is also responsible for about 25 percent of global emissions. While American officials lack even the most rudimentary vision of how to restructure an economy around carbon control, a coalition of tropical nations led by Papua New Guinea is ready to use carbon credits as means of saving their rainforests. The Montreal conference gave these nations the go-ahead last week to draft a plan for managing the financial incentives.

Dr. Glen Barry, President of Ecological Internet, applauds the new forestry carbon credits proposed by Papua New Guinea (PNG), but he warns that: "Without reigning in the 'timber-mafia' roaming PNG's countryside like robber barons, all the carbon market money in the world will not save PNG's precious ancient rainforests. The mostly Malaysian owned logging companies have their tentacles in virtually every orifice of government, and to some respect can be said to be running the country. Corruption, much of it derived from the timber industry, is epidemic and makes the country essentially ungovernable."

It will be a job of work to bring the illegal timber mafias under control, but first the world will have to reject the legal timber piracy being proposed this week at the WTO meeting in Hong Kong.

The WTO generally views environmental restrictions as unfair trade restrictions. It would prohibit eco-labeling like the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certifications that let consumers identify and purchase wood products that are sustainably harvested.

WTO forestry rules would also make it much harder to stop illegal logging. According to Greenpeace, about 80 percent of logging in Brazil and 50 percent of logging in Indonesia is illegal, but under trade rules, one country cannot ban imports from another in order to influence its policies. The only recourse is to reject a particular shipment of wood that is illegally logged, but the burden of proof is on the importer - proof that is impossible to find.

According to Victor Menotti, Program Director of the International Forum on Globalization, global forestry corporations like International Paper, Mead, and Weyerhaeuser, are behind the WTO forestry rules. The American Forest and Paper Association (AF&PA) lobbies Washington on their behalf and writes the US position on trade, shaping the WTO agenda on forest issues. "This close collaboration allows industry to use the WTO as an instrument to discipline governments, overriding measures that might pinch corporate profits," Menotti said in a 2001 report on the WTO.

These same corporations are tireless in their efforts to break down and rinse away what remains of US environmental law protecting forests. Mark Rey, the current Undersecretary of Agriculture in charge of the Forest Service, was formerly a vice president of AF&PA. Rey moved from industry to a staff position with the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources to top fox guarding the hen house under Bush. During these Bush years, Rey has managed to gut many of the key rules and regulations that formerly protected our national forests, including the Northwest Forest Plan that was so painstakingly negotiated by the Clinton administration.

It is the same situation in the Department of Interior, whose Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages some of the last low-elevation old growth forests in the Northwest. BLM is fast-tracking its Western Forest Plan revision for the purpose of meeting timber targets. Here in my neighborhood, the Illinois River watershed, the BLM is preparing expedited plans to log every last bit of native forest remaining on the valley bottom.

The ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest are a multi-layered complex carbon storehouse to rival the tropical rainforests. If the US would join the rest of the world in implementing the Kyoto agreement, we could offset some of our greenhouse gas emissions with what is left of our old growth forests. But just like Papua New Guinea, the timber pirates, along with the oil men and other resource extractors "have their tentacles in virtually every orifice of government, and to some respect can be said to be running the country."

Last week, the Washington Post reported that US chief climate negotiator Harlan Watson was essentially nominated for the position by Exxon Mobil. This is just one more indication of the extent to which the United States government has been body-snatched by corporate interests.

Corporations may have legal personhood, but they are not human. I watched an interview on E&E TV with Margo Thorning, managing director of the International Council for Capital Formation, an Exxon-funded think tank. She kept repeating that the Kyoto cap and trade system for greenhouse gases would be "economic suicide," completely unconcerned that failure to bring carbon emissions under control could result in the actual suicide of civilization if not humanity itself.

Americans use 50 million tons of paper annually - consuming more than 850 million trees. More than 10 million tons of paper are shipped through the US Postal Service. The AF&PA is lobbying Congress to keep postal rates low because, as explained on their web site: "In the past, whenever postal rates have increased, there has been a companion decrease in the demand for paper products." This is the timber industry demanding public subsidies in the face of rising energy and transportation costs in order to keep up the flow of forests into our mailboxes as junk mail.

Subsidized postal rates are exactly the kind of rich nation subsidy that never gets addressed by the WTO in its quest to open vulnerable developing markets to the big multi-national corporations.

Thousands of protesters, representing the small farmers and laborers of the world, are clashing with authorities in Hong Kong this week. They are protesting the economic homicide of the WTO.

Friends of the Earth International just released "The Tyranny of Free Trade," a report that documents the social disruption, environmental damage and hunger resulting from trade liberalization and market pressures. Small-scale farmers, who are often sustainable users of forests, are particularly vulnerable to market pressures and are often forced from their land when it is converted to plantations or planted with crops for export.

Increasingly, the world is being divided between those who see endless growth as the only alternative and those who find their salvation in forests.