Clever!
The current carbon market actually encourages cutting down some of the world's biggest forests, which would unleash tonnes of climate-warming carbon into the atmosphere, a new study reported on Monday.
Under the Kyoto Protocol aimed at stemming climate change, there is no profitable reason for the 10 countries and one French territory with 20 percent of Earth's intact tropical forest to maintain this resource, according to a study in the journal Public Library of Science Biology. The Kyoto treaty and other talks on global warming focus on so-called carbon credits for countries and companies that plant new trees where forests have been destroyed.
Trees and other plants absorb carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas emitted by petroleum-fueled vehicles, coal-fired power plants and humans. At this point, there is no credit for countries that keep the forests they have, the study said. "The countries that haven't really been the target of deforestation have nothing to sell because they haven't deforested anything," said Gustavo Fonseca, one of the study's authors.
"So that creates a perverse incentive for them to actually start deforesting, so that in the future, they might be allowed to actually cap-and-trade, as they call it: you put a cap on your deforestation and you trade that piece that hasn't been deforested," Fonseca said in a telephone interview.
The countries most at risk for this kind of deforestation, because they all have more than half their original forests intact, are Panama, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Peru, Belize, Gabon, Guyana, Suriname, Bhutan and Zambia, along with the French territory of French Guiana.
FULL STORY here
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7 comments:
Maybe what needs to be traded are "oxygen credits". Say charge those countries using up more oxygen than they produce and paying undeveloped countries that don't use many fossil fuels but do maintain large plots of forrest land.
The Kyoto protocols, the more I llok at them the more they seem to be about apearing to do something about global warming rather than solving the problem.
What I do know for sure is that individual restraint and the "honor system" are never a good basis for policing a shared rescource. Anybody that's watched the North Atlantic and eastern Pacific fisheries can tell you that.
what's need is for climate-contrilling nannystate lefties to stfu.
OK, so they change the rules of the market. Big deal. End off story.
That's why we need CO2 taxes, pure and simple. You f**k s**t up for the rest of us, you pay.
Didn't that used to be a law back in the old days? Like public-nuisance common law?
Oh no, wait. Under classic English Common Law, we could SHUT THE POLLUTERS DOWN COMPLETELY. But I guess that ol' common law's a bit too old-fashioned and conservative for people these days.
ian:
the problem with that reasoning is simple:
1 - co2 is not a pollutant; it isn't toxic; we breath it all the time; we each produce it all the time; people who do aerobics produce more.
2 - climate change is natural and not the result of man-made co2; there has always been climate change; there will always be climate change; glaciers have always come-and-gone - ice caps too; antarctica was once tropical; greenland green.
THEREFORE: co2 taxes and all other schemes to get humans to reduce our "carbon footprint" are a waste of time and unhealthy distortion of the marketplace.
lefties like these schemes bevcause these schemes attack the very things they have long attacked: freemarkets, industrializaton, free trade, etc.
WAKE UP.
Climate Change is natural. It is also man-made. Yes, the Sun is actually getting brighter. That has probably been the cause of most past global warming and cooling. Currently, it accounts for about 0.1% of the warming that is going on. The rest is due to all the extra CO2 in the atmosphere. You know, the stuff we get from burning fossil fuels.
If you don't believe that CO2 in the atmosphere can make the Earth hotter, then you don't believe that it's hot on Venus.
Yeah, Antarctica was green during the dinosaurs; look what happened when the climate changed on them.
Ian,
Last time I checked, Venus was rather closer to the Sun than the Earth. Do you think that has anything to do with the temperature on Venus.
Also, the Venusian atmosphere is 97% carbon dioxide, whereas our atmosphere is 0.038% carbon dioxide. Less than four-hundredths of a percent. If the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere went up a hundred fold, it'd still be only 1% or thereabouts of the amount in the Venusian atmosphere.
The two planets' atmospheres and temperatures are not comparable.
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