Fw: [kyotonow-news] CLIMATE & FOREST TALKS RESUME, CALL TODAY & NEXT TUESDAY!
Ruth Duemler
-----Original Message-----
From: Eban Goodstein <eb...@lclark.edu>
To: green...@greenhousenet.org <green...@greenhousenet.org>;
kyoton...@kyotonow.org <kyoton...@kyotonow.org>
Date: Wednesday, December 06, 2000 8:24 AM
Subject: [kyotonow-news] CLIMATE & FOREST TALKS RESUME, CALL TODAY & NEXT
TUESDAY!
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>To: All Activists
>From: Aaron Rappaport, American Lands
>Date: December 6, 2000
>
>
>CLIMATE AND FOREST TALKS RESUME, CALL TODAY AND NEXT TUESDAY!
>
>This week has brought great news for efforts to curb climate change.
>Rushing to finalize some sort of climate agreement prior to the end of
>the Clinton Administration, today the U.S. and the E.U. will resume
>talks on how to use and credit forests for soaking up and storing
>atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), as well as other important aspects of
>implementing the Kyoto Treaty on Climate Change. Disagreements over
>forests - greatly exacerbated by the preposterous initial U.S. demand to
>use "business-as-usual" forestry to account for up to half of its
>obligation to reduce CO2 emissions - caused the collapse and official
>"suspension" of the climate summit in The Hague just nine days ago.
>
>The first phase of the new round of talks will occur this week in
>Ottawa. If all goes well a ministerial level of talks will occur next
>week in Oslo, with the goal producing an actual written agreement. Will
>the Europeans, angered by U.S. attempts to create a business as usual
>forestry "loophole" in the Treaty, refuse to allow even the protection
>and restoration of native forests to receive credit and financial
>encouragement as an emissions reduction? Will the U.S. continue to hold
>out for credit for business as usual, rather than improved, forestry -
>thereby avoiding both real emissions reductions from cars and power
>plants and real increased protection for the world's forests? With
>negotiations resuming tomorrow, these are immediate questions, and only
>immediate action can move the U.S. position and increase the likelihood
>that forest protection is in the final deal, while the business-as-usual
>forest loophole is not.
>
>Activists' good work by phone and fax has been paying off. We have
>already motivated the Administration to work for rules that contain no
>perverse incentives to log old growth.
>
>Calls and faxes are needed immediately to the Administration to
>influence this week's first phase of talks. Next Tuesday there will be
>a full-blown, open-the-floodgates, call-in day to move the ministerial
>round. On both occasions, please call Frank Loy, the Undersecretary of
>State for Global Affairs, at 202/ 647-6240, or fax him at 202/ 647-0753.
> Faxes on letterhead will carry extra weight. Here are two principle
>points to move the U.S. position in the right direction:
>
>1) Forest rules under the climate change treaty should protect and
>restore native forests all over the world.
>2) Business-as-usual forestry isn't a valid emissions reduction and
>shouldn't receive any credit at all.
>
>BACKGROUND - WHY BUSINESS-AS-USUAL FORESTRY IS A LOOPHOLE
>The easiest way to understand what business-as-usual forestry is to
>consider what it's not. It's not protecting more forests, particularly
>private ones, by reducing the amount of land we log every year. That
>step would be a bona-fide emissions reduction because logging converts
>most of each felled tree's wood into carbon dioxide rather than wood
>products. Since it would be a change in the way we do things, it's
>called "additional to business as usual".
>
>Business as usual forestry (BAUF), by contrast, is continuing to manage
>forests exactly the same way we do now. Overall, U.S. forests are
>absorbing CO2 because we have a lot of tree growth on abandoned farmland
>in the east. This more than offsets our emissions from logging
>elsewhere. While it does cause our emissions to be lower than if the
>U.S. contained no growing trees, BAUF can't make next year's emissions
>any lower than this year's, as we committed to doing in the Kyoto
>Treaty. Business-as-usual forestry can only keep our emissions the
>same.
>
>Or can it? Due to loopholes left in the Treaty when it was negotiated,
>the door wasn't slammed on counting BAUF as an emissions reduction by
>ignoring its absorptions when calculating 1990 emissions but then using
>them, for accounting purposes, to decrease reported emissions in 2008
>and beyond! This loophole is known as "gross-net forestry accounting".
>
>The cure would be to credit only forestry that is clearly additional to
>business as usual as an offset to what we spew out of tailpipes and
>smokestacks. The permanent protection of both primary and recovering
>native forests clearly qualifies. The financial incentives that come
>with the credits could be a boon to protecting forests worldwide,
>particularly those on private lands or in countries without meaningful
>environmental laws.
>
>For more information please contact:
>Darcy Davis, American Lands, 503/ 978-0132,
>mailto:darcy...@americanlands.org
>Aaron Rappaport, American Lands, 202/ 547-9098,
>mailto:arapp...@mindspring.com
>
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