And another thing...

Martin Wright ranks forests over flight guilt, is dazzled by a hundred halogen spots, and relieved that Al Gore is staying clear of the White House.

When it comes to climate change, there’s an elephant in the living room, and it’s got a trunk the size of a tropical tree.

Sorry about the clunking metaphor, but it’s entirely apt. The elephant is rainforest destruction – the scale and pace of which has reached truly scary levels.

“‘Save the Forests!’ isn’t just a more appealing slogan than ‘Stop Flying!’ – it’s a much more urgent one, too.”

After energy production, it’s by far the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions, contributing up to ten times as much as aviation.

The Stern Report, no less, warned that it would release more carbon into the atmosphere in the next four years than every flight from the dawn of aviation until 2025.

Now at last, the elephant’s emerging into view, and people are reaching for the jumbo-sized tranquiliser darts. The Bali climate talks finally put at least a sketchy forest agreement on the table, and the UK, to its credit, showed how it might be done via its outline deal with Guyana.

All this, it must be said, is not before time. Burning forests produces a particularly nasty double whammy of warming. As they burn, they send vast swathes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And once they’re gone, they can’t soak up carbon emitted from other sources, like industry, cars and power plants.

Yet despite all this, people get far more exercised over the evils of air travel than they do over forest loss. Sure, it’s mainly happening in ‘faraway countries of which we know little’. But this skewed sense of priorities is bitterly ironic all the same, because, politically and economically, it will almost certainly be easier to make massive reductions in deforestation than to achieve similar cuts in air travel. And in terms of curbing climate change, that would be massively more effective, too.

As forest scientists at the Global Canopy Programme point out, you don’t need complex technical fixes. You just have to make trees worth more standing than felled. And with the fate of civilisation cradled in their canopy, they should carry quite a price tag.

It’s still easier said than done, of course, and tough to enforce in remote regions of Africa, Indonesia and Brazil – hardly havens of good governance at the best of times. But there are no shortages of ideas – and pilots – for doing so [see ‘How much do you want for this forest – in millions?’ – GF65].

If we spent half as much time pushing for action on this as we do flagellating each other over the odd flight, then maybe we’d achieve something. After all, no one likes being told off. As a tactic for persuasion, shaming is notoriously counter-productive – particularly so when it comes to making people feel guilty for taking cheap holidays in the sun. So until such time as fuel prices go through the roof, or tight carbon trade caps stifle the market, air travel is always going to be a seductive option for all but the deepest of greens.

By contrast, staging a concerted drive to save the forests can be a passionate and positive process: one full of uplifting stories and imagery; one which can make you feel good about yourself. ‘Save the Forests!’ isn’t only a more appealing slogan than ‘Stop Flying!’ – it is, in climate terms, a much more urgent one, too.

Gore not for president

So now we can relax. Al Gore’s not going to ruin it all and run.

For a while, it looked as though he was poised to rain on Hillary Clinton’s triumphal parade to the White House, by announcing An Inconvenient Bid for the presidency himself.

It may, as one commentator put it, now be Hamlet without the Prince – but it’s a wise move all the same. Power inevitably means compromise, and the first time President Gore baulked at calls for a punitive tax hike on gasoline, or some similar act of political suicide, his hard-won climate credibility would sink like a soggy polar bear.

Assuming that he (sooner or later) endorses Hillary, he’ll have much more influence as a trusted but robustly independent advocate, with a (literally) unimpeachable reputation.

And that’s more likely to remain intact, now that it’s clear he wasn’t seeking to float into the White House on the back of all those calving icebergs.

All power and no point

Ever wondered how we can know so much about climate change, but be so rubbish at tackling it?

Try speaking at an event on the subject.

The scene: a hotel conference suite. My physical position on the panel was ample evidence of the stark realities of global warming, as so often experienced by those of us in the, ahem, front line.

In other words, I was simultaneously chilled down the back of my neck by the breeze from the air conditioning, while the side of my face was grilled by the hot air outlet from the projector – whose sole purpose was to display the sponsor’s logo throughout. (No power, no point…). Meanwhile, my eyes were dazzled by the glare of a hundred halogen spots.

No doubt the hotel chain in question has all manner of carefully positioned motion sensitive lighting controls, dimmer switches and associated gizmos, along with a great wodge of environmental policies.

But if our default reaction to a room full of switches and knobs is to whack everything on to the max and leave it there, then it’s all a bit power-pointless.

6 January 2008

Martin Wright