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

It’s called rainforest destruction.

While everyone works themselves into agonies of guilt (matched only by almost complete inaction) over the odd plane flight, the pace and scale of deforestation continues to soar.

It’s already the largest single source of greenhouse emissions after energy (contributing, according to some estimates, up to ten times as much as aviation), and, barring the odd bit of good news from Brazil, the tide seems unstoppable.

Burning forests provide a particularly nasty double whammy of warming. As they burn, they send vast wodges of carbon into the atmosphere. And once they’re gone, they can’t soak up carbon emitted from other sources, like industry, cars and power plants.

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

Politically and economically, it would be a damn sight easier to make massive reductions in deforestation than to achieve similar cuts in air travel – and in terms of curbing climate change, massively more effective, too.

As forest scientists at the Global Canopy Programme point out, you don’t need complex technical fixes to do so, either. 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. But there are no shortages of ideas – and pilots – for doing so [see ‘How much do you want for this forest – in millions?’].

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…