CarbonForum America

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

By Brooke Williams

After decades in the conservation movement where there hasn’t been much to get excited about, I was surprised last week, walking into the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco.

The purpose of my visit was CarbonForum America, the first trade fair dedicated to business opportunities in the “new, carbon constrained economy.” The positive energy was palpable in that giant room. Dark-suited, beautiful, and mostly European people pranced from booth to booth, blackberries or cell phones attached to the side of their heads. These lawyers, brokers, and project developers were in San Francisco because of the money - each person wanted their share of the $60 billion dollars projected to change hands this year as most of the world strives to meet the demands set by the Kyoto Protocols by the year 2012. I say ‘most’ of the world, because, as we all know, the U.S. has refused to acknowledge Kyoto and has yet to set any limits on the amount of greenhouse gases we generate in our carbon-addicted economy.

I went to CarbonForum with representatives of Pax Natura (www.paxnatura.org), a Salt Lake based Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) on whose board I sit. The organization began with the purchase of 800 hectares of rainforest in Costa Rica and plans for a state-of-the art environmental education center. Think impenetrable forest, fer de lance snakes, monkeys, poison dart frogs and hundreds of bird species. Our director signed our project up with the Costa Rican government’s “Payment for Environmental Services” (PES) program, which, for two decades has used gas taxes to pay land owners for the environmental services their native forests provide.

In other words, participants in the PES program get paid yearly for NOT cutting down the trees on their land. Many use income from the program to start small sustainable businesses.   

For the past two years, Pax Natura has been working on a program to sell carbon credits as offsets to companies, organizations, and governments interested in reducing their footprint and being part of the solution to global climate change. Income from selling the credits goes directly to greatly expanding Costa Rica’s existing PES program.
Deforestation accounts for 20 percent of green house gases emitted in the world, due mainly to rural farmers clearing land for agriculture. Because the Kyoto protocols mistakenly focused only on forest restoration, the deforestation issue has not been dealt with adequately.

To date, of the 945 projects registered as providing verified offsets for meeting Kyoto guidelines, only one addresses deforestation. In October, I wrote about 15 “carbon wedges.” Each ‘wedge’ representing an existing technology that could reduce carbon emissions by 1 billion tons by the year 2057. Improving the fuel economy of 2 billion cars is one wedge. Others include increasing the efficiency of buildings by 25 percent, using more nuclear energy and less automobile transportation and storing carbon.

Stopping deforestation is one wedge, a huge piece of the puzzle. Phase one of this small Costa Rican project will reduce GHG emissions by 200 million tons of carbon over 10 years.
One CarbonForum presenter said that ‘tons of carbon’ don’t excite people; stories do. Pax Natura is a great story. And it’s just beginning. As part of an overall strategy to decrease their footprint, the University of Utah recently purchased credits to offset 8,000 tons of carbon each year.

I’m more hopeful today than I was a week ago. Now with the market involved, the smartest people in the world are working on this global climate change issue. To them, there is no hint of doom and gloom, only opportunity.
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CarbonForum America | Planet JH News Article: Left Wing Local

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