Photo: Shi! There’s a new fashion trend this fall: saving Indonesian rainforests. The Gucci Group, the prestigious conglomerate of fashion and luxury brands that owns Yves Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, and Balenciaga, has decided to eliminate all paper made from Indonesian rainforests. That includes everything from its letterhead to the pretty paper bags with ribbon handles that they give to shoppers to hold their new couture.

A paper policy, you say? That’s not really fashionable, is it?

Turns out it is. Gucci Group’s policy puts it at the front of a list of major companies -- including Tiffany & Co., H&M Group, Hugo Boss, Bulgari, and Ferragamo -- that have decided  they don’t want their brands to be associated with the destruction of rainforests or with encouraging climate change.

Worldwide, the degradation and destruction of tropical rainforests is responsible for 20 percent of all annual greenhouse emissions. In Indonesia, which supplies much of America’s paper, a lot of this deforestation is driven by the pulp and paper industry -- notably the notorious paper company Asia Pulp and Paper.

This hurts the climate as well as the forests. The carbon emissions resulting from Indonesia’s rapid deforestation account for around 8 percent of global emissions -- more than the combined emissions from all cars, trucks, buses, planes, and trains in United States.

The Gucci Group’s comprehensive policy commits it to one of the strongest paper standards in the industry. With its new policy, the Gucci Group has pledged to reduce the amount of paper it uses, eliminate fiber from high-conservation-value forests, and only purchase recycled products or those certified by the Forest Stewardship Council by December 2010.

“Standing rainforests are not a luxury, they’re a necessity if the world wants to stop climate change,” said Mimma Viglezio, executive VP for global communications at the Group. “Our actions are lowering our own carbon footprint, but we hope that they will also raise awareness inside the fashion industry that it’s possible for our industry to make a difference for rainforests and for the climate.”

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Photo: Mongabay

A combination of dramatic technological advances, experience, and application of a little common sense has markedly increased scientists' confidence in their ability to monitor forest conservation projects for their climate impact.

As The Eliasch Review [PDF], the U.K. Government's authoritative recent report on forest-climate science and policy, put it, "Using appropriate techniques, forest emissions can be estimated with similar confidence to emissions estimates in other sectors." 

That's very good news, as approximately 20 percent of total global warming pollution comes from deforestation, more than all the world's cars, trucks, planes, and ships combined. As the United States and the world move towards a system in which these forests are valued for their immense carbon storage, it's critical that we make those valuations as accurate as possible -- so we can know exactly how much a particular forest conservation project (and ultimately a particular country) is actually reducing emissions.

Of course, there's a key caveat in The Eliasch Review's conclusion: "using appropriate techniques." Although these appropriate techniques are available and have been applied in many projects, deploying them at the global scale needed to end deforestation will require financial and human investment.

Those investments are very affordable -- the costs of monitoring forest projects are typically less than $1 per ton of carbon reduced, often much less. But they need to happen quickly, before we lose more forests. That's why it's so important that Congress pass climate legislation that includes strong public and private financing for tropical forest conservation (including especially the five percent tropical forest set-aside) -- and supplements it with interim financing that's able to go into place before climate legislation enters into force in 2012.

So why are emission reductions from forests so easy to monitor?

At a certain level, it's very simple. Unlike smokestacks, tailpipes, chemical processes, or even agriculture, you don't have to constantly monitor forests to measure how much carbon they store (or how much carbon is sent into the atmosphere when they're burned).

You can look at a forest, use decades-old techniques to measure the amount of carbon stored in it, write the amount down, and then come back 5, 10, or 50 years later and measure how much carbon is there.

Now, although confidence in monitoring has come a long way, it doesn't mean there isn't any complexity. In particular, in areas where forests have been partially degraded, some sophistication is required to come up with an accurate baseline figure for deforestation, below which emissions reductions are determined.   It's been done, and done well, but it does require more effort than the classic model of just measuring degradation to a pristine forest.

But contrast forest monitoring to smokestack or tailpipe monitoring -- just looking at it does nothing for you. You need to make sure that there are meters (or at least that you've got a very accurate recording of how much coal or gas is going in), and that no one ever "accidentally" turns off the meter or misreports quantities burned at any time. If you don't catch misreporting in real time, it's almost impossible to catch it ever. Of course, unlike critics of giving credit for forest conservation, I'm not suggesting that measurement challenges mean that we shouldn't give credit for pollution reductions in the energy sector -- just that the challenges in that sector should be recognized.

Forest monitoring has also benefited from innovation in satellite technology over the last half century. Satellites like NASA's MODIS, the Brazilian Space Agency and China's CBERS, the Japanese ALOS, and French SPOT are actively and accurately monitoring the world's forests -- and new, even better satellites go up every year.  There's now even low-angle radar from Japan that can see under clouds. These "eyes in the sky" can look into your bathroom; from that perspective, measuring forest emissions looks a lot less challenging.

Satellite image of deforestation in the Amazon.Photo: MongabayIndeed, the last 35 years have seen the democratization of satellite technology, so that anyone can check up on what's happening even in forests thousands of miles away. It started with the U.S. government's Landsat satellite, which published some of the earliest high-resolution images of deforestation in the 1970s. 

Now, anyone can just login to Google Earth and monitor deforestation for themselves. Google has partnered with a variety of groups in the Amazon, including indigenous tribes, to monitor deforestation -- and allow individuals to protest and point out illegal and unwanted activities.

From Rhett Butler at Yale 360: 

One of the first Google Earth Outreach projects involved indigenous tribes in the Amazon rain forest. Facing an onslaught of threats to their lands and culture, the tribes have embraced advanced technology as a means of protecting and better managing their homeland. The tribes -- including the Surui in western Brazil and the Wayana and Trio in Suriname -- are using GPS to map their lands, plot rivers, sites of spiritual significance, and their resources, including medicinal plants and rich hunting grounds. The Rainforest Foundation U.K. and the Global Canopy Program are taking a similar approach in Congo and Cameroon, respectively, helping communities map their lands to protect against illegal logging and other forms of encroachment.

In sum, it's very difficult to hide a forest that's been cut down. "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" is a question anyone trying to illegitimately get credit for forest conservation will have to ask.

This Orangutan certainly can't wait. Photo: MongabayKnowing the high certainty pollution reductions that forest conservation can deliver, Congress and the world can now turn their attention, with confidence, to figuring out the best incentives to actually save the forests. Because the truth is that we cannot afford any further delay. In the dozen years it's taken for the countries of the world to start to realize that excluding tropical forests from the Kyoto Protocol was a mistake, more than 300 million acres of forest have been destroyed, putting an amount of pollution equivalent to about 10 times the United States annual pollution into the air. We can't afford to wait another dozen years to finally agree to solutions that actually work.

For more on the reliability of forest conservation, check out "Not Your Daddy's Offsets" and "The Tropical Global Warming Solution," and stay tuned for a sequel to this post.   

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Let’s look at one of the illegally hacked emails in more detail

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil -- President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said Tuesday he will offer to reduce the pace of deforestation in Brazil's Amazon rain forest by 80 percent by 2020 when he attends December's global climate talks in Copenhagen.

Lula said his pledge will come during high-stakes talks in the Danish capital that aim to push 192 nations towards a climate deal to succeed the landmark Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

"We're in the process of preparing our proposal for Copenhagen," Lula said on his weekly radio program, Coffee with the President.  "I foresee that by 2020 we will be able to reduce deforestation by 80 percent; in other words, we will emit some 4.8 billion fewer tons of carbon dioxide gas."

Brazil's rain forest, the largest on Earth, is shrinking at the rate of some 12,000 square kilometers (or 7456.454 miles) per year because of deforestation.

Lula said he will also demand in Copenhagen that industrialized countries pay their fair share of the costs of reducing greenhouse gases. Proposals offered by developed countries should not only cover "initiatives to reduce their emissions, but all the other harm they already have inflicted on the planet," the Brazilian leader said.

"We have to draw a line between rich countries, which have a had an industrial policy in place for more than 150 years, and the poor ones which only now are beginning to develop," he said.

"With respect to global warming, the responsibility of the rich countries is much greater than that of emerging countries," said Lula.

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Gucci Group commits to saving Indonesia’s rainforests

Bukit Tigapuluh Forest is truly one of those special places. It’s got three endangered species, two minority groups of indigenous people and a superlative: it’s the last remaining stand of tropical lowland forest left on the island of Sumatra.

Funnily enough, it’s also about to be cut down.

Notorious rainforest destroyer Asia Pulp and Paper has cut a road through the forest and is working on getting a concession to convert the forest (containing over 1,000 species of trees) into a tree plantation (containing maybe 2 species).

They’re calling this development.

Nonprofits and businesses around the world are calling it deforestation. Unfortunately, the new forest part of the of the climate change treaty (called REDD) under negotiation this week here in Bangkok may end up calling it carbon savings and subsidizing its destruction.

Only two days into Bangkok, REDD talks have been picking up from the snail’s pace that they were running at in the Bonn sessions earlier this year. Developing countries like India and Brazil have come out with stronger positions that are challenging developed countries to truly make forests a priority in the negotiations, and formerly timid Australia is stepping up to the plate.

But forest definitions remain a problem. As the situation currently stands, the proposed treaty text does not distinguish between intact natural forests (those that humans didn’t plant) and tree plantations. Not only is this a problem from a cultural and biodiversity point of view - since tree plantations don’t provide any of the habitat or cultural benefits of natural forests - it’s a problem from a climate point of view.

Intact natural ecosystems like forests store and absorb massive amounts of carbon, tree plantations, being younger and less diverse, store and absorb significantly less carbon. This equation means that converting forests to plantations is a net loss for the climate, increasing the 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions caused by deforestation, rather than decreasing it, which is ostensibly, the point of REDD. 

Right now, Bangkok is all about setting rules for how the game of REDD will be played. Just like in any sport, we need to know where the goal is and which plays will draw a red card. If the rules aren’t set out clearly, we may end up permanently offsides.

Forest definitions sound geeky, but they really do matter. If a treaty intended to protect forests and the climate can’t save a place like Bukit Tigapuluh, then what are we doing here?

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Gucci Group commits to saving Indonesia’s rainforests

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A new report, "Forging the Climate Consensus: Domestic and International Offsets" makes clear exactly how important a role high-quality offsets play in maintaining the integrity of climate legislation -- and how they could allow an international climate agreement to achieve far stronger emissions reductions targets than would otherwise be possible.

The report was issued by the National Commission on Energy Policy, which represents major corporations, NGO's, and labor unions (and whose executive director is Jason Grumet, Obama's top energy advisor during the campaign, so it should be taken at least somewhat seriously as the type of thinking being seriously considered in the White House and on Capitol Hill). It includes strong support for offsets, but questions if the verification requirements in the legislation are too tough to allow offsets to be brought to market in sufficient quantity to deliver major cost savings for climate legislation, especially in the first years.

If the bill's restrictions on use of offsets are so severe as to prevent them from being developed, their cost containment value would be reduced and the cost of climate legislation would be higher. That's of concern to the members of the commission, many of whom represent utilities and other interests that are, to a great extent, focused on keeping the cost of climate legislation down (a concern shared by many senators whose votes we'll need to pass climate legislation).

As a result, the commission recommends adopting alternate cost-containment measures like a price collar or an allowance auction reserve to hold prices down.

That's a huge problem. Unlike offsets, which, when done right, deliver emissions reductions by financing affordable (and important) activities like forest conservation and reforestation, price collars let polluters off the hook whenever the price of carbon rises above a certain level -- a dangerous policy, given that we can't be 100 percent sure what the price of carbon will be at any given time. An allowance auction reserve works in a similar way -- the government just releases more pollution permits whenever the price rises. Unlike offsets, which deliver affordability through pollution reductions, these mechanisms deliver affordability but no emissions reductions.

That's a fundamental calculus that offset critics just don't seem to get: if you remove offsets from legislation or an international climate agreement and you have to find cost control mechanisms somewhere else -- or just lower the targets. And that doesn't do any good for the planet or its people.

It was a perspective certainly missing from two anti-offsets broadsides issued this week by opponents of climate legislation: the "Dangerous Distraction" report by Friends of the Earth and a Greenpeace website mocking their use.

Of course, it's essential that offsets actually deliver reductions in pollution. FOE and Greenpeace recycle decades-old claims to imply that many offsets are less than credible.

But these are not your daddy's offsets. There have been tremendous advances to ensure that offsets, especially forest-based offsets, deliver the reductions they promise. Consider the offsets in the American Clean Energy and Security Act passed by the House of Representatives.

In addition to establishing a rigorous scientific board to evaluate any proposed offsets, the bill also includes an essential requirement: in order for any offsets to receive credit, they must have already taken place. In other words, you can't get credit for a plan to offset emissions, but only for verified emission reductions that have already occurred.

In addition, there are a variety of very strict requirements to ensure, for instance, that indigenous and forest-dependent people benefit from tropical forest conservation offsets (indeed, if a country doesn't meet the bill's standards for protection of indigenous people, they could be entirely shut out of the program) and that domestic reforestation activities use only native species and protect biodiversity.

Protection of indigenous people is an especially important issue. Deforestation has brought disease, terror, and displacement to indigenous communities around the world. In the Amazon alone, more than 90 indigenous tribes have been wiped out since 1900. These forests are being destroyed because they're not valued for the immense quantity of carbon they store.  To unscrupulous agribusiness and timber interests, their only value is as plantation land. In other words, they're worth more dead than alive.  And to some corporations, the same goes for the communities who live in them. Offset critics sometimes forget that the greatest threat to forest-dependent indigenous people is the destruction of forests, not their conservation. The simple fact that forest offset critics sometimes forget is that the greatest threat to the indigenous people of the forests is their destruction, not their conservation. It's for this reason that rainforest nations have been the leaders in calling for inclusion of incentives to protect forests in climate legislation.

But it's not just Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth who underestimate offsets' potential. I think those who are skeptical about how many will be eligible to be brought to market may underestimate the ability of even the poorest nations to develop, for instance, robust national plans and baselines to monitor the effects of deforesttation and conservation. With the possibility of big development resources on the table, they may be spurred to action faster than anyone realizes. Indeed, Brazilian states, in particular, have shown tremendous capacity to ramp up to monitor and attract forest conservation projects.

Of course, I don't want to pretend that all offsets are good. A variety of polluting industries have in the past successfully lobbied for crediting of their dubious activities. Friends of the Earth is absolutely right to point out the absurdity of providing carbon credit to, for instance, big dams, as has been done under the Clean Development Mechanism. Even if one accepts their carbon reductions, the damage they do to rivers and local communities is enormous. These dams should be removed, not subsidized (tell that to the World Bank, which has drastically increased their subsidies for dams).

For instance, there are real worries that the standards behind the domestic agricultural and biomass offsets are way too weak -- meaning that they could undermine a lot of the good work the legislation does to protect forests (see this post for more).

I think there's a fairly easy way to tell which kinds of offsets we should be suspicious of and which we shouldn't: look at what those backing certain kinds of offsets are saying: in general, those willing to embrace rigorous scientific and social standards can be trusted more than those who are lobbying for weaker standards, such as the Big Ag lobby. I wish offset critics were able to see the difference between crediting activities to save forests and giant environmentally destructive hydropower projects or unsustainable biofuels cultivation. Their legitimate criticisms might be listened to more seriously if they didn't try to demonize, for instance, saving endangered forests as well.

This is especially true when it comes to tropical forests. Critics successfully fought to keep tropical forest offsets out of the Kyoto Protocol. The world has suffered the consequences since then. Because of this giant mistake, more than 300 million acres of forest have gone up in smoke in the last ten years, producing an amount of global warming pollution equivalent to ten times the United States' annual emissions. That mistake has not only polluted the climate, it's also made extinct an untold number of species and allowed genocide and murder to be perpetrated against indigenous peoples throughout the tropical forest belt. It's time to come up with solutions to the deforestation crisis, not just dump on one of the key mechanisms that could provide ammo to solve it. 

A final point: the use of offsets shouldn't be conceived of as some kind of necessary concession.  They should be used in any climate legislation (or international agreement), no matter how strong, to make it even stronger by getting bigger pollution reductions for the same economic and political cost.

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To understand our current environmental dilemma, it helps to look at earlier civilizations that also got into environmental trouble. Our early 21st century civilization is not the first to face the prospect of environmentally induced economic decline. The question is how we will respond.

As Jared Diamond points out in his book Collapse, some of the early societies that were in environmental trouble were able to change their ways in time to avoid decline and collapse. Six centuries ago, for example, Icelanders realized that overgrazing on their grass-covered highlands was leading to extensive soil loss from the inherently thin soils of the region. Rather than lose the grasslands and face economic decline, farmers joined together to determine how many sheep the highlands could sustain and then allocated quotas among themselves, thus preserving their grasslands. Their wool production and woolen goods industry continue to thrive today.

Not all societies have fared as well as the Icelanders. The early Sumerian civilization of the fourth millennium BC had advanced far beyond any that had existed before. Its carefully engineered irrigation system gave rise to a highly productive agriculture, one that enabled farmers to produce a food surplus, supporting formation of the first cities and the first written language, cuneiform.

By any measure it was an extraordinary civilization, but there was an environmental flaw in the design of its irrigation system, one that would eventually undermine its food supply. The water that backed up behind dams built across the Euphrates was diverted onto the land through a network of gravity-fed canals. As with most irrigation systems, some irrigation water percolated downward. In this region, where underground drainage was weak, this slowly raised the water table. As the water climbed to within inches of the surface, it began to evaporate into the atmosphere, leaving behind salt. Over time, the accumulation of salt on the soil surface lowered the land's productivity.

Shifting from wheat to barley, a more salt-tolerant plant, postponed Sumer's decline, but it was treating the symptoms, not the cause, of their falling crop yields. As salt concentrations continued to build, the yields of barley eventually declined also. The resultant shrinkage of the food supply undermined this once-great civilization. As land productivity declined, so did the civilization.

The New World counterpart to Sumer is the Mayan civilization that developed in the lowlands of what is now Guatemala. It flourished from AD 250 until its collapse around AD 900. Like the Sumerians, the Mayans had developed a sophisticated, highly productive agriculture, this one based on raised plots of earth surrounded by canals that supplied water.

As with Sumer, the Mayan demise was apparently linked to a failing food supply. For this New World civilization, it was deforestation and soil erosion, likely on top of a series of droughts, that undermined agriculture. Food shortages apparently triggered civil conflict among various Mayan cities as they competed for something to eat. Today this region is covered by jungle, reclaimed by nature.

The Icelanders crossed a political tipping point that enabled them to come together and limit grazing before grassland deterioration reached the point of no return. The Sumerians and Mayans failed to do so. Time ran out.

Today, our successes and problems flow from the extraordinary growth in the world economy over the last century. The economy's annual growth, once measured in billions of dollars, is now measured in the trillions. Indeed, just the annual growth in the output of goods and services in recent years exceeded the total output of the world economy in 1900.

While the economy is growing exponentially, the earth's natural capacities, such as its ability to supply fresh water, forest products, and seafood, have not increased. Humanity's collective demands first surpassed the earth's regenerative capacity around 1980. Today, global demands on natural systems exceed their sustainable yield capacity by nearly 30 percent. We are meeting current demands by consuming the earth's natural assets, setting the stage for decline and collapse.

In our modern high-tech civilization, it is easy to forget that the economy, indeed our existence, is wholly dependent on the earth's natural systems and resources. We depend, for example, on the earth's climate system for an environment hospitable to agriculture, on the hydrological cycle to provide us with fresh water, and on long-term geological processes to convert rocks into the soil that has made the earth such a biologically productive planet.

There are now so many of us placing such heavy demands on the earth that we are overwhelming its natural capacities to meet our needs. Forests are shrinking. Each year overgrazing converts vast areas of grassland into desert. The pumping of underground water exceeds natural recharge in countries containing half the world's people, leaving many without adequate water.

Each of us depends on the products and services provided by the earth's ecosystems, ranging from forest to wetlands, from coral reefs to grasslands. Among the services these ecosystems provide are water purification, pollination, carbon sequestration, flood control, and soil conservation. A four-year study of the world's ecosystems by 1,360 scientists, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, reported that 15 of 24 primary ecosystem services are being degraded or pushed beyond their limits. For example, three quarters of oceanic fisheries, a major source of protein in the human diet, are being fished at or beyond their limits, and many are headed toward collapse.

Tropical rainforests are another ecosystem under severe stress, including the vast Amazon rainforest. Thus far roughly 20 percent of the rainforest has been cleared either for cattle ranching or soybean farming. Another 22 percent has been weakened by logging and road building, letting sunlight reach the forest floor, drying it out, and turning it into kindling. When it reaches this point, the rainforest loses its resistance to fire and begins to burn when ignited by lightning strikes. Scientists believe that if half the Amazon is cleared or weakened, this may be the tipping point, the threshold beyond which the rainforest cannot be saved. Daniel Nepstad, an Amazon-based senior scientist from the Woods Hole Research Center, sees a future of "megafires" sweeping through the drying jungle. He notes that the carbon stored in the Amazon's trees equals roughly 15 years of human-induced carbon emissions in the atmosphere. If we reach this tipping point we will have triggered a major climate feedback, another step that could help seal our fate as a civilization.

The excessive pressures on a given resource typically begin in a few countries and then slowly spread to others. Nigeria and the Philippines, once net exporters of forest products, are now importers. Thailand, now largely deforested, has banned logging. So has China, which is turning to Siberia and to the few remaining forested countries in Southeast Asia, such as Myanmar and Papua New Guinea, for the logs it needs.

As wells go dry, as grasslands are converted into desert, as fisheries are depleted, and as soils erode, people are forced to migrate elsewhere, either within their country or across national boundaries. As the earth's natural capacities at the local level are exceeded, the declining economic possibilities generate a flow of environmental refugees.

Countries today are facing several negative environmental trends simultaneously, some of which reinforce each other. The earlier civilizations such as the Sumerians and Mayans were often local, rising and falling in isolation from the rest of the world. In contrast, we will either mobilize together to save our global civilization, or we will all be potential victims of its disintegration.

Adapted from Chapter 1, "Entering a New World," in Lester R. Brown's Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, available for free download and purchase from the Earth Policy Institute.

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Henry Waxman and Ed Markey seem to have mastered the art of the non-concession concession: striking deals with potential opponents in ways that meet their needs while minimizing (though not entirely eliminating) the negative impacts.

Similar to their distribution of allowances, which seemed at first glance to be a massive giveaway but turned out to be far more equitable, the latest compromise between Waxman and House Agriculture chairman Collin Peterson seems to fall into this category. The agreement installs a five year moratorium on calculations for how ethanol and other biofuels affect international land use. Climate pollution is released into the air when American farmers switch their land from growing food to growing fuel, and South American agricultural interests burn the rainforest to clear land to grow additional food to fill the gap.

At first glance, that seems pretty bad, and in some ways, it is. As Environment America’s Anna Aurilio pointed out in E & E (sub required), "No one should be trying to legislate away scientific inquiry.” That’s true – and if there’s a possibility of undoing this concession, we should seize it. But in terms of actual impact on land and greenhouse gas emissions, this concession may be minimal. The 2007 law that mandated a “Renewable Fuels Standard” already exempts 15 billion gallons of ethanol from these land use requirements, and production may not exceed that mark, or exceed it significantly, within the moratorium’s five year time frame – meaning that this provision may have little immediate effect.

However, this concession does essentially punt the question down the road, which means that environmentalists and others concerned about ethanol’s impact (like anyone who pays more for food as a result of ethanol mandates), will have to be very vigilant five years from now to ensure that EPA does actually assess whether ethanol and other biofuels that destroy rainforests should qualify under the Renewable Fuels Standard.

There’s another way in which the legislation may make this concession less damaging than it seemed at first glance. The bill’s tropical forest provisions, which I summarized in this Center for American Progress post and here at Grist, will make deforestation much less financially attractive. By valuing forests for the carbon they store – and by providing incentives for reforestation – they make expansion into pristine areas much less likely. At current carbon prices, a hectare of rainforest could be worth $10,000. Depending on the price of carbon and the price of ethanol, it may make more strict financial sense for land owners, communities, and governments to invest in conservation instead of destroying forest for agricultural land for biofuels or other purposes.

In some cases, that will even be true in the United States where agricultural land values are much higher – farmers may be able to make more from reforestation or restoring their land to native prairie than continuing ethanol production, leading to a welcome conversion of at least marginal land to carbon-sequestering Nature.

The other main concession Waxman made was giving the Department of Agriculture primary jurisdiction over deciding what agricultural activities could qualify as offsets. As Tom Philpott chronicled here at Grist, if USDA continues its long tradition of altering science to meet whatever Big Ag’s financial interest du jour is, that could mean farmers would just get credit for pouring Monsanto’s Round-Up pesticide on genetically engineered crops.

But there’s some hope that USDA would actually apply science. In addition to bringing offsets to scale, we must also ensure that the offsets markets have high standards of environmental integrity to ensure that offsets result in real and measurable greenhouse gas reductions while bolstering efforts to conserve soil, water, and fish and wildlife resources. Tom Philpott added in an email (echoed by this post) to me that while we should view USDA’s promises with skepticism, he’s cautiously hopeful all the public scrutiny of these decisions will at least somewhat improve USDA’s commitment to the environment and science.

“I think the ag lobby will be surprised by the amount of scrutiny on ag offsets,” he said. “They are used to operating in obscurity, and haven't fully adjusted to this new era of public interest. Meaning that people like you and me can play an important role as watchdogs as this thing develops.”

At the end of the day, that’s the conclusion we need to draw. Henry Waxman and Ed Markey’s policy mastery and skillful negotiating diminished the negative environmental impacts of the compromises that are necessary to build a majority behind real action to solve this great global crisis – but we’ll have to remain involved for years to make sure those negative consequences stay diminished.

UPDATE: Ben Geman at E & E has news of how the bill’s biomass and biodiesel provisions have been changed:

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One of the little-known ingredients of the deal that allowed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, H.R. 2454, to pass the Energy and Commerce committee was a breakthrough on protections for the world's vanishing tropical forests. The bill's authors, Representatives Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA), used this agreement to achieve the bill's environmental aims while keeping it affordable enough to maintain the political support it needed to pass. As such, the bill's tropical forest provisions are essential not only to strong climate policy, but also to overall hopes for climate legislation as it works its way through Congress.

Destruction of these carbon-rich, biodiverse forests causes about 20 percent of global climate pollution -- more than the emissions from all the cars, trucks, planes and ships in the world combined. The bill's supporters recognized that you can't solve the climate crisis unless you solve the deforestation crisis.

Tropical forest conservation is one of the most affordable and fastest ways to achieve large pollution reductions. These forests are so biologically rich that every acre stores an average of about 200 tons of carbon dioxide, but because there are currently no systems to value tropical forest carbon, they're being destroyed for ranchland and soy plantations. Indeed, the consulting firm McKinsey & Co.'s recent greenhouse gas abatement cost curve analysis found that tropical forest conservation has the potential to reduce carbon pollution at just a fraction of the cost of other essential strategies, like installing clean energy or improving agricultural practices.

The challenge has been that, despite the importance of saving tropical forests and the relative ease of doing it, intractable debate about exactly how to end deforestation has persisted for years. As a result, tropical forests were entirely excluded from the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, resulting in 300 million acres of forests getting wiped off the map since then.

Since then, a consensus has emerged that this "colossal blunder" cannot be repeated -- but exactly how to protect the forests has continued to be disputed, with some groups favoring a pure government funding approach and others backing an approach that would give emitters pollution credits for investing in successful forest conservation.

To resolve this question, leading environmental groups and major U.S. corporations (including some of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters) like American Electric Power and Duke Energy convened a negotiating process through Avoided Deforestation Partners, while the Waxman-Markey legislation was being drafted.

These groups had a major realization: instead of choosing a government or private investment approach, we could do both. Indeed, it became clear that doing both was essential -- private investment was the only real hope for attracting the scale of financing needed to end deforestation, while government funding was necessary to build the scientific and policy infrastructure and developing country capacity necessary for a robust private investment system -- and to accomplish conservation goals to which private investment was less well suited.

In addition to endorsing this dual approach, the coalition also agreed to set very strict standards for any private conservation efforts. First and foremost, they agreed that emitters could only get credit for conservation activities once they had already occurred -- not just for having a plan. They also agreed that all forest conservation activities in major emitting countries like Indonesia and Brazil must be done in association with a national plan that ensures that the project is contributing to a national decline in deforestation, not just a local one.

In order to reduce deforestation immediately, however, the agreement doesn't require that all forest conservation wait for the establishment of national plans and baselines, a process expected to take some years, especially in the least developed countries that lack the resources to quickly evaluate deforestation levels and carbon stocks.

Instead, in the first years after the adoption of climate legislation, emitters will also be able to get credit for conservation activities that are part of state or province efforts to reduce deforestation in cases where those states or provinces themselves are major sources of carbon pollution. Companies can also receive credit for conservation projects in the least-developed, relatively low-emitting countries while they prepare their national plans. These provisions help ensure that the next few years don't result in a deforestation race to the bottom before conservation protections are established.

Finally, and crucially, no conservation project at any time will be able to receive credit unless it promotes biodiversity, and indigenous and forest-dependent people benefit from it.

With groups ranging from the Sierra Club to Starbucks and Pacific Gas and Electric Company endorsing these principles, the agreement had the political and policy support it needed. As I outlined in a recent brief paper for The Center for American Progress, the Waxman-Markey legislation includes almost all of these principles - though some technical differences between the agreement and the legislation remain.

That's great news for tropical forests. Based on figures from the EPA, the tropical forest provisions of the bill would reduce pollution by one billion tons annually by 2015 -- equivalent to eliminating all of Germany's pollution. And one third of those reductions -- those generated by auctioning off five percent of the bill's allowances and dedicating those funds to establishing a conservation infrastructure, among other purposes -- come in addition to the bill's pollution cap. That provides a big carbon saving bonus not accounted for in most estimates of the bill's impact.

These provisions also provide major cost savings. EPA has estimated that without international offsets (most of which will be forest-based), the bill would have been 96 percent more expensive. In the words of a recent New York Times editorial, "the economics make sense."

Despite the benefits, the bill has a long way to go before it becomes law -- and there are threats at every turn. The House leadership can ensure that the bill's forest provisions stay intact by not allowing hostile amendments to risk the entire agreement underlying the bill - and the realization of the bill's environmental goals.

The Waxman-Markey bill's forest provisions provide a model for action by other countries. If the bill passes and other industrialized countries adopt similar tropical forest conservation measures, deforestation could be ended or even reversed -- a huge global achievement that, until Waxman-Markey, seemed tragically out of reach.

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Dr. Kerry Kriger cracks a smile during his visit to Grist's Seattle HQ.Russ Walker / GristOn Tuesday, the staff at Grist devoured frogs for lunch.  Well, not exactly.

We sat down with conservation biologist Dr. Kerry Kriger of the newly minted nonprofit Save the Frogs! -- one of several stops he's making in Seattle during a country-wide speaking tour. As one of the lone voices raising the alarm for amphibians, Kriger dished about the worst disease ever to hit wildlife, why it's such a big deal that one-third of amphibians are threatened with extinction, and just how many people actually are having frogs for lunch.

A scientist by training, Kriger first became involved with amphibians while in Australia researching how frogs are affected by the fungal disease chytridiomycosis, which currently is decimating frog populations and which may be the worst disease ever recorded to hit a group of organisms. It's the chytrid fungus, and it has caused more than 100 extinctions since the 1970s.

Didn't know frogs were in such shoddy shape? Don't worry, you're the norm. Which is precisely the reason Kriger started Save the Frogs! in the first place. He realized he was writing scientific papers about how bad the situation is globally for frogs, which then got published in journals "normal people don't read." On top of all that, he and other scientists were making recommendations based on that research, but there was no one to carry them out. Kriger figured starting a nonprofit was the best way to fill that void.

His current vision for the organization is simple but powerful: "that everyone in America know that frogs are disappearing." Once general awareness is established, especially among the younger generation, it is Kriger's hope that grassroots and legal action to protect frogs and their habitat will follow.

When asked why the average citizen should care about some dying frogs on a mountain somewhere, Kriger took a minute to measure his answer.

"Frogs have been around 250 million years," he said. "They've outlived the dinosaurs ... But in the last 30, 40, 50 years, they're now going extinct."

Because thin-skinned frogs live both on land and in the water, they are biological indicators of the planet's health -- the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. With over one-third of these species in imminent danger of extinction, what's really alarming is that most of us have no idea what's going on.

If that's not cause for concern, he reasoned, you only have to look as far as human disease and medicine. Little-known fact: 10 percent of Nobel prizes in medicine and physiology recognized research that was performed, in part, by researchers using frogs. Additionally, frogs eat disease-carrying ticks and mosquitoes, reducing the spread of malaria, dengue fever, and other less-than-desirable conditions people don't want to catch.

So where is the ray of sunshine in all of this? Kriger admitted he was rarely asked that question, saying, "Good news comes out occasionally."

However, he went on, individuals can do a lot to reverse the threats to amphibians. A few ways to do this are by supporting organics (keeping harmful pesticides far from frogs), by buying pet or food frogs that are captive-bred and local (America is the second-largest importer of frog legs ... who knew?), and by dropping into casual conversation news of the amphibian extinction crisis (over cocktails, naturally).

If you're interested in hearing more from Kriger, take a look at his list of speaking engagements or contact him to help organize an event in your area. And really, consider skipping the frog legs next time.

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As the struggle to pass the Waxman-Markey climate-energy bill showed, there is a certain price any political system is willing to bear for climate action. In China, that price is low. In the United States, it is medium. And in Europe, it is relatively high.

But in every system, there exist two primary ways to reduce the costs of climate legislation to align it with that politically-determined price. One is by weakening the pollution reduction targets – something which provides zero benefit to the climate. The other is by including offsets – making it possible for emitters to get credit for low-cost pollution reduction activities like tropical forest conservation and energy efficiency investments.

Offsets have come under fire from critics who wish all of our organizing and effort had produced a stronger bill. But those critics are aiming their fire in the wrong direction. The inclusion of offsets was critical to getting the cost of the bill to a level at which a majority of the members of the Energy and Commerce committee could support it – without excessively lowering the targets. If the offsets had been eliminated or diminished, the pollution reduction targets would have been weakened much further in order to get the cost of the legislation down to the price the majority would support.

Indeed, we can estimate about how much those all-important targets would have been lowered: according to the EPA analysis (pdf) of the original Waxman-Markey discussion draft, the international offsets alone lowered the cost of the bill by about half. Take out those offsets, and the targets would have been made drastically lower to get the majority support the bill needed. As a result, the bill would have fallen far, far short of what we need to do to avoid climate catastrophe.

For my fellow political science nerds lovers, I've written an equation to express this phenomenon below:

The Law of Offsets

C = T / P

Where C = the cost of climate legislation a given political system will bear

T = Strength of pollution reduction targets

P = Price of pollution reductions

Excluding offsets also would have meant excluding major sources of global warming pollution like deforestation (20 percent of climate pollution, more than all the world’s cars, trucks, and planes combined) and agriculture (which, with offsets and other changes, has the potential to sequester almost 40 percent of global emissions).

Of course, it’s essential that offsets, like other kinds of pollution reductions, be real – and the Waxman-Markey legislation did a good job of ensuring they are. In addition to establishing a rigorous scientific board to evaluate any proposed offsets, the bill also includes an essential requirement: in order for any offsets to receive credit, they must have already taken place. In other words, you can’t get credit for a plan to offset emissions, but only for verified emission reductions that have already occurred.

In addition, there are a variety of very strict requirements to ensure, for instance, that indigenous and forest-dependent people benefit from tropical forest conservation offsets (indeed, if a country doesn’t meet the bill’s standards for protection of indigenous people, they could be entirely shut out of the program) and that domestic reforestation activities use only native species and protect biodiversity. There are a number of other safeguards and protections you can read about in Part D of the bill.

Of course, there are not an infinite number of real offsets out there. Indeed, the EPA analysis of the Waxman-Markey draft suggested that there may only be several hundred million tons a year of legitimate domestic offsets. As valuable as offsets can be, it’s essential that we maintain their integrity by sticking to the high standards in the bill.

A final point: the use of offsets shouldn’t be conceived of as some kind of necessary concession. They should be used in any climate legislation (or international agreement), no matter how strong, to make it even stronger. In essence, lowering the price of pollution reductions means more reductions are possible while staying within the politically achievable price.

Even if a political system will bear a relatively high cost for pollution reduction (as in Europe), you can still achieve even more pollution reductions through the use of low-cost measures like offsets. To sum up, in the words of climate economist Kenneth Chomitz, "cheapness is a virtue."

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HRH Prince of Wales (that's His Royal Highness to you peasants) has launched an international online campaign to save the rainforests, appropriately monikered the Prince's Rainforests Project. Prince Charles is joined by his sons William and Harry, along with a few non-royal celebs like Daniel Craig, the Dalai Lama, and an animated frog, in connecting tropical deforestation with the battle against climate change. Quoth The Royal One:

If we lose the battle against tropical deforestation, we lose the battle against climate change.

The Prince specifically aims this online grassroots crusade at the international climate talks in Copenhagen this December, hoping to create a groundswell of support for rainforest protections in those negotiations. As a part of this, there's a heavy social networking component, a la their MySpace page, YouTube channel, and embeddable Flash widget below.

According to their press release, it's kind of a big deal because this is apparently the "first time that a Royal has partnered with a social media platform to engage the public in a cause that is near and dear to them." No word yet on any royalty using social networks for causes they despise.

The Prince fessed up to choosing a frog as his symbol of action against climate change partly because of the long and illustrious fairy-tale history of princes and frogs, though it makes sense when you consider saving frogs can help beat climate change. Here's the message straight from the Prince's mouth:

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This weekend, The New York Times Magazine ran as its cover story an article entitled "Why Isn't the Brain Green?" (i.e. why humans don't generally make environmental choices automatically, even though it's good for us in the long term). And a front page Monday story in The Washington Post, chronicled how "going green" could lead to discord in families as, for example, one spouse wanted the heat on and another wanted to shiver for the planet.

I wish this article had included an important point: it's only hard for individuals to be green because our society remains so un-green. Turning on a lightswitch shouldn't be a source of agony - it should come from solar electricity made possible by government support and strict limits on polluting fuels. Consumers shouldn't have to worry about whether or not the fish they buy that the supermarket is endangered or not - supermarkets and restaurants shouldn't be allowed to serve endangered fish like red snapper and bluefin. And we shouldn't have to squint at ingredients labels to find out if our cookies contain rainforest-destroyers like palm oil: it should be banned from import. That's why the greenest thing anyone can do - better even than not flushing - is to organize their communities to demand that their elected officials and corporate leaders make our society go green - so that it becomes automatic for the rest of us.

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Logs being transported out of the Amazon rainforest.

Shazari via Flickr

It was a mistake, I know, to try to cross the street last Thursday evening. There I was, not far from the Tower of London, hoping to get across the main road east to the city's former docklands. But every time I tried to set foot on the tarmac, there was a wailing of police sirens, and a posse of motorbikes and limousines sped alarmingly by.

Each speeding convoy contained one of the planet's most important leaders, surrounded by associated ministers, officials, advisers and flunkies. They were burning fuel on their way back from a modernistic hanger-like exhibition center located by a disused dock, where they had spent the best part of the day saving the world.

Or had they? True, the G20 summit (at which the leaders had spent their day) had done much to crack down on some of the gross financial abuses they once indulged that have led to the greatest economic slump in 70 years, promising restrictions, for example on hedge funds, bonuses and tax havens. True, too, the leaders did more than expected to try to rescue developing countries -- hardest hit of all by the crisis -- allowing the International Monetary Fund to lend more money and taking steps to finance trade.

But they did nothing to address the far bigger crises queueing up to batter us when the present one is over -- those caused by tightening energy shortages and escalating climate change.

That was all the more tragic because, as most of the leaders have publicly accepted, the solution to the financial, energy and climate crises is one thing -- "a global green new deal", to use U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown's words, that invests massively in energy efficiency and renewable sources. This would not only reduce carbon emissions and promote alternatives to oil, but employ more people (over three times more, according to one recent study) and offer more opportunities for innovation than conventional spending.

The world desperately needed the boost that the leaders could have given to the building of a low-carbon economy. While the G20 show played out in London, this year's first session of the vital climate change negotiations -- due to culminate in a "last chance saloon" meeting in Copenhagen in December -- was getting increasingly bogged down in Bonn. And, despite all the rhetoric of recent months, most developed countries have devoted precious little of their stimulus packages to green measures.

Britain's Lord Stern, author of a definitive report on economics and climate change, has proposed [PDF] that G20 countries commit about 20 percent of their stimulus dollars to low-carbon investments. Only France, among Western countries, has exceeded that benchmark (and then only just). Britain has only achieved 6 percent, the United States just twice that. They are all put to shame by China, at 38 percent, not to speak of South Korea's 81 percent.

The British officials managing the G20 summit put Lord Stern's benchmark on the table as something the leaders might wish to endorse. Not a single country, including the U.K., supported the idea. And green measures and combatting climate change only featured (and as weakly worded aspirations at that) in paragraphs 27 and 28 of the 29-paragraph comminiqué.

The failure had an immediate chilling effect on the Bonn negotiations, which were already dealing with the failure of rich countries to make good on their promises in Bali 16 months ago to set aside money to help poor nations fight, and adapt to, climate change; last month E.U. leaders put off making commitments until they saw what the United States came up with.

Big developing countries -- like China, India, Mexico, South Africa and Brazil -- where leaders increasingly accept they must take action on climate, had been disillusioned to see how little the rich nations were committing to the green new deal. And the G20 leaders' neglect of climate change made things worse.

Yet, almost entirely unnoticed by the media, there was one serious attempt in London last week to get the leaders to take action against global warming. It took place not in the docklands hanger but in the ornate St. James Palace across town. And the host was not Britain's prime minister but its future head of state, Prince Charles.

The Prince called together representatives of all the G20 countries -- including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel -- to urge them to take action to protect rainforests. And he, at least, said what needed saying.

"As important and concerning as the global financial crisis is," he told them, "its challenges and consequences will pale into insignificance when compared with the scale and extent of human misery and suffering, social and economic, if our actions to tackle climate change are too little or too late, or both."

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