Stop burning trees and coal

The Times
May 29, 2009
Camilla Cavendish

Many things need urgent attention if we want to protect the biosphere, but two stand out: trees and coal. Both are part of the natural cycle which we all sketched at school: trees use sunlight to take carbon out of the air, and return that carbon to the Earth — partly as coal — as they decay. But the rate at which we are now burning the trees — and the coal — is pushing us towards unnatural disaster.
Forests, particularly tropical ones, are the world’s last, best and cheapest insurance policy against climate change and species extinction. They are ancient, complex ecosystems which store water and regulate rainfall and are home to perhaps half the world’s plant and animal species. We are destroying them at an alarming rate, however: deforestation and new land cultivation accounts for almost 20 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions each year. That’s more than is produced by every car, ship, lorry and aircraft on the planet. It’s more than is produced by either the US or China. We cannot combat climate change if we keep destroying forests.
If trees are an insurance policy, coal is the fuel which could really burn the house down. Coal is the dirtiest and most plentiful of the fossil fuels. It is also the cheapest — a dirty trick played on us by Nature — which is why it is the fastest growing fuel in the world. It provides almost 30 per cent of the world’s energy and half of America’s electricity-generating capacity. The world is set to use a great deal of coal in the next 20 years, according to the International Energy Agency; about half of it in China and India — but if we burn all the coal in the ground, without trapping the carbon dioxide, we could face runaway climate change.
It is the potential irreversibility of the process that is most alarming. At some level, most of us understand that the complex ecosystems we have taken for granted are fundamental to our survival. In the past 18 months, debates about whether the climate is warming have given way to the realisation that change is happening faster than most scientists had expected. As the white, reflective Arctic sea ice melts, the dark ocean absorbs more sunlight, accelerating the melting. If the permafrost on land thaws it will release methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, which would in turn cause more warming. Tipping points such as these could turn global warming into mankind’s biggest mistake, with consequences visible from the moon.
We find it hard to contemplate the enormity of these changes, to comprehend our place in the natural cycle, to act on problems that are so much bigger than we are. In our daily lives we continue to make choices that move the dial another fraction in the wrong direction. We write cheques to save cute monkeys from extinction, but buy soap made from palm oil, the production of which has devastated the forests where the monkeys lived. We show off the cloth bags we bought to reduce waste, then fill them with plastic bottles containing water we could have drunk free from the tap, knowing that the bottles will be shipped to China and burnt. This cognitive dissonance — so terribly human — is exacerbated because climate change is an international problem, which must be solved globally. So we are always looking to someone else to solve it.
We’re going to have to stop waiting for someone else to act. The solutions must come from the West; not just because the bulk of the man-made greenhouse gases still in the atmosphere were put there by the British, American and German industrial revolutions, but also because we have the most money and know-how. Indonesia is going to keep clearing forests to make way for agricultural land until it becomes more profitable to preserve the trees. China and India will build more dirty coal plants until cleaner ones become financially viable. The big questions are how the industrialised West is going to find the money to get the industrialising nations to do the right thing, and how to ensure that the money actually achieves the objective.
ENDING DEFORESTATION There is currently no value attached to a live tree, standing on peat-rich soil, in a tropical rainforest. A pile of dead timber is profitable and so is a patch of cultivatable land. So how do we change things so that trees are worth more alive than they are dead?
First, forests need to be part of any new climate change regime. Second, countries need to be paid for them. Various proposals are under discussion, mostly variations on the theme of letting countries claim carbon “credits” for valuable trees, which they could then trade. The Prince of Wales has suggested issuing rainforest bonds that could attract private sector capital, particularly from pension funds. Those bonds would be guaranteed by developed nations. Satellite monitoring means that it is easier than it might seem to check whether a country has fulfilled its promises to preserve trees. The Brazilian space agency already publishes regular, detailed pictures of the Amazon, and it has offered to make its technology available to other rainforest nations.
The biggest problems lie elsewhere. First, it is questionable to what extent many governments actually control their forests. Most will have to build partnerships involving federal, state and municipal authorities, plus local people and business interests. That is a challenge. Second, there is a real danger that issuing vast numbers of cheap credits for forests will kill the global carbon price.
CLEANING UP COAL It is not yet realistic to expect China, India or indeed South Africa (which has vast coal reserves) to stop burning coal — their governments would be committing political suicide.The focus, instead, is on convincing them to capture the emissions from coal plants and pump them underground. This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Some carbon capture and storage (CCS) plants are already being built at small scale, and none of the components they use are new. The big unknown is the cost. Current estimates are that CCS will roughly double the cost of a new power plant, so unless the West takes a lead there is scant chance that Asia will take action. And the West is dragging its heels, although Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Governor of California, has effectively outlawed the building of any new coal-fired power plants that do not include CCS.
Even if CCS can be successfully built, the question is how to finance the transition. Straight transfers of money from Western taxpayers to Eastern governments were always going to be fraught with difficulty, even if the world had not been in deep recession. Hopes are, instead, being pinned on trying to create a global carbon price. One way to do this is to impose a carbon tax on pollution; a clear and simple mechanism, but it may prove difficult to persuade countries to harmonise levels. The alternative is to create a “cap and trade” scheme, in which companies are given permits to pollute, which they can sell if they are not needed. This puts a price on pollution, which rises as the number of permits is gradually reduced.
Cap and trade can be spectacularly successful. It almost eradicated sulphur dioxide from American factories in the 1990s after Congress became concerned about acid rain. Companies that had to pay to pollute changed their processes faster than anyone had expected. It is also the basis for the EU’s European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which runs until 2012 (which has, admittedly, been less effective, chiefly because protectionist governments have handed out too many permits). Crucially, the process of trading permits creates funds to help companies or countries to clean up their act. Under the ETS, money is already flowing from the West to clean up the East through something called the Clean Development Mechanism. There are flaws in that mechanism but, in principle, it offers the prospect of a global pile of money to reward good behaviour — which could be large enough to bring China and India to the negotiating table. Without them, the Copenhagen negotiation will be pointless.
COPENHAGEN: THE NITTY GRITTY The greatest barriers to meaningful agreement at the summit are probably:
• Differing levels of ambition (too few countries prepared to keep warming below the “safe” consensus of 2C);
• Inability to agree on the necessary funds;
• Legal wrangling. At the moment, it is still not clear whether what will be negotiated is an entirely new treaty, or amendments to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or amendments to the Kyoto Protocol (to which the US is not a signatory). This will be discussed at the Bonn Climate Change talks next week.
Four outcomes are possible:
• Breakthrough: big agreements on big things, including a second commitment period for emissions trading after 2012 (without which it will be harder for President Obama to convince senators to back a US cap and trade scheme);
• Breakdown: spectacular failure to agree anything important (though this could at least galvanise a public outcry and sense of urgency);
• Stall, then recovery: an agreement in principle, pending resolution of certain outstanding issues. That is what happened with the Kyoto Protocol;
• Stall, then breakdown: an agreement in principle, pending resolution of certain issues which prove insuperable. This would be the most dangerous outcome, because it will mask the reality of breakdown by enabling participants to pretend that progress has been made.
Copenhagen offers a unique opportunity for the world to act in time. On January 1 this year, the Rio Tinto adviser and environmentalist Tom Burke wrote a new year letter to me and other friends. It contained this striking paragraph: “The punctuation of history is denoted by the names of the places where order was restored after chaos had prevailed — Westphalia, Versailles, San Francisco. It is not an exaggeration to say that the implications of what happens — or does not — in Copenhagen in December will do more to shape human destiny for longer than any of them. For the nature of the climate is such that the future cannot redeem today’s mistakes. In the most literal sense, the sins of the fathers will indeed be visited on the sons and well beyond the third and fourth generation.”
The challenges are immense. But human intelligence, which got us into this mess, is also our passport out of it.