International Negotiations Collapse Due To U.S. Intransigence

Climate Change and Forests

by Jim Brobeck

Extreme weather has ripped across the United Kingdom and Western Europe causing billions of dollars of damage and the death of at least 11 people. The Pacific Ocean could lose the majority of its coral reefs by the end of the century devastating the region’s fishing and tourism industries. Crop-killing droughts in the heartland of America threaten the food supply of humans around the world. Polar bears are starving, walrus and caribou populations are declining, and the Arctic ice pack is melting away: scientists are warning that rising temperatures from global warming are damaging the fragile Arctic systems that wildlife and northern communities rely on.

The list of problems associated with global warming grows every year. While climate science can be dizzyingly complex, the underlying facts are simple. Carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere traps heat. For the last 10,000 years, we enjoyed a constant level of CO2--about 280 parts per million (ppm)--until about 100 years ago, when we began to burn more coal and oil. That 280 has already risen to 360 ppm--a concentration that has not been seen for 400,000 years. It is projected to double to 560 ppm later in this new century, correlating with an increase in the average global temperature of three to seven degrees F. (For perspective, the last Ice Age was only five to nine degrees colder than the current climate.)

Evidence of global warming abounds: The 11 hottest years on record have occurred since 1983; the five hottest consecutive years were 1991 to 1995; 1998 was the hottest year on record; the decade of the 1990s was the hottest at least in this past millennium. The planet is heating more rapidly than at any time in the last 10,000 years. On this point, the science is unambiguous: to allow the climate to re-stabilize requires worldwide emissions reductions of 70 percent.

Greenhouse gases produced mainly by the burning of fossil fuels are altering the atmosphere in ways that affect earth’s climate, and it is likely that they have "contributed substantially to the observed warming over the last 50 years," an international panel of climate scientists has concluded. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said temperatures could go higher than previously predicted if emissions are not curtailed.

The conclusions resonated loudly when negotiators from most of the world’s nations gathered in The Hague during November 13-24 to work out details of the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty intended to cut releases of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. The 1997 treaty has been signed by more than 150 countries, but has not yet been ratified by any industrialized country. At this summit, rules on how to implement many aspects of the Treaty, including emissions trading between domestic polluters and the owners of forestlands were on the table.

Forest vegetation, especially stands of old growth trees, capture and hold CO2. The United States delegation (including Japan and Canada) went into the negotiations hoping to bypass their commitment to reduce CO2 emissions by getting credit for forest CO2 sequestration.

Forest activists from around the planet were hopeful that the role of healthy old growth ecosystems would be recognized for the important role in climate regulation that could be added to the list of positive effects that conservation plays in preserving our environment. But the proposals being offered by the American negotiators were obviously concocted by the commercial timber and paper industry and would have devastated natural forests. The rules that our government insisted upon would allow credit under the term "reforestation" for regrowth following harvesting, while not counting the harvesting as emissions. This interpretation has the potential to significantly weaken reductions. The system would allow a power plant unable to reduce its emissions to 5% below 1990 levels (as agreed upon in the 1997 Kyoto meeting) to instead buy "emissions reduction credits" from a landowner whose forest practices are recognized by the forest rules as removing CO2 from the atmosphere. The question that forest activists asked: will the practices that receive the most credits benefit or harm fish, wildlife, and water quality? The European Union contingent at the November negotiations saw the trading of credits as a loophole that would negate CO2 emission eductions. Europeans are more sensitive to the effects of climate change due to recent super storms that have devastated portions of their region as well as their close ties to former colonies that are threatened with extinction should oceans rise to anticipated levels due to thermal expansion and melting polar ice.

The U.S. supported accounting rules that could actually encourage countries to convert old growth forests into clear cuts before the official Kyoto "accounting period" begins in the year 2008. If governments receive credits for planting new trees in recent clear cuts after 2008, but are not debited for the logging that created the clear cuts and the need for replanting, an enormous incentive would exist for expedited logging over the next few years. The local timber giant Sierra Pacific Industries has created an explosion of clear cut acreage and would have benefited by the passage of the U.S. proposal to credit forest owners that convert our natural forests into commercial tree plantations.

Many beneficial forest activities, such as protecting and restoring native forests and extending timber rotations, would help to reduce the buildup of atmospheric CO2. Conservationists hoped that emissions trading could produce a "win-win" deal for both landowners and the environment. However, there are other, very destructive activities that in some cases temporarily reduce CO2 levels a little more. These include growing timber plantations containing only one kind of tree, using foreign or genetically engineered trees, and applying massive amounts of chemical herbicides and fertilizers. In fact the replacement of existing forests with plantations would likely end up increasing CO2 emissions in both short term (it takes a long time for a seedling to grow into a tree) and the long-term (plantations are more susceptible to catastrophic fire and insect damage). If Kyoto forest rules ended up written so that these egregious practices receive more emissions reduction credits than beneficial ones do, then the world’s flagship environmental treaty will actually encourage further degradation of forests and water quality, both here in America and around the globe.

During the two weeks of negotiations in the Netherlands forest activists concerned about the future of natural forests joined the European Union and the developing countries in their protest of the policies stubbornly held onto by the American-Canadian-Japanese delegates. Having completely discredited itself by seeking massive and false carbon sequestration credits from its current, "business-as-usual", forestry activities, the U.S. has generated international wrath. By continually attempting to insert this loophole into the way forests would be credited for reducing CO2 emissions, American delegation brought negotiations here to a standstill. The loopholes were so large that our country would have been able to escape from reducing its emissions to below 1990 levels, in stark violation of its commitment in the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change.

The two weeks of international talks at The Hague ended in failure as our American delegates refused to abandon their insistence on CO2 emission loopholes. Europe blamed the United States for holding to a position that was bad for the environment.

Disappointed negotiators pledged to meet again. But deep divisions between the two main bargaining blocs -- the United States and the European Union -- cast doubt on the prospects for a later agreement. Conference chairman Jan Pronk decided not to close out the meeting, but instead suspended it, saying it would resume early next year.

"We did not succeed," said Pronk, the Dutch environment minister. "Looking back, I think it’s better to say perhaps we did not yet succeed."

Some European Union countries believed the Americans were asking for credit for too high a proportion, while others didn’t think the lands should count at all. Instead of decreasing, emissions would be allowed to increase under the U.S. plan, the European Union said. The issue remained the chief sticking point to the end.

After high-level talks among many of the key delegations reached an impasse, Pronk intervened with his own compromise proposal, but both negotiating blocs -- the EU and an American-led group that included Japan and Canada -- rejected it.

It is unfortunate that our American negotiators are representing established corporate entities that want to continue to use the atmosphere as a dump for the byproducts of coal and oil combustion. A future of photo-voltaics and wind power providing our energy needs would fulfill the vision of such futurists as R. Buckminster Fuller. He considered the use of coal and oil practical only in the early stages of industrialization. Now that we have "tooled up" with modern technical advances we should convert to non-polluting forms of energy production.

Natural forest ecosystems are priceless reservoirs of biodiversity and are key to enhancing climate stability. It would have been right for the negotiations in the Netherlands to yield protection for natural systems and non-polluting energy for humans. Citizens must continue to insist that their government prioritize environmentally progressive policies.

From the Winter 2001 issue of the Environmental News.