Deforestation and Climate Change

Last night I had dinner with some musician friends from High School (thanks Facebook for making such a meeting possible!). And there were only two of us who had left the fine arts world for science. My friend Abbie (who used to play Oboe in the Vermont Youth Orchestra) has been working on the international politics of global climate change. Her most recent Masters Degree (she now has two) in Environmental Studies led her to a thesis regarding the importance of including deforestation policy in climate change talks. According to her 1/5th of the world's Green House Gas emissions come from deforestation, slash & burn, in the rainforest. And that's the cheapest thing to fix. Instead of building wind turbines, or switching to biodiesel, we could just not destroy forest land for agricultural use.

According to Abbie, slash & burn in the Amazon was, once upon a time, a sustainable technique used by natives for agriculture. A small population would clear an area of forest, but the land was so poor that it could only support them for a handful of years, after which they'd pick up camp, move to another location and do the same thing until, after about a 30 year period they would end up at the original plot.

Abbie's thought is that a high carbon-emitting country could pay a highly forested-country to not cut down their forest land as a way to offset or sequester their carbon.

This plan was opposed by Abbie's friend who works first-hand with Brazilian farmers saying that in such a case, one country basically pays the government of another country and the farmers who need jobs are left with nothing.

Here's as fundamental question: how can we both preserve forest land and create jobs for native peoples?

When a french-horn playing friend asked, "so what's an acre of forest worth?" Abbie replied that it depends on the type of forest and how much carbon is sequestered there. For some forest areas that have been burned it may take on the order of 50 years to gain back the carbon lost to decay or burning. However, the peat forests in Indonesia which are incredibly carbon dense, she said once those have been filled in for agriculture, the space will *never* recapture all the carbon it once held. And ironically, the agriculture in Indonesia is largely for Palm Oil, which is used in many products, but also biodeisel. Apparently the EU just put out a mandate that some percentage of all transportation fuel must be biodeisel. So this mandate is creating a market for a horribly carbon-unfriend practice. Bleh! So complicated!

All this stuff sounds fairly depressing and too big to handle, but I'd like to propose that it's not too big. It's all just policy. Let's change the mindset. I think, globally our morals are shifting, so what should they be? Look at whole systems, give back what you take, businesses need morals too, what do people need?, progress at what cost? hmmm I feel another post coming on... :)

On another note entirely:
Last night I had a dream that my students were presenting their original calculations regarding energy and climate change at a church and WCAX was there and wanted to know if we wanted to use their microphones or if we should use our own. I came up to give an introduction to the presentations when I woke up, and as I did the phrase throbbing in my head was:

"The Rich want to Drive. The Poor want to Eat."