Word: carbonator
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Kudos for Michael Kinsley's commentary exposing the fallacy of carbon offsets [July 2]. By analogy, he has shown this idea to be another example of spin designed to avoid responsibility for the garbage that is spewed into our environment...
...brilliant essay on exchanging credits for carbon use and child abuse, Kinsley has approached the paradoxical level of irony that Jonathan Swift achieved with A Modest Proposal. The logic is flawless, the intent is benign, yet the solution proposed is so repugnant. Perhaps that is the true nature of capitalism...
...After China and the U.S., which country emits the greatest quantity of greenhouse gases per year? Answer high-tech Japan or industrial Germany, and you flunk. A holographic Al Gore will be beamed over to give you remedial lessons. It's rural Indonesia, which emits 3.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually--almost entirely from deforestation. Living trees absorb CO2, and as they are cut down or burned, they release their stored carbon into the air. Trees also absorb sunlight, warming the earth, but in the tropics their ability to absorb CO2 and promote cloud formation has a net cooling...
...protecting their forests, a process called "avoided deforestation." But that's beginning to change. The World Bank is raising $250 million for a pilot fund to support projects that would encourage governments and companies in the developed world to pay for preserving trees in the tropics in exchange for carbon credits that grant the right to emit CO2. It is a small step, but it represents one of the first attempts to use the tools of carbon finance to save the 32 million acres of forest destroyed each year. Existing carbon-credit programs focus on industrial emissions; this initiative extends...
...reach that level, however, proponents of avoided deforestation must satisfy the skeptics who kept such projects off the Kyoto Protocol when the environmental treaty's carbon-trading program was set up in 2001. Negotiators at the time worried that the carbon released by cut or burned timber was too difficult to track accurately--just try counting the trees in the Amazon basin--so countries could have ended up receiving credit for preserving nonexistent forests. But since then, scientists have vastly improved their ability to monitor deforestation through satellite technology...