After Copenhagen

A 1-2-3 Guide to Climate Change

What do they mean by targets and how can they be enforced? What’s the significance of the failure to get a new treaty? Why has nothing been done to protect the rainforests? It can be hard to figure it all out, so we’ve tried to boil it down to its main features, and then suggest something positive we can do.

It’s generally accepted that there are three main things to be done to try to prevent catastrophic global warming.

1. Use less energy

Reduce emissions as soon and as much as possible, via energy efficiency (better engines, insulation) and abstinence (voluntary, or imposed by statutes, standards and regulations).

Regulated reduction targets are led by international agreements, but enforced by national governments. Signatories of international agreements are likely to be more forceful, which is why a deal matters.

There do not seem to be any penalties for entire countries, and their governments are in cahoots with “their” industries in competing for markets, contracts and commercial dominance and of course in jealously guarding and promoting their own natural resources regardless of their damage to the climate.

That is, when they’re not plundering other people’s. In theory, international agreement should reduce destructive national competition. As if…

The main enforcement mechanism for big industry has been cap-and-trade, with highly dubious results. Heavy polluters simply pay to carry on business as usual, while dangerous and damaging things such as palm-oil plantations, or subsidies to the Australian coal industry, have been funded by the very money meant to benefit the planet. And there’s been fraud (five billion Euros stolen) and skullduggery.

Campaigners like FoE are calling for an end to the whole system. At the least it should be replaced by fines, taxes and penalties that are re-directed into the two measures below by an independent body.

Individuals and householders are being urged to turn off this and that and change our lifestyles and habits. This is necessary, but somewhat dispiriting as it’s pretty marginal and not even keeping up with the justified increases in places like India and China. Maybe every little helps?

2. Replace Fossil Fuels

This emissions reduction is an urgent stop-gap measure until we have new technology to REPLACE THE USE OF FOSSIL FUELS. This is the long term answer and will be a great boon to the planet and civil society. It is potentially the next industrial revolution. But it’s mostly still at the prototype stage.

It can be speeded up by national and international measures and policies to promote investment with subsidies, tax breaks, easing of legal and international barriers, rewarding and publicising innovation, creating the grids and infrastructures needed to make it linked-up and useable, and helping individuals and institutions to make the transition to clean alternatives. (Germany greatly reduced emissions by subsidising PV solar panels, and now they are leading the investment in Sahara solar electricity which we in Britain haven’t even noticed is happening.)

Most of the major players, including Obama, are leaning towards this, but many of their policies are themselves at the “prototype” stage, and some policies (e.g. Brown’s nuclear “renewables”) can starve clean renewables of investment. The term renewable itself is misused to imply non-polluting or clean and to confuse the issue of finite resources with global warming.

For China, India and Brazil, rapidly industrialising, it’s a race against time to instal serious solar or hydro electricity from the start rather than having to switch mid-way. If they do manage it, they could leave the old industrialised nations standing. Chinese environmentalists, however, are pointing out that “they always said they wouldn’t pollute first and then sort it out, but that’s just what they’re doing”.

This important ultimate solution will not be driven primarily by climate change treaties but by business opportunities and the profit motive. And there will inevitably be a mix of big centralised schemes and the localised “backyard” and small scale rural technologies favoured by community campaigners such as “Age of Stupid”.

3. Save the forests, plant trees

The third accepted mechanism is to TURN THE TIDE OF FOREST LOSS, AND PLANT TREES INSTEAD OF BURNING THEM. Despite forest loss accounting for maybe a third of greenhouse gas increases, the damage limitation hasn’t even started. If they agree on anything after Copenhagen it should be that.

The UN has recently set up the REDD scheme (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation in Developing Countries). If this will pay custodians of the forests for the global “service” provided by their trees in mopping up atmospheric carbon, well and good. The BBC’s Panorama recently reported on people being paid more to conserve the forest than they got from planting soya. But the clearances and soya planting continue.

Given the distortions created in other areas by the multi-billion pound carbon credits industry, there is much suspicion as to how this will work or whether it will be a cop-out from reducing emissions. Maybe the rainforest is better REDD than dead. But if REDD is funding monoculture, bio-fuels and palm-oil plantations instead of the agroforestry that both the environment and the communities need, we should campaign for it to have different priorities and control. And this is the time to do it, while REDD is still at an exploratory stage.

Forest conservation and tree planting needs no prototypes or innovation. All the knowledge and experience is there: see below. It could have happened from the start. It’s also something we can all have a hand in. But the hostility to offsetting is holding us back. Say tree-planting to a deep-dyed Green and you’ll get a surprisingly hostile response.

So what Hastings can do about it?

It’s easy to feel frustrated and disempowered watching the horse-trading and sleaze while our planet fries. We know that as individuals we are part of the problem, but how do we become part of the solution?

The popular 10:10 campaign urges people to reduce their own carbon footprint by 10% this year, by a combination of abstinence and energy efficiency. It’s a great start, and none too soon, but it too leaves out trees.

If as individuals we get trees planted we can be much more ambitious and eliminate 100% of our personal carbon output, and even achieve a negative footprint.

By far the most carbon-greedy trees are young ones growing in tropical regions. So someone will have to do it for us, but who can we trust?

Forget the dodgy offset carpetbaggers flogging gimmicks, snake-oil remedies and heart-shaped groves in parks. Some of these will try to sell you a tree at up to £40 (or even a very special one at £250!). The Woodland Trust charges £15. So even if we trust them, it’s way too expensive.

Trees for the Future: right places, right price

We instead have to seek out and support and publicise the genuinely beneficial projects, and HOT would like to champion and recommend a wonderful, award-winning charity called Trees for the Future which does all the right things, in the right places, at the right price.

For TFTF, carbon reduction is just a by-product of fighting poverty. For 20 years they have planted trees where they’re needed most: to regenerate and hold soils and water and rural communities, to reduce the impact of floods and drought, to provide food, cattle fodder, cash and coppiced wood for building and cooking.

Mixed plantings create “forest gardens” that enhance and protect other crops, wildlife and diverse species. And the trees are left in good hands for maintenance. When seedlings were threatened with drought last month in the Philippines, local college students turned out to help pump and carry water to ensure their survival.

50 Million trees and counting

They’re now doing it on quite a grand scale: they have already planted over 50 million trees in 12,000 villages across 58 countries, and are now aiming for a further 20 million in the next year alone.

These green villages, groves and forests become exemplary showpieces and are starting to spread the word through whole provinces in Africa, India, Asia and Central America. A twinning “Tree-Pals” programme connects local kids with schools in the USA, where TFTF is based.

We’d like to help them. And we’d like you to help us to help them.

TFTF get over a dozen trees planted for £1. If you’re counting carbon, that’s around £3 per tonne of carbon sequestered. (Offsetting with Climate Care costs £7.50 per tonne.) A monthly £5 will plant 15 trees every week: this has to be fantastic value.

Have a Zero Carbon Footprint Year after Year

For a one-off donation of £50, an average Hastings household emitting around 15 tonnes of carbon annually can get 5-600 trees planted in Haiti or Ethiopia or Senegal, enough to build up quite soon to a zero carbon footprint back home in Hastings and also create something useful, inspiring and wonderful. And that’s not just for one year: these trees will continue to eat up your carbon, and benefit the people, for years to come.

So: do take to your bike, insulate your home, walk to work, dress from our great charity shops and get appliances from Freecycle. And for the other 90% of your carbon footprint, there’s Trees for the Future.

Hastings Online Times will be developing this project. Let us know how many trees you’re planting, and what ideas you can bring to this: can you involve your workplace or kids’ school? If you have a shop or business, could it get a tree planted for every transaction? TFTF have many such schemes on their website (see them also on Facebook), but there are not many yet in the UK.

Will Hastings lead the way?

Also in: The HOT Planet

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