Carbon

As they do every year, Greenpeace and nongovernmental organizations like “Eyes on the Forest,” which is supported by the WWF and other western environmental groups, have squarely blamed the plantation industry for the seasonal fires in Sumatra.

This generates sympathy for the anti-forestry campaign NGOs have been waging in Indonesia for many years, which pits economic development against the environment.

But this perspective is simplistic and wrong.

ScienceDaily (Aug. 4, 2009) — Pine trees grown for 12 years in air one-and-a-half times richer in carbon dioxide than today's levels produced twice as many seeds of at least as good a quality as those growing under normal conditions, a Duke University-led research team reported Aug. 3 at a national ecology conference.

How much pollution can a tree absorb? The question is at the center of a high-stakes fight over how much it will cost to curb climate change -- and who will foot the bill.

Trees are nature's antidote to smokestacks and tailpipes. Factories and cars cough out carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas produced when fossil fuel is burned. Trees inhale it. They store the carbon in their roots, trunks and leaves, and they send the oxygen back into the air.

You've heard of credit default swaps and subprime mortgages. Are carbon default swaps and subprime offsets next? If the Waxman-Markey climate bill is signed into law, it will generate, almost as an afterthought, a new market for carbon derivatives. That market will be vast, complicated, and dauntingly difficult to monitor. And if Washington doesn't get the rules right, it will be vulnerable to speculation and manipulation by the very same players who brought us the financial meltdown.

This is a series of articles (started here, June, 1^st 2009) taken from GRIST, Offsets are still counterfeit carbon credits

The arguments in favor of counterfeit carbon credits still fail no matter how often they are repeated