In 1997 the Kyoto Protocol was formalized within the United Nations Convention on Climate Change to limit carbon emissions causing global warming. Although since then the situation has become more acute due to the accelerated impacts of climate change, during the Conferences talk mainly addresses the “opportunities” of this catastrophe, understood as business.
Bulletin articles
Carbon forestry projects made a late start in the CDM market because they are so controversial. The necessary legal framework, laid out in the Marrakesh accords of 2001, was agreed only in late 2005 at the Montreal climate negotiations. So there is little concrete to point to yet.
Since 1994, a Dutch organisation called the FACE Foundation has been working at Mount Elgon National Park. FACE works with the Ugandan Wildlife Authority (UWA) which is responsible for the management of national parks in Uganda. The UWA-FACE project aims to plant trees on an area of 25,000 hectares just inside the border of the national park. So far UWA-FACE has planted 8,500 hectares. Under the contract with UWA, the FACE Foundation owns the carbon in the trees planted at Mount Elgon and the trees must not be cut down for at least 99 years.
A few days ago, the 12th session of the Conference of the Parties on Climate Change – COP 12 – came to an end. The closing session confirmed the scant will of governments and parties in seeking real solutions to the climate crisis. However what did stand out was interest in promoting the use of strategies invented to solve the climate problem based on market mechanisms. Among these, the group of tree plantation projects as greenhouse gas sinks were the most notorious.
In 2003, a committee of the 9th Conference of the Parties (COP 9) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), held in Milan, established that GE trees could be used within the so called Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) in plantations created to allegedly offset the carbon emissions from factories in the industrialized North.
Loss of forest cover in Kenya has contributed to diminishing livelihoods of many Kenyans caused by reduced land productivity, famine and drought. The current drought experienced in the country in 2005/2006 is a case in point. Large-scale livestock deaths were reported, and in many places, incidences of resource use conflict were witnessed, leading to loss of human lives.
The Indian province of West Bengal holds the unique record of being ruled by the longest-serving ‘democratically-elected-left-government’ in the country, and, for that matter, anywhere else in the world, as the left never fail to point out.
This ‘left’ state is on rampage, and terror was unleashed on peasants, agricultural workers and small traders in Singur, an agricultural area located in the fertile basin of the River Ganga.
Replacing fossil fuels by biofuels (produced from plant biomass) may seem a step along the right path to avoid worsening climate change. However plans for their production and use not only leave this problem unsolved but make many others worse.
The biofuels to be adopted are biodiesel (obtained from oilseeds) and ethanol (obtained from fermentation of plant cellulose). Among the many possible crops for this purpose are soybeans, corn, colza, groundnuts, sunflower seeds, oil palms, sugarcane, poplar and eucalyptus trees.
The US Department of Energy's Office of Biological and Environmental Research (DOE) is funding a $1.4 million, three-year study by Purdue faculty members to determine ways to alter lignin and test whether the genetic changes affect the quality of plants used to produce biofuels. A hybrid poplar tree is the basis for the research that is part of the DOE's goal to replace 30 percent of the fossil fuel used annually in the United States for transportation with biofuels by 2030.
In 1972, a study conducted by the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT), on growing consumer trends alerted politicians and scientists all over the world. The research titled “The limits of growth” was prepared by an international group of scientists, researchers and industrialists – later to be know as the Club of Rome – and became a classic for the analysis of the relationship between production and environment.
The modalities of biofuel consumption and production are already causing a negative impact on food security, rural livelihoods, forests and other ecosystems, and these negative impacts are expected to accumulate rapidly. Large-scale, export-oriented production of biofuel requires large-scale monocultures of trees, sugarcane, corn, oil palm, soy and other crops. These monocultures already form the number one cause of rural depopulation and deforestation worldwide.
There are some 800 million automobiles in the world, consuming over 50 percent of the energy produced in the world, making individual vehicles the prime cause of the greenhouse effect. Although there is consensus that climate change is a fact, there is no serious intention of changing the life-style causing it and instead, technological solutions are being sought to enable the companies benefiting from this model to maintain their profits.
In this context, over the past years biofuels have started to be promoted as an alternative to global warming.