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Cap and Trade is a Casino Game, Not a Global Warming Offset

Posted By mike On October 15, 2009 @ 9:31 am In Connect the Dots, Small Foot Print, Global Warming | No Comments

Read it and weep. The exaggerated claims of offsets by the corporate sponsors should be criminal.

[1] clipped from [2] www.washingtonpost.com

Use of Forests as Carbon Offsets Fails to Impress In First Big Trial

Project in Bolivia Keeps Trees Standing But Has Little Clear Effect on Emissions

More than a decade ago in the northeast corner of Bolivia, a group of polluters and environmentalists joined forces in the first large-scale experiment to curb climate change with a strategy that promised to suit their competing interests: compensating for greenhouse gas emissions by preserving forests.

Preventing the clearing and burning of tropical forests, which help absorb carbon dioxide and provide habitat to an array of species, has become a critical objective for environmentalists.

But a report Greenpeace will release Thursday questions the premise of using forest conservation overseas to compensate for U.S. pollution, noting that Noel Kempff envisioned keeping 55 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere over 30 years but has lowered that expectation to 5.8 million. The revised estimates do not take into account that logging may have moved to areas to the north, east and southwest of the project. And the report notes that the project’s three corporate underwriters — American Electric Power, BP America and PacifiCorp — overestimated how much carbon the project kept from entering the atmosphere, telling the EPA it accounted for 7.4 million metric tons from 1997 to 2004. 

[3] blog it

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URL to article: http://smallblueplanet.org/2009/10/15/cap-and-trade-is-a-casino-game-not-a-global-warming-offset/

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[2] www.washingtonpost.com: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/14/AR2009101403762.
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[3] Image: http://clipmarks.com/share/626AB0CC-6284-4085-98AE-69229CD6E0F0/blog/

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