While the world scrambles to find clean energy solutions, somewhere, every minute of every day, saws buzz through a forest, cutting down one of nature’s antidotes to carbon pollution.
[caption id="attachment_6323" align="alignright" width="280" caption="Saving forests in the Congo will help save endangered gorillas (Photo: John Martin)"][/caption]
Digging into the palm oil debate, an urgent issue to many environmental groups, our reporter Ashley Phillips found herself slipping into a swamp of material.
For years, there has been a volley of claims and counter claims about the environmental and humanitarian consequences related to palm oil production.
The UN Environment Programme has blamed the massive destruction of rainforest in Malaysia and Indonesia for producing such a volume of manmade greenhouse gas emissions that it ranks behind only the US and China. These gases are released as the native rainforest is cleared to install or expand palm plantations, and it is exacerbated by the slash-and-burn clearing that is a double whammy to the atmosphere — removing carbon-holding rainforest while spewing carbon from massive wood fires.
Seemingly the only thing happening faster than the destruction of the rainforest in Southeast Asia is the consumer demand for palm oil which turns up in every 10th product at the grocery by some estimations.
Once, long ago, a winemaker promised to sell no wine before its time. Now, a different company is promising to sell no wine (at least one label of wine anyway) without helping humans atone for past crimes.
The rhyme may not be as good, but the thought is more altruistic.
Could all of our efforts to become green — our rehabbing of buildings, spurning of plastic bags and buying of new hybrids — turn out to be mere tinkerings in the tool shed as the whole grand project collapses around us?
That seems to be the point up for consideration these days. That this whole Save-the-Earth thing might be bigger than a green fashion trend or an overhaul of the auto industry. It might require more drastic action than turning down our newly installed programmable thermostats.
Recently, the New York Times ran a blog item about a study showing that having babies is one of the non-greenest things you can do, especially if you’re a Westerner and your baby is destined to be a giant among world consumers. This is sort of a “duh”. But the University of Oregon scientists quantified the impact, concluding that an American child would have seven times the impact of a Chinese-born kiddo.
Prince Charles launched a new Internet initiative The Prince’s Rainforest Project Campaign at the National Geographic’s store in London on Tuesday. The Prince also released a webcast drawing attention to deforestation.
The Prince attended a showing of a 90 second public awareness film. Celebrities such as Harrison Ford, Daniel Craig, and the Dalai Lama joined Prince Charles and his sons Princes William and Harry to raise awareness of the organization and the loss of tropical rainforests.
The casual observer might imagine that few creatures would be bothered less by climate change than tropical lizards: Scaly and small, they should both shrug the heat off and be able to find shade easily when they feel like it.
That turns out not to be the case, as University of Washington biology professor Raymond Huey can tell you. Working from data collected three decades ago, he recently published a paper arguing that such creatures may actually be more vulnerable to rising temperatures than the rest of us.
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