Pak Gubernur, SFM dan Perubahan Iklim
Oleh: Mohamad Rayan M.Ec
Pak Gubernur merasa geram ketika melihat langsung kerusakan hutan Merang dengan menaiki helikopter ketika memantau hutan Merang yang 90.000 ha dari 265.000 masih baik pada hari Jum’at 10 Desember 2010 seperti dilaporkan media cetak nasional 11 Desember 2010 lalu.
Lebih jauh laporan tersebut menggambarkan illegal logging masih marak di hutan Merang, Kecamatan Bayung Lencir, Kabupaten Musi Banyuasin dan terdeteksi ada 12 titik lokasi penimbunan kayu hasil pembalakan liar. Kayu-kayu tersebut siap di dihanyutkan melalui sungai dalam bentuk rakit dengan ratusan bahkan ribuan pohon untuk disetorkan pada sawmill (panglong) yang banyak jumlahnya di pinggir sungai Lalan.
Mayoritas sawmill ini adalah ilegal. Dan mayoritas panglong ini dimiliki Cukong berukuran menengah dan besar dan namanya sudah diketahui penegak hukum dan masyarakat di sekitar hutan Merang. Seperti tulisan perubahan iklim sebelumnya, Cukong-cukong ini berkipas-kipas dengan uangnya diatas penderitaan masyarakat marjinal yang di rayu dan dijebak untuk membalok secara ilegal.
Dilaporkan juga pada koran Nasional tersebut Bapak Gubernur langsung membentuk tim yang terdiri atas Pemkab MUBA, Pemprov Sumsel, Kemenhut dan aparat terkait untuk menerbitkan pembalakan liar tersebut dengan tegas.
Marilah kita bersyukur karena akan adanya aksi dari bapak Gubernur Sumsel dalam memitigasi pembalakan liar di hutan Merang dan mungkin areal hutan lainnya di Sumsel. Ini adalah bukti komitmen untuk membuat Green Sumsel atau Sumsel Hijau. Dan ini wajar saja karena Sumsel adalah salah satu kandidat provinsi untuk proyek REDD+ didanai dana dari Norwegia dan dana lainnya. Sebagai contoh kemungkinan dana tambahan adalah sebagian dana $110 Milyar dolar komitmen hibah negara maju pada negara sedang berkembang yamg merupakan hasil Konferensi PBB Iklim ke 16 di Cancun, Mexico bisa mengalir ke Indonesia dan Sumsel untuk membantu masyarakat disekitar dan didalam hutan.
Memang aksi akan dilakukan, namun seperti tulisan sebelumnya di kolom ini, tantangan didepan akan berat. Ini disebabkan susahnya menegakan hukum pada cukong illegal logging yang berkoalisi dengan oknum penegak hukum untuk mengekpolitasi masyarakat marjinal di Sumsel untuk membalok. Sedangkan penegakan hukum hanya salah satu sektor saja dalam mengelola hutan secara berkesinambungan atau Sustainable Forest Management.
Sebelum kita membicarakan SFM, ada baiknya kita ulang inti permasalahan illegal logging di Merang dan di Sumsel.
Masalah klasik illegal logging menurut teori dilakukan oleh tiga aktor yaitu Oknum Pejabat, Cukong dan Masyarakat Pembalok. Dalam teori ini si cukong lah yang mengekploitasi masyarakat marjinal yang membalok. Dan memuluskan kegiatan illegal ini dengan menyogok oknum pejabat di industri perkayuan bisa di dinas, departemen atau bagian penegakan hukum.
Seterusnya dalam teori ini, si cukong memberitahukan kalau butuh dana atau dana emergensi, datang saja padanya. Cukong pun ada kelas kecil, menegah dan kakap. Kelas kecil siap mendanai kegiatan kecil untuk masuk hutan dan membawa balok ke panglong atau sawmill ilegal yang berada banyak di pinggir sungai kalau di daerah Merang, Bayung Lencir. Keberadaan cukong kecil mulai berkurang atau punah disebabkan menurut teori ini, si cukong kecil tidak mampu bayar sogok kalau kena razia. Keberadaan cukong menengah sekarang ini, cukup banyak karena pada umumnya mereka mempunyai dana untuk membiayai sawmill di pinggir sungai dan punya dana untuk menyogok oknum kalau kena razia. Nah, dalam teori ini, si cukong besarlah yang membeli kayu dari cukong menengah atau kecil dan cukong besarlah yang dapat melewati penjagaan dan razia di kabupaten, propinsi dan nasional.
Dalam teori segitiga mas illegal logging ini, lebih besar si cukong untuk membayar sogok, upeti, denda, pungutan dsb, lebih leluasa si cukong gede untuk memasarkan kayu illegalnya ke pasar nasional maupun ekspor. Menurut teori ini, lingkaran segitiga mas industri illegal logging ini masih berlangsung secara nasional.
Dalam kegiatan proyek GTZ MRPP, proyek hanya bisa mengumpulkan data, melaporkan hasil temuan dan mengadvokasi pemerintah, masyarakat dan penegak hukum mengenai kegiatan di areal 24,000 ha di Hutan Rawa Gambut (HRG) Alami di Merang.
Salah satu survei komrehensif dilakukan MRPP bekerjasama dengan Universitas Muhamadiyah Palembang, Fakultas Kehutanan pada Oktober 2008, memperkirakan dalam 2-5 tahun, HRG alami di Merang akan hilang di balak oleh pembalak liar didanai cukong kecil, menengah dan besar. Si cukong makin kaya, si oknum pejabat atau petugas kebagian uang haram dan masyarakat pembalak liar yang marjinal baik lokal maupun pendatang dari kabupaten lain tetap miskin. Bencanapun akan datang karena hutan telah tiada. Solusinya penegakan hukum untuk memutuskan mata rantai industri illegal logging, terutama si cukong mesti dibawa ke meja hijau.
Putusnya mata rantai illegal logging juga belum begitu kuat tanpa masyarakat disekitar dan didalam hutan tidak diberikan pendapatan alternatif atau kegiatan pembangunan masyarakat yang juga sudah ditulis dalam kolom sebelumnya.
Strategi MRPP untuk menghadapi tantangan illegal logging di hutan Merang membentuk Kelompok Masyarakat Peduli Hutan (KMPH). Pengelompokan ini adalah sarana untuk memberdayakan masyarakat dengan pendekatan Community Based Forest Management (CBFM) atau Manajemen Hutan Berbasis Masyarakat. Anggota kelompok ini pada umumnya masyrakat desa di dekat proyek Merang di hutan Merang, Bayung Lencir, kabupaten Musi Banyuasin. Kegiatan wajib bagi KMPH mencangkup menjaga dan melindungi kelestarian kawasan hutan rawa gambut, melakukan penanaman kembali jenis lokal di kawasan hutan rawa gambut, melakukan penanaman tanaman keras di kebun atau di luar wilayah project, melakukan penyadartahuan kepada masyarakat luas tentang pentingnya kawasan hutan rawa gambut dan terlibat aktif di dalam kegiatan pengembangan kapasitas yang dilaksanakan proyek. Sekarang sudah terbentuk 10 KMPH dengan anggota 20 untuk setiap kelompok.
Di dalam kelompok-kelompok KMPH diadakan Thematic Trainings untuk anggota KMPH bertemakan pelatihan dasar manajemen, dinamika kelompok, teknologi dan manajemen usaha peningkatan pendapatan yang dipilih, ekonomi rumah tangga dan pembukuan usaha simpan pinjam. Adapun usaha peningkatan pendapatan, di Bina desa, masyarakat memilih pembesaran ayam buras sedang di desa Kephayang memilih pembesaran ayam negeri.
Program Pemberdayaan Masyarakat berikutnya difokuskan pada subsidi pengembangan lembaga keuangan mikro desa. Diikuti dengan evaluasi usaha simpan pinjan pada kelompok binaan sebelumnya.
Kegiatan perlindungan hutan dan pengembangan masyarakat disekitar dan dalam hutan adalah dua unsur penting dalam Sustainable Forest Management, SFM adalah sistem dimana hutan dilihat sebagai bagian dari komponen kehidupan. Menurut satu definisi SFM yang ditulis Ruspandi (PUSDIKLAT Kehutanan-Bogor) setelah pulang dari training dibiayai oleh GTZ ke Jerman yang berkembang di dunia kehutanan dan banyak dikembangkan di Jerman adalah
Setiap kawasan hutan diyakini sebagi bagian dari komponen kehidupan, dengan berbagai fungsinya seperti tempat rekreasi, konservasi flora dan fauna, produksi hasil hutan, tempat perburuan, komponen pengendali iklim dan tata air serta lokasi dengan pemandangan yang indah.
Keseluruhan fungsi hutan pada suatu kawasan diatas, harus dapat dikelola secara optimal untuk menghindari terjadinya konflik .
Dalam mengelola berbagai fungsi hutan tersebut diperlukan SDM yang memilik kompetensi, dan kompetensi tersebut diperoleh melalui pendidikan, pengalaman kerja dan pelatihan profesional yang secara rutin harus dijalani.
Forest Ranger (Polhut) harus memiliki pengetahuan terkait teknis, komersial dan ekologis dalam pengelolaan hutan, berburu, konservasi alam dan perlindungan lingkungan. Forest Ranger juga harus memilki kemampuan bekerjasama dengan masyarakat dan pemilik hutan dalam membantu menyiapkan perencanaan tahunan hutan masyarakat dan hutan milik. Meskipun hutan masyarakat dan hutan milik tidak dikuasai negara namun terdapat regulasi yang ketat terhadap kemungkinan untuk mengkonversi hutan tersebut untuk kepentingan di luar kehutanan.
Dengan demikian dapat disimpulkan bahwa keberhasilan pengelolaan hutan merupakan wujud dari kerjasama dan kolaborasi semua pihak yang didukung oleh SDM yang Profesianal.
Kemenhut akhir-akhir ini juga telah mengadopsi SFM dengan membentuk badan pengelolaan hutan tingkat tapak yaitu Kelompok Pengelolaan Hutan (KPH). Hutan Merang dikelolah dibawah naungan Kelompok Pengelolaan Hutan Produksi Lalan Mangsang Mendis di Musi Banyuasin.
Di Indonesia SFM harus ada dukungan dari tiga jalur politik yaitu eksekutif, legislatif dan yudikayif. Lebih jauh menurut Ruspandi KPH semestinya mempunyai langkah-langkah sbb: Dukungan politik pemerintah terutama Kemendagri (NSPK Organisasi KPH), Kemenpan (NSPK Kompetensi KPH), DPRD Prov/Kab dan Gubernur/Bupati (Perda Prov/Kab, Pergub/Perbup); Dukungan anggaran kegiatan berkelanjutan terutama dari Kemenhut, sehingga memacu gairah pemerintah daerah untuk membentuk KPH; Permenhut yang merinci secara jelas tugas/fungsi antara KPH (pengelola) dengan Dinas Kehutanan, sehingga mengurangi hambatan internal yang saat ini dirasakan di daerah; Review seluruh Permenhut, sehingga dapat mengakomodir tupoksi/keberadaan KPH; Perlu dipikirkan pula regulasi kolaborasi ketenagaan tingkat lapangan yang berasal dari pemerintah pusat dan pemda provinsi/kabupaten (jaman dulu istilah DPK=dipekerjakan dan DPB=diperbantukan) atau pola rekruitmen dan Apabila memungkinkan memberikan tunjangan profesional (Remunerasi) kepada seluruh personil KPH, karena organisasi KPH sudah jelas target/hasil/manfaat/dampak yang akan diperoleh.
Sedangkan dalam mengimplementasikan diperlukannya akurat data yang didapat dari inventarisasi hutan. Inventarisasi hutan secara menyeluruh dilakukan terhadap semua kawasan hutan dengan teliti baik secara kuantitas dan kualitas sehingga didapat informasi secara pasti hingga data per pohon terkait jenis, volume hingga tempat tumbuhnya serta dilakukan penandaan yang jelas. Data yang lengkap sebagai dasar untuk mengatur wilayah yang dilidungi atau wilayah yang memiliki potensi komersial untuk pemanfaatan lainnya yang kelak disusun dalam suatu rencana pengelolaan hingga rencana pemanfaatan tahunan.
SFM di Indonesia diimplementasikan dalam bentuk Kelompok Pengelolaan Hutan (KPH), hutan Merang adalah bagian dari KPHProduksi Lalan Mangsangmendis (KPHP Lalan). Dalam kaitanya dengan Proyek Merang REDD Pilot Proyek, KPHP Lalan akan merupakan pengelola proyek pasca berakhirnya proyek persiapan REDD ini. Makanya kolaborasi antara proyek dan KPHP sangat erat. Diharapkan ketika proyek berakhir KPHP-lah yang yang akan mengelola kegiatan REDD di areal 24.000 ha. Dan apabila nanti ada dana bantuan maupun dana hasil penjualan karbon, maka KPHP Lalan yang menjadi pengelolanya. KPH kedepan adalah bentuk wujud dari pengelolaan hutan secara berkesinambungan.
Senin, 24 Januari 2011
Minggu, 25 Juli 2010
Harimau Merang diburu buat obat
Harimau Merang diburu buat obat
Harimau yang tertangkap ini merupakan individu ketiga yang tertangkap dengan menggunakan listrik di dekat wilayah proyek kita selama proyek MRPP. Sebenarnya para pemburu tersebut bukan untuk tujuan menangkap Harimau tapi menangkap rusa. Individu pertama tertangkap tanggal 07 September 2009 dan individu kedua tertangkap 12 Oktober 2010. Kedua individu tersebut tertangkap di Sungai Tembesu Daro, daerah Merang Kecamatan Bayu Lencir, Kabupaten MUBA, Sumatera Selatan di areal GTZ Merang REDD Pilot Project.
Harimau ketiga yang tertangkap ini (foto terlampir) ditangkap tanggal 11 Juni 2010. Individu yang tertangkap berjenis kelamin jantan yang masih remaja. Panjang diperkirakan antara 1,5-2 M, tertangkap juga dengan alat setrum listrik. Individu ketiga ini tertangkap di Sungai/kanal Buaya Kutung, di dekat perkebunan sawit milik grup PT Indofood.
Seluruh Harimau (individu kesatu sampai ketiga) biasanya tersetrum pada saat malam hari, dan setelah tertangkap pada malam hari individu harimau tersebut dikuliti untuk di bawa di jual ke Karang Agung, Bayung Lencir. Rata-rata Harimau tersebut laku terjual dengan harga Rp 4-5 juta. Di pasar internasional harga bisa ratusan atau ribuan kali lipat.
Seperti telah diketahui umum, seluruh bagian harimau dimanfaatkan oleh penada, cukong, pedagang untuk obat-obat terutama pengobatan tradisional atau oriental.
Laporan Tim MRPP
Harimau yang tertangkap ini merupakan individu ketiga yang tertangkap dengan menggunakan listrik di dekat wilayah proyek kita selama proyek MRPP. Sebenarnya para pemburu tersebut bukan untuk tujuan menangkap Harimau tapi menangkap rusa. Individu pertama tertangkap tanggal 07 September 2009 dan individu kedua tertangkap 12 Oktober 2010. Kedua individu tersebut tertangkap di Sungai Tembesu Daro, daerah Merang Kecamatan Bayu Lencir, Kabupaten MUBA, Sumatera Selatan di areal GTZ Merang REDD Pilot Project.
Harimau ketiga yang tertangkap ini (foto terlampir) ditangkap tanggal 11 Juni 2010. Individu yang tertangkap berjenis kelamin jantan yang masih remaja. Panjang diperkirakan antara 1,5-2 M, tertangkap juga dengan alat setrum listrik. Individu ketiga ini tertangkap di Sungai/kanal Buaya Kutung, di dekat perkebunan sawit milik grup PT Indofood.
Seluruh Harimau (individu kesatu sampai ketiga) biasanya tersetrum pada saat malam hari, dan setelah tertangkap pada malam hari individu harimau tersebut dikuliti untuk di bawa di jual ke Karang Agung, Bayung Lencir. Rata-rata Harimau tersebut laku terjual dengan harga Rp 4-5 juta. Di pasar internasional harga bisa ratusan atau ribuan kali lipat.
Seperti telah diketahui umum, seluruh bagian harimau dimanfaatkan oleh penada, cukong, pedagang untuk obat-obat terutama pengobatan tradisional atau oriental.
Laporan Tim MRPP
Angry Elephants Destroyed 5 Ha of Coconut Plantations
Angry Elephants Destroyed 5 Ha of Coconut Plantations
Breaking News!
Once again, another finding. Merang Redd Pilot Project (MRPP) team had received news from our counterpart in Musi Banyuasin District that they found 13 wild elephants around Merang REDD Pilot Project.
Pak Hadi, Kabag Perlindungan Hutan Dishut Muba, (MUBA Forest Protection of MUBA District Forestry Agency) told MRPP and requested for cooperation in handling 13 wild elephants in Karya Mukti Village Jalur P1-P10, Kec. Lalan, KPHP Lalan area, Bayu Lencir, Musi Banyuasin.
The colony consists of 8 large and 5 small elephants. The elephants had destroyed local agriculture and disturb local community. It is estimated 5 hectare of coconut trees destroyed by the elephants.
The elephants have arrived in Karya Mukti Village since 6 July 2010. They are still around the area. The community believed they are from Sembilang National Park.
Dinas Kehutanan Muba will lead a meeting at Sekayu for tackling the cases. The meeting will be held on Wednesday, July 28 2010.
It is expected that BKSDA, MRPP, Zoological Society of London, Harapan Rainforest and others expected to attend the meeting.
MRPP Team
Breaking News!
Once again, another finding. Merang Redd Pilot Project (MRPP) team had received news from our counterpart in Musi Banyuasin District that they found 13 wild elephants around Merang REDD Pilot Project.
Pak Hadi, Kabag Perlindungan Hutan Dishut Muba, (MUBA Forest Protection of MUBA District Forestry Agency) told MRPP and requested for cooperation in handling 13 wild elephants in Karya Mukti Village Jalur P1-P10, Kec. Lalan, KPHP Lalan area, Bayu Lencir, Musi Banyuasin.
The colony consists of 8 large and 5 small elephants. The elephants had destroyed local agriculture and disturb local community. It is estimated 5 hectare of coconut trees destroyed by the elephants.
The elephants have arrived in Karya Mukti Village since 6 July 2010. They are still around the area. The community believed they are from Sembilang National Park.
Dinas Kehutanan Muba will lead a meeting at Sekayu for tackling the cases. The meeting will be held on Wednesday, July 28 2010.
It is expected that BKSDA, MRPP, Zoological Society of London, Harapan Rainforest and others expected to attend the meeting.
MRPP Team
Senin, 17 Mei 2010
Govt drops designating plantations as forests
National
Govt drops designating plantations as forests
Adianto P. Simamora, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Wed, 04/14/2010 8:43 AM | National
A | A | A |
The forestry ministry dropped its controversial initiative to classify oil palm plantations as forests after strong protests from environmental activists on fears that it would speed up deforestation.
The statement was made by the ministry’s head of research and development Tachrir Fathoni on the sidelines of a seminar on Indonesian forestry following the Copenhagen climate talks.
“We have dropped it. No more talk about it,” he told reporters on Tuesday.
He said the ministry acknowledged that any changes on forest definitions should be made by amending the 1999 forest law.
The law defines forest as an integrated ecosystem in the form of land comprising biological resources, dominated by trees in natural forms and surrounding environment, and which cannot be separated from each other.
The same statement was also made by Nur Masripatin, the ministry’s director of the center for social economics and policy research.
“Indonesia will not include palm plantations as part of forest although some countries have done it,” she said on the sideline of seminar.
Malaysia, the second largest producer of palm oil after Indonesia, uses the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) standard to identify forest — which is land with tree crown cover of more than 10 percent and an area of more than 0.5 hectares with trees reaching a minimum height of five meters.
The forestry ministry planned to draft a ministerial decree to include oil palm plantations as forest after the Copenhagen meeting.
But a group of activists from Greenpeace Indonesia and the Indonesian Environmental Forum (Walhi) criticized the government over its plans accusing the authorities of not being serious on promises to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Greenpeace Indonesia then put a giant banner at the ministry of forestry building reading “plantations are not forests”.
Greenpeace said inclusion of ‘plantations’ in the definition of forests, would lead to massive concealment of emissions from the destruction of peat land and forests.
On Tuesday, Walhi welcomed the decision from the government to drop the plan.
“The ministry’s decision to not include plantations in forest is correct, the most important thing
now is the ministry should exclude the industrial forest concessions (HTI) as part of the forest,” Walhi’s forest campaign director, Teguh Surya.
HTI usually carries monoculture plants like acacia for paper mills.
He said that the ministry should also audit the existing oil palm plantations which converted forest areas without permits.
“Forestry Minister [Zulkilfli Hasan] should gather the courage to withdraw the licenses of oil palm plantations operating in forest areas,” he said.
The Agriculture Ministry earlier said it planned to use 1.8 million hectares of land designated as industrial forests (HTI) for oil palm plantations.
Agriculture Minister Suswono said that of 9.7 million hectares of land available for oil palm plantation, some 7.9 million hectares was already developed, leaving 1.8 million hectares designated as HTI.
Govt drops designating plantations as forests
Adianto P. Simamora, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Wed, 04/14/2010 8:43 AM | National
A | A | A |
The forestry ministry dropped its controversial initiative to classify oil palm plantations as forests after strong protests from environmental activists on fears that it would speed up deforestation.
The statement was made by the ministry’s head of research and development Tachrir Fathoni on the sidelines of a seminar on Indonesian forestry following the Copenhagen climate talks.
“We have dropped it. No more talk about it,” he told reporters on Tuesday.
He said the ministry acknowledged that any changes on forest definitions should be made by amending the 1999 forest law.
The law defines forest as an integrated ecosystem in the form of land comprising biological resources, dominated by trees in natural forms and surrounding environment, and which cannot be separated from each other.
The same statement was also made by Nur Masripatin, the ministry’s director of the center for social economics and policy research.
“Indonesia will not include palm plantations as part of forest although some countries have done it,” she said on the sideline of seminar.
Malaysia, the second largest producer of palm oil after Indonesia, uses the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) standard to identify forest — which is land with tree crown cover of more than 10 percent and an area of more than 0.5 hectares with trees reaching a minimum height of five meters.
The forestry ministry planned to draft a ministerial decree to include oil palm plantations as forest after the Copenhagen meeting.
But a group of activists from Greenpeace Indonesia and the Indonesian Environmental Forum (Walhi) criticized the government over its plans accusing the authorities of not being serious on promises to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Greenpeace Indonesia then put a giant banner at the ministry of forestry building reading “plantations are not forests”.
Greenpeace said inclusion of ‘plantations’ in the definition of forests, would lead to massive concealment of emissions from the destruction of peat land and forests.
On Tuesday, Walhi welcomed the decision from the government to drop the plan.
“The ministry’s decision to not include plantations in forest is correct, the most important thing
now is the ministry should exclude the industrial forest concessions (HTI) as part of the forest,” Walhi’s forest campaign director, Teguh Surya.
HTI usually carries monoculture plants like acacia for paper mills.
He said that the ministry should also audit the existing oil palm plantations which converted forest areas without permits.
“Forestry Minister [Zulkilfli Hasan] should gather the courage to withdraw the licenses of oil palm plantations operating in forest areas,” he said.
The Agriculture Ministry earlier said it planned to use 1.8 million hectares of land designated as industrial forests (HTI) for oil palm plantations.
Agriculture Minister Suswono said that of 9.7 million hectares of land available for oil palm plantation, some 7.9 million hectares was already developed, leaving 1.8 million hectares designated as HTI.
Minggu, 16 Mei 2010
Forest and Carbon Eclipping
Carbon
+1 1 vote
Sojitz to set up online carbon credits market - Nikkei
by Reuters News on 29 March 2010, 20:59 PM 0 comments , 54 views
Categories: Reuters News
March 30 (Reuters) - Trading house Sojitz Corp <2768.T> will create an online marketplace for carbon credits to quickly match up buyers and sellers, the Nikkei business daily reported.
Various frameworks exist in Japan for trading carbon credits, but with no common marketplace, buyers and sellers often have difficulty finding each other and getting a handle on market prices, causing the domestic market to stagnate, the paper said.
Sojitz subsidiary CoalinQ Corp, which operates an e-commerce site for coal transactions, will set up a joint venture with carbon credit seller Smart Energy Co on Thursday and the firm will start operating a carbon trading site in May, the daily said.
The marketplace will handle five or so kinds of carbon credits, including those issued by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, the Environment Ministry and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, the Nikkei said.
About 4 percent to 5 percent of transaction prices will be charged as commissions and trading of the equivalent of at least 800,000 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions a year is targeted by 2014, the paper said.
Demand for carbon credit trading is expected to increase as a Tokyo ordinance on limiting CO2 emissions takes effect next month, the daily said.
(Reporting by Saqib Iqbal Ahmed in Bangalore; Editing by Gopakumar Warrier) ((saqib.ahmed@thomsonreuters.com; within US +1 646 223 8780; outside U.S +91 80 4135 5800; Reuters Messaging saqib.ahmed.reuters.com@reuters.net))
Keywords: SOJITZ/
Carbon
+2 2 votes
Deutsche Bank, BarCap see over 10% drop in 2009 EU ETS emissions
by Reuters News on 29 March 2010, 09:50 AM 2 comments , 156 views
Categories: Reuters News
* Deutsche sees 10.4 pct drop in '09 EU ETS emissions
* BarCap forecasts 10.5 pct drop, little effect on prices
* Both see between 3-5 pct rise in 2010
LONDON, March 29 (Reuters) - Carbon emissions under the European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme fell by over 10 percent in 2009 but are expected to rebound this year as Europe's economy recovers, Deutsche Bank and Barclays Capital said on Monday.
Deutsche bank said in an analyst note that carbon emissions from heavy industry fell to 1.9 billion tonnes last year, down 220 million tonnes from the 2.12 billion tonnes emitted in 2008, the first year of the scheme's second phase.
"We expect 2009 to mark the low point of emissions over Phase 2, and project a 5 percent rebound over 2010 to just over 2 billion tonnes," said Deutsche Bank analyst Mark C. Lewis.
"We expect a more modest upward trend of 2 percent in both 2011 and 2012, but would note that the severity of the recession in 2009 can be gauged by the fact that even by 2012 our projected levels (2.095 billion) are still below that of 2008."
BarCap also published their forecasts on Monday.
"Total emissions from covered installations will be 1.897 billion tonnes, which is a 10.5 percent year/year reduction," said BarCap's Trevor Sikorski.
Sikorski then expects 2010 emissions to climb back to 1.95 billion tonnes, a 2.8 percent rise.
The European Commission is scheduled to publish preliminary 2009 emissions data for the scheme on April 1, though both analysts said the data will likely be incomplete.
Sikorski said the data's impact on EU emissions permit prices is likely to be muted.
"The market is expecting 2009 emissions to be down by double figures, somewhere between 10-12 percent, so anything around these numbers should introduce little short-term impact," he said in a note.
"The market should react in a bearish manner only if verified emissions are above this range."
EU permits for December delivery were down 0.5 percent at 12.85 euros a tonne on Monday afternoon.
Deutsche Bank's Lewis expects CO2 from the EU's power sector, the 27-nation bloc's largest emitters, to have dropped by 110 million tonnes or 7.3 percent to 1.4 billion tonnes of CO2 last year.
"This reflects both a fall in the total amount of electricity generated (which we estimate at nearly 5 percent), and a cleaner fuel mix across the EU," he said.
Lewis also estimated industrial emissions, which include those from the steel and cement sectors, to also have fallen by 110 million tonnes, or 18 percent, to 500 million tonnes of CO2.
Last month, analysts Point Carbon estimated 2009 EU ETS emissions fell by 11 percent to 1.886 billion tonnes.
(Reporting by Michael Szabo; Editing by William Hardy)
Contact author
Comments
by Umashankar S - Bangalore, India on 29 March 2010, 13:07 PM
Going by the trends, emissions could be circa 1.85 billion tonnes in 2009. The cap for phase-2 is at 2.090 billion tonnes per year. Time to strengthen the ETS.
comment link
GHG emissions reduction: Switching off climate change
Alan Oxley , Melbourne, Australia | Mon, 03/29/2010 10:02 AM | Opinion
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has committed Indonesia to make substantial cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases. Several studies have been commissioned which recommend this.
Others aim to set out what to do. All, in one way or another, rely on the official United Nations report on assessments of climate change.
But there are now serious doubts about the scientific soundness of those assessments.
In what has been dubbed “Climategate”, it was revealed that leading climate change scientists have manipulated data in the official reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the UN’s official adviser on climate science. The IPCC has been publicly embarrassed and has ordered a review of its processes.
Six months ago most political leaders felt bound to take action to reduce emissions. The politics have suddenly changed.
Recent opinion polls in the US and Britain show people are becoming less convinced of the need for drastic action on climate change. There is now new political sensitivity to the high cost of cutting greenhouse emissions.
This is a time when prudent people would take extra care about claims about the impact of global warming. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) apparently sees things differently.
This week it is urging that everyone in Jakarta turn their lights off for an hour on Earth Day (March 27) to “change the world in one hour”. This is a global campaign.
According to WWF, 300 megawatts/hour less power will be consumed, saving 267 trees and creating cleaner air for 535 people.
Let’s assess these numbers at face value. With trillions of trees and 220 million people in Indonesia, these changes are so tiny that a statistician would rate them at zero. How can this “change the world”?
But there’s something else. It is the nation’s electricity utility, not the consumers of electricity, which emit greenhouse gases.
The generators will not be powered down during Earth Hour. Because a power grid cannot predict how much consumption will vary in that hour, it is most likely to keep its generators operating during Earth Hour even if they do not need to produce electricity. Only in this way can it is able to meet demand from hour to hour.
So it is hard not to form an opinion that WWF is less interested in the technical or scientific accuracy of what it says, than to create a fanfare. We should not be surprised at this. WWF’s approach to forestry in Indonesia for over a decade leads one to the same view.
In 1997, one year before WWF established a permanent presence in Indonesia, Danish environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg showed that claims by the president of WWF International that the forest fires that year in Indonesia were the worst on record were simply not true.
He also showed WWF’s assessment of how much forest was burnt was significantly in error.
This fanfare appeared to presage the launch of WWF’s long-running campaign to halt expansion of forestry and plantation industries in Indonesia.
Little has changed. Today, WWF uses data on forest fires from that earlier period to show rates and causes of deforestation in Indonesia that do not stand scrutiny.
Analyses produced two years ago to demonstrate a large carbon footprint in Jambi province from the forest sector relied on hearsay and arbitrarily discounted the sequestration of carbon by natural forests, rather using sound technical analysis.
The forest industry protested these claims, pointing out, as the Food and Agricultural Organization has for years, that the biggest drivers of illegal logging and deforestation in Indonesia were independent operators and poor smallholders. WWF continued to solicit funds from its donors and aid agencies. Environmental campaigners typically dismiss counter comment from the forest industry as “just what you would expect to hear”.
The recent Climategate revelations support the perception that WWF is also guided more by fanfare than fact on climate change.
The London Telegraph found no less than 16 WWF reports made claims which were used as sources for the UN reports which did not meet the scientific standards of the UN body.
The most notorious was reliance on a claim in a WWF report, for which there was no dependable scientific support, to demonstrate that climate change was accelerating the shrinkage of glaciers in the
Himalayas.
The issue here is not a quibble over numbers. WWF’s research is highly influential. It contributed to the widely publicized claim, since disavowed by the Indonesian government, that Indonesia is the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Research by World Growth has confirmed that Indonesia’s response is correct.
Despite this, the claim is still used, even by the British Government, to justify expensive and growth-sapping measures to reduce emissions.
WWF reports are also used to support bids for funding from aid donors and foundations to support its programs.
Generally donors prefer to support on-ground conservation rather than advocacy. What has WWF delivered in Indonesia apart from anti-forestry tirades?
It has a number of small, but useful, animal conservation programs. Its conservation showpiece is Tesso Nilo National Park’s expansion to 100,000 hectares in Sumatra.
This has not been successful. Forest land encroachment for livelihood plantings and illegal logging by local communities are rampant within the park.
Despite this, has continued to incorrectly label large plantation and forestry companies as the primary threat to the park. Rather than get its own house in order and fix Tesso Nilo’s existing problems, WWF has been lobbying national and local governments to have the park expanded.
The question here is, if poor communities within the existing national park boundaries cannot be managed currently, how will an even larger park fare?
While WWF professes that real conservation is its primary business, its activities indicate that what drives the organization is what it calls advocacy (i.e. creating fanfare). Some donors, like the European Union (EU), directly support the goal of constraining forestry and support WWF advocacy for that.
Like WWF, the EU gives no public recognition of the fact that around 25 percent of Indonesian forest and over 50 percent of Malaysian forest is already reserved, or that forest conversion on land earmarked for development creates jobs and reduces poverty.
Those motivated to see real conservation results however might be more circumspect. Climategate reveals that WWF’s reputation as a conservation organization is at risk. It needs to show it has done something to improve the standard, quality and veracity of its technical work.
Meanwhile, its Earth Hour website suggests it is business as usual. It sports an electronic invitation to make a financial contribution to the WWF campaign.
Recent opinion polls in the US and Britain show people are becoming less convinced of the need for drastic action on climate change.
The writer is chairman of World Growth, a US-based NGO
Community networks key to forest reform
Adianto P. Simamora , The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Wed, 03/24/2010 6:01 PM | National
Communities linked to their own networks and organizations have the best chance of success in community forestry, a research finds.
The three-year research project, conducted by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), assessed 30 sites in 10 countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America.
“The research focused on communities that had fought for or been granted new statutory rights,” Anne Larson, senior associate at CIFOR said.
The findings were published in a book, Forest for People: Community Rights Forest Tenure Reform, which was launched on Wednesday.
“We aimed at identifying issues and concerns from the perspective of socially and economically vulnerable groups that were seeking tenure reforms,” she said.
Tenure reforms – a change in tenure rights in forested areas – represent a forest reform comparable to widespread agrarian reforms of the mid 20th century.
Although the world’s forests are still primarily public land, more than a quarter of forests in developing countries are now owned by or assigned to communities.
It said that tenure was particularly important in light of the ongoing negotiations on REDD (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation).
For REDD schemes to be successful, clear ownership of forest resources and carbon pools needs to be established so that payments for carbon sequestration can be made. Without having secure rights and clear ownership over carbon pools, communities and indigenous groups may not be able to claim benefits from REDD schemes, and may even be dispossessed.
This would be to the detriment of efforts both to mitigate climate change and to ensure equity, Anne said.
UK supports Jambi’s conservation efforts
John Afrizal , The Jakarta Post , Jambi | Mon, 03/29/2010 10:14 AM | The Archipelago
Indonesia and the UK are working together to curb the impact of global warming and deforestation, says British Ambassador to Indonesia Martin A. Hatfull.
During a visit to Jambi’s Berbak National Park in East Tanjung Jabing regency, he said his government expected to hold an open dialogue with the Indonesian government.
He acknowledged President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono had often expressed his commitment to addressing climate change and protecting Indonesia’s forests.
“We also plan to work together with governments in the provinces, where we can help develop programs that are environmentally responsible,” said Hatfull.
He was in Jambi to observe efforts to curb deforestation and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, crucial in the fight against climate change.
He said he was pleased with the visit, and the programs being run by the Geological Society of London, which works together with the park to curb deforestation and protest the forest.
“The British government, through the Darwin Initiative, is funding the project,” said Hatfull.
Jambi Governor Zulkifli Nurdin, said that Jambi was one of the country’s cultural centers and the only remaining home of two important tribes in Sumatra — the Rimba and Talang Mama.
He said that Jambi was also the only province in Indonesia that had four national parks — Kerinci Seblat, Bukit Duabelas, Tigapuluh and Berbak national parks — in which various species of flora and fauna are found.
The British government, through its international development ministry, has allocated £4.7 million through the Indonesian Climate Change Fund and from now until 2015 will provide £50 million for climate change mitigation activities across the country.
Hatfull praised Zulkifli for his commitment to addressing climate change, forest fires and illegal logging, as well as his decision to allocate 100 hectares of forest for a restoration project.
“We must manage the forest and environment wisely, not based on greed,” said Hatfull.
`Mosaic system' proposed for plantations
Adianto P. Simamora , THE JAKARTA POST , JAKARTA | Sat, 03/27/2010 12:40 PM | National
Forestry Minister Zulkifli Hasan has asked oil palm plantation companies to adopt mosaic systems to help maintain biodiversity in plantations, and to address mounting criticism of the industry over environmental concerns.
Minister Zulkilfli sent a letter to Agriculture Minister Suswono in February asking for the development of the mosaic system, requiring companies to maintain areas of original vegetation of high conservation value.
Forestry Ministry forest production director general Hadi Daryanto said the ideal percentage of plantation on plots of land was around 70 percent.
"The remaining area should be set aside for, among others, the protection of biodiversity. We want both *the forestry and agriculture* ministers to have one voice in respond-ing to protests on environmental issues from the international community," he told The Jakarta Post on Friday.
Zulkilfli said the mosaic pattern system, which had been adopted in industrial forest plantations, could also minimize diseases that thrive in monoculture plantations.
Minister Suswono was slated to visit European countries to campaign for Indonesia's palm oil products.
Greenomics Indonesia executive director Elfian Effendi said the ministry needed to resolve legal issues surrounding palm plantations before making overseas trips.
"We are worried that the whitewash campaign won't be productive, because up to 3.5 million hectares of oil palm plantations are classified by the Forestry Ministry as illegal plantations," he said.
"Many existing palm oil companies have no licenses to clear land for their plantations."
Activists said the poor supervision of oil palm plantations in Indonesia had led to an increase of greenhouse gas emissions.
However, the Agriculture Ministry, managing the sector, insists that the palm oil industry is not related to deforestation.
It says oil palms account for seven million hectares or 6 percent of Indonesia's total forest area.
Minister Suswono also said oil palm plantations utilized critical or marginal land.
Palm Oil Producer Association (Gapki) executive director Fadhil Hasan has claimed most of 7.3 million hectares of land occupied by palm oil plantations was in conversion forest areas allocated by the government.
The association has accused foreign anti-palm-oil groups of launching campaigns against Indonesia's CPO industry, citing green issues.
‘Mosaic system’ proposed for plantations
Adianto P. Simamora , The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Fri, 03/26/2010 9:27 PM | National
Forestry Minister Zulkifli Hasan has asked oil palm plantation companies to adopt mosaic systems to help maintain biodiversity in plantations, and to address mounting criticism of the industry over environmental concerns.
Minister Zulkilfli sent a letter to Agriculture Minister Suswono in February asking for the development of the mosaic system, requiring companies to maintain areas of original vegetation of high conservation value.
Forestry Ministry Forest Production Director General Hadi Daryanto said the ideal percentage of plantation on plots of land was around 70 percent.
“The remaining area should be set aside for, among others, the protection of biodiversity. We want both [the forestry and agriculture] ministers to have one voice in responding to protests on environmental issues from the international community,” he told The Jakarta Post on Friday.
Zulkilfli said the mosaic pattern system, which had been adopted in industrial forest plantations, could also minimize diseases that thrive in monoculture plantations.
Carbon
+3 3 votes
BLOG: Who Killed Cap-and-Trade?
by Tyler Gumpright on 29 March 2010, 17:42 PM 0 comments , 56 views
Categories: News from the Web, Blogs, Analysis
March 28th, 2010
By Robert Stavins
In a recent article in the New York Times, John Broder asks “Why did cap-and-trade die?” and responds that “it was done in by the weak economy, the Wall Street meltdown, determined industry opposition and its own complexity.” Mr. Broder’s analysis is concise and insightful, and I recommend it to readers. But I think there’s one factor that is more important than all those mentioned above in causing cap-and-trade to have changed from politically correct to politically anathema in just nine months. Before turning to that, however, I would like to question the premise of my own essay.
Is Cap-and-Trade Really Dead?
Although cap-and-trade has fallen dramatically in political favor in Washington as the U.S. answer to climate change, this approach to reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is by no means “dead.”
The evolving Kerry-Graham-Lieberman legislation has a cap-and-trade system at its heart for the electricity-generation sector, with other sectors to be phased in later (and it employs another market-based approach, a series of fuel taxes for the transportation sector linked to the market price for allowances). Of course, due to the evolving political climate, the three Senators will probably not call their system “cap-and-trade,” but will give it some other creative label.
The competitor proposal from Senators Cantwell and Collins — the CLEAR Act — has been labeled by those Senators as a “cap-and-dividend” approach, but it is nothing more nor less than a cap-and-trade system with a particular allocation mechanism (100% auction) and a particular use of revenues (75% directly rebated to households) — and, it should be mentioned, some unfortunate and unnecessary restrictions on allowance trading.
And we should not forget that cap-and-trade continues to emerge as the preferred policy instrument to address climate change emissions throughout the industrialized world — in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan (as I wrote about in a recent post).
But back to the main story — the dramatic change in the political reception given in Washington to this cost-effective approach to environmental protection.
A Rapid Descent From Politically Correct to Politically Anathema
Among factors causing this change were: the economic recession; the financial crisis (linked, in part, with real and perceived abuses in financial markets) which thereby caused great suspicion about markets in general and in particular about trading in intangible assets such as emission allowances; and the complex nature of the Waxman-Markey legislation (which is mainly not about cap-and-trade, but various regulatory approaches).
But the most important factor — by far — which led to the change from politically correct to politically anathema was the simple fact that cap-and-trade was the approach that was receiving the most serious consideration, indeed the approach that had been passed by one of the houses of Congress. This brought not only great scrutiny of the approach, but — more important — it meant that all of the hostility to action on climate change, mainly but not exclusively from Republicans and coal-state Democrats, was targeted at the policy du jour — cap-and-trade.
The same fate would have befallen any front-running climate policy.
Does anyone really believe that if a carbon tax had been the major policy being considered in the House and Senate that it would have received a more favorable rating from climate-action skeptics on the right? If there’s any doubt about that, take note that Republicans in the Congress were unified and successful in demonizing cap-and-trade as “cap-and-tax.”
Likewise, if a multi-faceted regulatory approach (that would have been vastly more costly for what would be achieved) had been the policy under consideration, would it have garnered greater political support? Of course not. If there is doubt about that, just observe the solid Republican Congressional hostility (and some announced Democratic opposition) to the CO2 regulatory pathway that EPA has announced under its endangerment finding in response to the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts vs. EPA.
(There’s a minor caveat, namely, that environmental policy approaches that hide their costs frequently are politically favored over policies that make their costs visible, even if the former policy is actually more costly. A prime example is the broad political support for Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, relative to the more effective and less costly option of gasoline taxes. Of course, cap-and-trade can be said to obscure its costs relative to a carbon tax, but that hardly made much difference once opponents succeeded in labeling it “cap-and-tax.”)
In general, any climate policy approach — if it was meaningful in its objectives and had any chance of being enacted — would have become the prime target of political skepticism and scorn. This has been the fate of cap-and-trade over the past nine months.
Why is Political Support for Climate Policy Action So Low in the United States?
If much of the political hostility directed at cap-and-trade proposals in Washington has largely been due to hostility towards climate policy in general, this raises a further question, namely, why has there been so little political support in Washington for climate policy in general. Several reasons can be identified.
For one thing, U.S. public support on this issue has decreased significantly, as has been validated by a number of reliable polls, including from the Gallup Organization. Indeed, in January of this year, a Pew Research Center poll found that “dealing with global warming” was ranked 21st among 21 possible priorities for the President and Congress. This drop in public support is itself at least partly due to the state of the national economy, as public enthusiasm about environmental action has — for many decades — been found to be inversely correlated with various measures of national economic well-being.
Although the lagging economy (and consequent unemployment) is likely the major factor explaining the fall in public support for climate policy action, other contributing factors have been the so-called Climategate episode of leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia and the damaged credibility of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) due to several errors in recent reports.
Furthermore, the nature of the climate change problem itself helps to explain the relative apathy among the U.S. public. Nearly all of our major environmental laws have been passed in the wake of highly-publicized environmental events or “disasters,” ranging from Love Canal to the Cuyahoga River.
But the day after Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught on fire in 1969, no article in The Cleveland Plain Dealer commented that “the cause was uncertain, because rivers periodically catch on fire from natural causes.” On the contrary, it was immediately apparent that the cause was waste dumped into the river by adjacent industries. A direct consequence of the “disaster” was, of course, the Clean Water Act of 1972.
But climate change is distinctly different. Unlike the environmental threats addressed successfully in past legislation, climate change is essentially unobservable. You and I observe the weather, not the climate. Until there is an obvious and sudden event — such as a loss of part of the Antarctic ice sheet leading to a disastrous sea-level rise — it’s unlikely that public opinion in the United States will provide the bottom-up demand for action that has inspired previous Congressional action on the environment over the past forty years.
Finally, it should be acknowledged that the fiercely partisan political climate in Washington has completed the gradual erosion of the bi-partisan coalitions that had enacted key environmental laws over four decades. Add to this the commitment by the opposition party to deny the President any (more) political victories in this year of mid-term Congressional elections, and the possibility of progressive climate policy action appears unlikely in the short term.
An Open-Ended Question
There are probably other factors that help explain the fall in public and political support for climate policy action, as well as the changed politics of cap-and-trade. I suspect that readers will tell me about these.
Robert N. Stavins is the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government, Director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, and Chairman of the Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Group.
‘Cap and Trade’ Loses Its Standing as Energy Policy of Choice
By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: March 25, 2010
• Sign in to Recommend
• Twitter
• Sign In to E-Mail
• Print
•
Reprints
• ShareClose
o Linkedin
o Digg
o Facebook
o Mixx
o MySpace
o Yahoo! Buzz
o Permalink
o
WASHINGTON — Less than a year ago, cap and trade was the policy of choice for tackling climate change.
Matthew Cavanaugh/European Pressphoto Agency
Senators Lindsey Graham, left, John Kerry and Joseph I. Lieberman are working on bipartisan climate change legislation.
Related
• Times Topic: Cap and Trade
Environmental groups and their foes in industry joined hands to embrace the approach, a market-driven system that sets a ceiling on global warming pollution while allowing companies to trade permits to meet it. President Obama praised it by name in his first budget, and the authors of the House climate and energy bill passed last June largely built their measure around it.
Today, the concept is in wide disrepute, with opponents effectively branding it “cap and tax,” and Tea Party followers using it as a symbol of much of what they say is wrong with Washington.
Mr. Obama dropped all mention of cap and trade from his current budget. And the sponsors of a Senate climate bill likely to be introduced in April, now that Congress is moving past health care, dare not speak its name.
“I don’t know what ‘cap and trade’ means,” Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said last fall in introducing his original climate change plan.
Mr. Kerry’s partner in promoting global warming legislation, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, pronounced economywide cap and trade dead last month and has since been working with Mr. Kerry to try to patch together a bill that satisfies the diverse economic, regional and ideological interests of the Senate.
That plan, still being written, will include a cap on greenhouse gas emissions only for utilities, at least at first, with other industries phased in perhaps years later. It is also said to include a modest tax on gasoline, diesel fuel and aviation fuel, accompanied by new incentives for oil and gas drilling, nuclear power plant construction, carbon capture and storage, and renewable energy sources like wind and solar.
Why did cap and trade die? The short answer is that it was done in by the weak economy, the Wall Street meltdown, determined industry opposition and its own complexity.
The idea began as a middle-of-the-road Republican plan to unleash the market to reduce power plant pollution and spur innovation. But when lawmakers tried to apply the concept to the far more pervasive problem of carbon dioxide emissions, it ran into gale-force opposition from the oil industry, conservative groups that portrayed it as an economy-killing tax and lawmakers terrified that it would become a bonanza for Wall Street traders and Enron-style manipulators.
“Economywide cap and trade died of what amounts to natural causes in Washington,” said Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, who has been promoting the idea for more than two decades. “The term itself became too polarizing and too paralyzing in the effort to win over conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans to try to do something about climate change and our oil dependency.”
Cap and trade was first tried on a significant scale 20 years ago under the first Bush administration as a way to address the problem of airborne sulfur dioxide pollution — widely known as acid rain — from coal-burning power plants in the Eastern United States. A limit was imposed on emissions from the plants, and utilities were allowed to buy and sell permits to comply. Today it is considered one of the most effective environmental initiatives.
Environmentalists and industries resurrected the idea in recent years as a centerpiece of measures to address global warming and growing oil imports. Representatives Henry A. Waxman of California and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, both Democrats, built their climate change bill last year in large measure around it.
But in trying to assemble a majority to pass it, Mr. Waxman and Mr. Markey dished out a cornucopia of concessions and exemptions to coal companies, utilities, refiners, heavy industry and agribusinesses. The original simplicity was lost, replaced by a bazaar in which those with the most muscle got the best deals.
Opponents labeled it a tax-and-redistribution scheme.
“We turned it into ‘cap and tax,’ and we turned that into an epithet,” said Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market research organization supported by conservative individuals and corporations. “We also did a good job of showing that a bunch of big companies — Goldman Sachs, the oil companies, the big utilities — would get windfall profits because they’d been given free ration coupons.”
C. Boyden Gray, White House counsel in the first Bush administration and a strong advocate of the acid rain cap-and-trade program, said that opponents were largely correct in labeling the Waxman-Markey plan a tax, because so many of the pollution allowances were given away to industry rather than allocated based on past emissions.
“This is potentially a $3 trillion tax,” Mr. Gray said, “which is pretty steep in the best of times, and poison in the worst of times.”
The House narrowly passed the bill last June, but the Senate has moved slowly to take it up. Mr. Kerry and Mr. Graham, along with Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, have been trying to find support for a comprehensive measure.
They, too, have been forced to seek compromise, offering incentives to oil drillers, nuclear power advocates, antitax groups, coal companies and utilities.
Two senators, Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, and Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, have proposed an alternative that they call cap and dividend, under which licenses to pollute would be auctioned to producers and wholesalers of fossil fuels, with three-quarters of the revenue returned to consumers in monthly checks to cover their higher energy costs.
Ms. Cantwell said that cap and trade had been discredited by the Wall Street crisis, the Enron scandal and the rocky start to a carbon credits trading system in Europe that has been subject to dizzying price fluctuations and widespread fraud.
She said her bill would require every pollution permit to be auctioned rather than given away and was 39 pages long, compared with Waxman-Markey, which weighs in at some 1,400 pages.
The Cantwell-Collins plan is almost exactly what Mr. Obama proposed in the campaign and after first taking office — a 100 percent auction of permits and a large tax rebate to the public.
“He called our bill ‘very elegant,’ ” Ms. Cantwell said. “Simplicity and having something people can understand is important.”
+1 1 vote
Sojitz to set up online carbon credits market - Nikkei
by Reuters News on 29 March 2010, 20:59 PM 0 comments , 54 views
Categories: Reuters News
March 30 (Reuters) - Trading house Sojitz Corp <2768.T> will create an online marketplace for carbon credits to quickly match up buyers and sellers, the Nikkei business daily reported.
Various frameworks exist in Japan for trading carbon credits, but with no common marketplace, buyers and sellers often have difficulty finding each other and getting a handle on market prices, causing the domestic market to stagnate, the paper said.
Sojitz subsidiary CoalinQ Corp, which operates an e-commerce site for coal transactions, will set up a joint venture with carbon credit seller Smart Energy Co on Thursday and the firm will start operating a carbon trading site in May, the daily said.
The marketplace will handle five or so kinds of carbon credits, including those issued by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, the Environment Ministry and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, the Nikkei said.
About 4 percent to 5 percent of transaction prices will be charged as commissions and trading of the equivalent of at least 800,000 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions a year is targeted by 2014, the paper said.
Demand for carbon credit trading is expected to increase as a Tokyo ordinance on limiting CO2 emissions takes effect next month, the daily said.
(Reporting by Saqib Iqbal Ahmed in Bangalore; Editing by Gopakumar Warrier) ((saqib.ahmed@thomsonreuters.com; within US +1 646 223 8780; outside U.S +91 80 4135 5800; Reuters Messaging saqib.ahmed.reuters.com@reuters.net))
Keywords: SOJITZ/
Carbon
+2 2 votes
Deutsche Bank, BarCap see over 10% drop in 2009 EU ETS emissions
by Reuters News on 29 March 2010, 09:50 AM 2 comments , 156 views
Categories: Reuters News
* Deutsche sees 10.4 pct drop in '09 EU ETS emissions
* BarCap forecasts 10.5 pct drop, little effect on prices
* Both see between 3-5 pct rise in 2010
LONDON, March 29 (Reuters) - Carbon emissions under the European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme fell by over 10 percent in 2009 but are expected to rebound this year as Europe's economy recovers, Deutsche Bank and Barclays Capital said on Monday.
Deutsche bank said in an analyst note that carbon emissions from heavy industry fell to 1.9 billion tonnes last year, down 220 million tonnes from the 2.12 billion tonnes emitted in 2008, the first year of the scheme's second phase.
"We expect 2009 to mark the low point of emissions over Phase 2, and project a 5 percent rebound over 2010 to just over 2 billion tonnes," said Deutsche Bank analyst Mark C. Lewis.
"We expect a more modest upward trend of 2 percent in both 2011 and 2012, but would note that the severity of the recession in 2009 can be gauged by the fact that even by 2012 our projected levels (2.095 billion) are still below that of 2008."
BarCap also published their forecasts on Monday.
"Total emissions from covered installations will be 1.897 billion tonnes, which is a 10.5 percent year/year reduction," said BarCap's Trevor Sikorski.
Sikorski then expects 2010 emissions to climb back to 1.95 billion tonnes, a 2.8 percent rise.
The European Commission is scheduled to publish preliminary 2009 emissions data for the scheme on April 1, though both analysts said the data will likely be incomplete.
Sikorski said the data's impact on EU emissions permit prices is likely to be muted.
"The market is expecting 2009 emissions to be down by double figures, somewhere between 10-12 percent, so anything around these numbers should introduce little short-term impact," he said in a note.
"The market should react in a bearish manner only if verified emissions are above this range."
EU permits for December delivery
Deutsche Bank's Lewis expects CO2 from the EU's power sector, the 27-nation bloc's largest emitters, to have dropped by 110 million tonnes or 7.3 percent to 1.4 billion tonnes of CO2 last year.
"This reflects both a fall in the total amount of electricity generated (which we estimate at nearly 5 percent), and a cleaner fuel mix across the EU," he said.
Lewis also estimated industrial emissions, which include those from the steel and cement sectors, to also have fallen by 110 million tonnes, or 18 percent, to 500 million tonnes of CO2.
Last month, analysts Point Carbon estimated 2009 EU ETS emissions fell by 11 percent to 1.886 billion tonnes.
(Reporting by Michael Szabo; Editing by William Hardy)
Contact author
Comments
by Umashankar S - Bangalore, India on 29 March 2010, 13:07 PM
Going by the trends, emissions could be circa 1.85 billion tonnes in 2009. The cap for phase-2 is at 2.090 billion tonnes per year. Time to strengthen the ETS.
comment link
GHG emissions reduction: Switching off climate change
Alan Oxley , Melbourne, Australia | Mon, 03/29/2010 10:02 AM | Opinion
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has committed Indonesia to make substantial cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases. Several studies have been commissioned which recommend this.
Others aim to set out what to do. All, in one way or another, rely on the official United Nations report on assessments of climate change.
But there are now serious doubts about the scientific soundness of those assessments.
In what has been dubbed “Climategate”, it was revealed that leading climate change scientists have manipulated data in the official reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the UN’s official adviser on climate science. The IPCC has been publicly embarrassed and has ordered a review of its processes.
Six months ago most political leaders felt bound to take action to reduce emissions. The politics have suddenly changed.
Recent opinion polls in the US and Britain show people are becoming less convinced of the need for drastic action on climate change. There is now new political sensitivity to the high cost of cutting greenhouse emissions.
This is a time when prudent people would take extra care about claims about the impact of global warming. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) apparently sees things differently.
This week it is urging that everyone in Jakarta turn their lights off for an hour on Earth Day (March 27) to “change the world in one hour”. This is a global campaign.
According to WWF, 300 megawatts/hour less power will be consumed, saving 267 trees and creating cleaner air for 535 people.
Let’s assess these numbers at face value. With trillions of trees and 220 million people in Indonesia, these changes are so tiny that a statistician would rate them at zero. How can this “change the world”?
But there’s something else. It is the nation’s electricity utility, not the consumers of electricity, which emit greenhouse gases.
The generators will not be powered down during Earth Hour. Because a power grid cannot predict how much consumption will vary in that hour, it is most likely to keep its generators operating during Earth Hour even if they do not need to produce electricity. Only in this way can it is able to meet demand from hour to hour.
So it is hard not to form an opinion that WWF is less interested in the technical or scientific accuracy of what it says, than to create a fanfare. We should not be surprised at this. WWF’s approach to forestry in Indonesia for over a decade leads one to the same view.
In 1997, one year before WWF established a permanent presence in Indonesia, Danish environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg showed that claims by the president of WWF International that the forest fires that year in Indonesia were the worst on record were simply not true.
He also showed WWF’s assessment of how much forest was burnt was significantly in error.
This fanfare appeared to presage the launch of WWF’s long-running campaign to halt expansion of forestry and plantation industries in Indonesia.
Little has changed. Today, WWF uses data on forest fires from that earlier period to show rates and causes of deforestation in Indonesia that do not stand scrutiny.
Analyses produced two years ago to demonstrate a large carbon footprint in Jambi province from the forest sector relied on hearsay and arbitrarily discounted the sequestration of carbon by natural forests, rather using sound technical analysis.
The forest industry protested these claims, pointing out, as the Food and Agricultural Organization has for years, that the biggest drivers of illegal logging and deforestation in Indonesia were independent operators and poor smallholders. WWF continued to solicit funds from its donors and aid agencies. Environmental campaigners typically dismiss counter comment from the forest industry as “just what you would expect to hear”.
The recent Climategate revelations support the perception that WWF is also guided more by fanfare than fact on climate change.
The London Telegraph found no less than 16 WWF reports made claims which were used as sources for the UN reports which did not meet the scientific standards of the UN body.
The most notorious was reliance on a claim in a WWF report, for which there was no dependable scientific support, to demonstrate that climate change was accelerating the shrinkage of glaciers in the
Himalayas.
The issue here is not a quibble over numbers. WWF’s research is highly influential. It contributed to the widely publicized claim, since disavowed by the Indonesian government, that Indonesia is the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Research by World Growth has confirmed that Indonesia’s response is correct.
Despite this, the claim is still used, even by the British Government, to justify expensive and growth-sapping measures to reduce emissions.
WWF reports are also used to support bids for funding from aid donors and foundations to support its programs.
Generally donors prefer to support on-ground conservation rather than advocacy. What has WWF delivered in Indonesia apart from anti-forestry tirades?
It has a number of small, but useful, animal conservation programs. Its conservation showpiece is Tesso Nilo National Park’s expansion to 100,000 hectares in Sumatra.
This has not been successful. Forest land encroachment for livelihood plantings and illegal logging by local communities are rampant within the park.
Despite this, has continued to incorrectly label large plantation and forestry companies as the primary threat to the park. Rather than get its own house in order and fix Tesso Nilo’s existing problems, WWF has been lobbying national and local governments to have the park expanded.
The question here is, if poor communities within the existing national park boundaries cannot be managed currently, how will an even larger park fare?
While WWF professes that real conservation is its primary business, its activities indicate that what drives the organization is what it calls advocacy (i.e. creating fanfare). Some donors, like the European Union (EU), directly support the goal of constraining forestry and support WWF advocacy for that.
Like WWF, the EU gives no public recognition of the fact that around 25 percent of Indonesian forest and over 50 percent of Malaysian forest is already reserved, or that forest conversion on land earmarked for development creates jobs and reduces poverty.
Those motivated to see real conservation results however might be more circumspect. Climategate reveals that WWF’s reputation as a conservation organization is at risk. It needs to show it has done something to improve the standard, quality and veracity of its technical work.
Meanwhile, its Earth Hour website suggests it is business as usual. It sports an electronic invitation to make a financial contribution to the WWF campaign.
Recent opinion polls in the US and Britain show people are becoming less convinced of the need for drastic action on climate change.
The writer is chairman of World Growth, a US-based NGO
Community networks key to forest reform
Adianto P. Simamora , The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Wed, 03/24/2010 6:01 PM | National
Communities linked to their own networks and organizations have the best chance of success in community forestry, a research finds.
The three-year research project, conducted by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), assessed 30 sites in 10 countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America.
“The research focused on communities that had fought for or been granted new statutory rights,” Anne Larson, senior associate at CIFOR said.
The findings were published in a book, Forest for People: Community Rights Forest Tenure Reform, which was launched on Wednesday.
“We aimed at identifying issues and concerns from the perspective of socially and economically vulnerable groups that were seeking tenure reforms,” she said.
Tenure reforms – a change in tenure rights in forested areas – represent a forest reform comparable to widespread agrarian reforms of the mid 20th century.
Although the world’s forests are still primarily public land, more than a quarter of forests in developing countries are now owned by or assigned to communities.
It said that tenure was particularly important in light of the ongoing negotiations on REDD (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation).
For REDD schemes to be successful, clear ownership of forest resources and carbon pools needs to be established so that payments for carbon sequestration can be made. Without having secure rights and clear ownership over carbon pools, communities and indigenous groups may not be able to claim benefits from REDD schemes, and may even be dispossessed.
This would be to the detriment of efforts both to mitigate climate change and to ensure equity, Anne said.
UK supports Jambi’s conservation efforts
John Afrizal , The Jakarta Post , Jambi | Mon, 03/29/2010 10:14 AM | The Archipelago
Indonesia and the UK are working together to curb the impact of global warming and deforestation, says British Ambassador to Indonesia Martin A. Hatfull.
During a visit to Jambi’s Berbak National Park in East Tanjung Jabing regency, he said his government expected to hold an open dialogue with the Indonesian government.
He acknowledged President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono had often expressed his commitment to addressing climate change and protecting Indonesia’s forests.
“We also plan to work together with governments in the provinces, where we can help develop programs that are environmentally responsible,” said Hatfull.
He was in Jambi to observe efforts to curb deforestation and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, crucial in the fight against climate change.
He said he was pleased with the visit, and the programs being run by the Geological Society of London, which works together with the park to curb deforestation and protest the forest.
“The British government, through the Darwin Initiative, is funding the project,” said Hatfull.
Jambi Governor Zulkifli Nurdin, said that Jambi was one of the country’s cultural centers and the only remaining home of two important tribes in Sumatra — the Rimba and Talang Mama.
He said that Jambi was also the only province in Indonesia that had four national parks — Kerinci Seblat, Bukit Duabelas, Tigapuluh and Berbak national parks — in which various species of flora and fauna are found.
The British government, through its international development ministry, has allocated £4.7 million through the Indonesian Climate Change Fund and from now until 2015 will provide £50 million for climate change mitigation activities across the country.
Hatfull praised Zulkifli for his commitment to addressing climate change, forest fires and illegal logging, as well as his decision to allocate 100 hectares of forest for a restoration project.
“We must manage the forest and environment wisely, not based on greed,” said Hatfull.
`Mosaic system' proposed for plantations
Adianto P. Simamora , THE JAKARTA POST , JAKARTA | Sat, 03/27/2010 12:40 PM | National
Forestry Minister Zulkifli Hasan has asked oil palm plantation companies to adopt mosaic systems to help maintain biodiversity in plantations, and to address mounting criticism of the industry over environmental concerns.
Minister Zulkilfli sent a letter to Agriculture Minister Suswono in February asking for the development of the mosaic system, requiring companies to maintain areas of original vegetation of high conservation value.
Forestry Ministry forest production director general Hadi Daryanto said the ideal percentage of plantation on plots of land was around 70 percent.
"The remaining area should be set aside for, among others, the protection of biodiversity. We want both *the forestry and agriculture* ministers to have one voice in respond-ing to protests on environmental issues from the international community," he told The Jakarta Post on Friday.
Zulkilfli said the mosaic pattern system, which had been adopted in industrial forest plantations, could also minimize diseases that thrive in monoculture plantations.
Minister Suswono was slated to visit European countries to campaign for Indonesia's palm oil products.
Greenomics Indonesia executive director Elfian Effendi said the ministry needed to resolve legal issues surrounding palm plantations before making overseas trips.
"We are worried that the whitewash campaign won't be productive, because up to 3.5 million hectares of oil palm plantations are classified by the Forestry Ministry as illegal plantations," he said.
"Many existing palm oil companies have no licenses to clear land for their plantations."
Activists said the poor supervision of oil palm plantations in Indonesia had led to an increase of greenhouse gas emissions.
However, the Agriculture Ministry, managing the sector, insists that the palm oil industry is not related to deforestation.
It says oil palms account for seven million hectares or 6 percent of Indonesia's total forest area.
Minister Suswono also said oil palm plantations utilized critical or marginal land.
Palm Oil Producer Association (Gapki) executive director Fadhil Hasan has claimed most of 7.3 million hectares of land occupied by palm oil plantations was in conversion forest areas allocated by the government.
The association has accused foreign anti-palm-oil groups of launching campaigns against Indonesia's CPO industry, citing green issues.
‘Mosaic system’ proposed for plantations
Adianto P. Simamora , The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Fri, 03/26/2010 9:27 PM | National
Forestry Minister Zulkifli Hasan has asked oil palm plantation companies to adopt mosaic systems to help maintain biodiversity in plantations, and to address mounting criticism of the industry over environmental concerns.
Minister Zulkilfli sent a letter to Agriculture Minister Suswono in February asking for the development of the mosaic system, requiring companies to maintain areas of original vegetation of high conservation value.
Forestry Ministry Forest Production Director General Hadi Daryanto said the ideal percentage of plantation on plots of land was around 70 percent.
“The remaining area should be set aside for, among others, the protection of biodiversity. We want both [the forestry and agriculture] ministers to have one voice in responding to protests on environmental issues from the international community,” he told The Jakarta Post on Friday.
Zulkilfli said the mosaic pattern system, which had been adopted in industrial forest plantations, could also minimize diseases that thrive in monoculture plantations.
Carbon
+3 3 votes
BLOG: Who Killed Cap-and-Trade?
by Tyler Gumpright on 29 March 2010, 17:42 PM 0 comments , 56 views
Categories: News from the Web, Blogs, Analysis
March 28th, 2010
By Robert Stavins
In a recent article in the New York Times, John Broder asks “Why did cap-and-trade die?” and responds that “it was done in by the weak economy, the Wall Street meltdown, determined industry opposition and its own complexity.” Mr. Broder’s analysis is concise and insightful, and I recommend it to readers. But I think there’s one factor that is more important than all those mentioned above in causing cap-and-trade to have changed from politically correct to politically anathema in just nine months. Before turning to that, however, I would like to question the premise of my own essay.
Is Cap-and-Trade Really Dead?
Although cap-and-trade has fallen dramatically in political favor in Washington as the U.S. answer to climate change, this approach to reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is by no means “dead.”
The evolving Kerry-Graham-Lieberman legislation has a cap-and-trade system at its heart for the electricity-generation sector, with other sectors to be phased in later (and it employs another market-based approach, a series of fuel taxes for the transportation sector linked to the market price for allowances). Of course, due to the evolving political climate, the three Senators will probably not call their system “cap-and-trade,” but will give it some other creative label.
The competitor proposal from Senators Cantwell and Collins — the CLEAR Act — has been labeled by those Senators as a “cap-and-dividend” approach, but it is nothing more nor less than a cap-and-trade system with a particular allocation mechanism (100% auction) and a particular use of revenues (75% directly rebated to households) — and, it should be mentioned, some unfortunate and unnecessary restrictions on allowance trading.
And we should not forget that cap-and-trade continues to emerge as the preferred policy instrument to address climate change emissions throughout the industrialized world — in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan (as I wrote about in a recent post).
But back to the main story — the dramatic change in the political reception given in Washington to this cost-effective approach to environmental protection.
A Rapid Descent From Politically Correct to Politically Anathema
Among factors causing this change were: the economic recession; the financial crisis (linked, in part, with real and perceived abuses in financial markets) which thereby caused great suspicion about markets in general and in particular about trading in intangible assets such as emission allowances; and the complex nature of the Waxman-Markey legislation (which is mainly not about cap-and-trade, but various regulatory approaches).
But the most important factor — by far — which led to the change from politically correct to politically anathema was the simple fact that cap-and-trade was the approach that was receiving the most serious consideration, indeed the approach that had been passed by one of the houses of Congress. This brought not only great scrutiny of the approach, but — more important — it meant that all of the hostility to action on climate change, mainly but not exclusively from Republicans and coal-state Democrats, was targeted at the policy du jour — cap-and-trade.
The same fate would have befallen any front-running climate policy.
Does anyone really believe that if a carbon tax had been the major policy being considered in the House and Senate that it would have received a more favorable rating from climate-action skeptics on the right? If there’s any doubt about that, take note that Republicans in the Congress were unified and successful in demonizing cap-and-trade as “cap-and-tax.”
Likewise, if a multi-faceted regulatory approach (that would have been vastly more costly for what would be achieved) had been the policy under consideration, would it have garnered greater political support? Of course not. If there is doubt about that, just observe the solid Republican Congressional hostility (and some announced Democratic opposition) to the CO2 regulatory pathway that EPA has announced under its endangerment finding in response to the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts vs. EPA.
(There’s a minor caveat, namely, that environmental policy approaches that hide their costs frequently are politically favored over policies that make their costs visible, even if the former policy is actually more costly. A prime example is the broad political support for Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, relative to the more effective and less costly option of gasoline taxes. Of course, cap-and-trade can be said to obscure its costs relative to a carbon tax, but that hardly made much difference once opponents succeeded in labeling it “cap-and-tax.”)
In general, any climate policy approach — if it was meaningful in its objectives and had any chance of being enacted — would have become the prime target of political skepticism and scorn. This has been the fate of cap-and-trade over the past nine months.
Why is Political Support for Climate Policy Action So Low in the United States?
If much of the political hostility directed at cap-and-trade proposals in Washington has largely been due to hostility towards climate policy in general, this raises a further question, namely, why has there been so little political support in Washington for climate policy in general. Several reasons can be identified.
For one thing, U.S. public support on this issue has decreased significantly, as has been validated by a number of reliable polls, including from the Gallup Organization. Indeed, in January of this year, a Pew Research Center poll found that “dealing with global warming” was ranked 21st among 21 possible priorities for the President and Congress. This drop in public support is itself at least partly due to the state of the national economy, as public enthusiasm about environmental action has — for many decades — been found to be inversely correlated with various measures of national economic well-being.
Although the lagging economy (and consequent unemployment) is likely the major factor explaining the fall in public support for climate policy action, other contributing factors have been the so-called Climategate episode of leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia and the damaged credibility of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) due to several errors in recent reports.
Furthermore, the nature of the climate change problem itself helps to explain the relative apathy among the U.S. public. Nearly all of our major environmental laws have been passed in the wake of highly-publicized environmental events or “disasters,” ranging from Love Canal to the Cuyahoga River.
But the day after Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught on fire in 1969, no article in The Cleveland Plain Dealer commented that “the cause was uncertain, because rivers periodically catch on fire from natural causes.” On the contrary, it was immediately apparent that the cause was waste dumped into the river by adjacent industries. A direct consequence of the “disaster” was, of course, the Clean Water Act of 1972.
But climate change is distinctly different. Unlike the environmental threats addressed successfully in past legislation, climate change is essentially unobservable. You and I observe the weather, not the climate. Until there is an obvious and sudden event — such as a loss of part of the Antarctic ice sheet leading to a disastrous sea-level rise — it’s unlikely that public opinion in the United States will provide the bottom-up demand for action that has inspired previous Congressional action on the environment over the past forty years.
Finally, it should be acknowledged that the fiercely partisan political climate in Washington has completed the gradual erosion of the bi-partisan coalitions that had enacted key environmental laws over four decades. Add to this the commitment by the opposition party to deny the President any (more) political victories in this year of mid-term Congressional elections, and the possibility of progressive climate policy action appears unlikely in the short term.
An Open-Ended Question
There are probably other factors that help explain the fall in public and political support for climate policy action, as well as the changed politics of cap-and-trade. I suspect that readers will tell me about these.
Robert N. Stavins is the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government, Director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, and Chairman of the Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Group.
‘Cap and Trade’ Loses Its Standing as Energy Policy of Choice
By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: March 25, 2010
• Sign in to Recommend
• Sign In to E-Mail
•
Reprints
• ShareClose
o Linkedin
o Digg
o Facebook
o Mixx
o MySpace
o Yahoo! Buzz
o Permalink
o
WASHINGTON — Less than a year ago, cap and trade was the policy of choice for tackling climate change.
Matthew Cavanaugh/European Pressphoto Agency
Senators Lindsey Graham, left, John Kerry and Joseph I. Lieberman are working on bipartisan climate change legislation.
Related
• Times Topic: Cap and Trade
Environmental groups and their foes in industry joined hands to embrace the approach, a market-driven system that sets a ceiling on global warming pollution while allowing companies to trade permits to meet it. President Obama praised it by name in his first budget, and the authors of the House climate and energy bill passed last June largely built their measure around it.
Today, the concept is in wide disrepute, with opponents effectively branding it “cap and tax,” and Tea Party followers using it as a symbol of much of what they say is wrong with Washington.
Mr. Obama dropped all mention of cap and trade from his current budget. And the sponsors of a Senate climate bill likely to be introduced in April, now that Congress is moving past health care, dare not speak its name.
“I don’t know what ‘cap and trade’ means,” Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said last fall in introducing his original climate change plan.
Mr. Kerry’s partner in promoting global warming legislation, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, pronounced economywide cap and trade dead last month and has since been working with Mr. Kerry to try to patch together a bill that satisfies the diverse economic, regional and ideological interests of the Senate.
That plan, still being written, will include a cap on greenhouse gas emissions only for utilities, at least at first, with other industries phased in perhaps years later. It is also said to include a modest tax on gasoline, diesel fuel and aviation fuel, accompanied by new incentives for oil and gas drilling, nuclear power plant construction, carbon capture and storage, and renewable energy sources like wind and solar.
Why did cap and trade die? The short answer is that it was done in by the weak economy, the Wall Street meltdown, determined industry opposition and its own complexity.
The idea began as a middle-of-the-road Republican plan to unleash the market to reduce power plant pollution and spur innovation. But when lawmakers tried to apply the concept to the far more pervasive problem of carbon dioxide emissions, it ran into gale-force opposition from the oil industry, conservative groups that portrayed it as an economy-killing tax and lawmakers terrified that it would become a bonanza for Wall Street traders and Enron-style manipulators.
“Economywide cap and trade died of what amounts to natural causes in Washington,” said Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, who has been promoting the idea for more than two decades. “The term itself became too polarizing and too paralyzing in the effort to win over conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans to try to do something about climate change and our oil dependency.”
Cap and trade was first tried on a significant scale 20 years ago under the first Bush administration as a way to address the problem of airborne sulfur dioxide pollution — widely known as acid rain — from coal-burning power plants in the Eastern United States. A limit was imposed on emissions from the plants, and utilities were allowed to buy and sell permits to comply. Today it is considered one of the most effective environmental initiatives.
Environmentalists and industries resurrected the idea in recent years as a centerpiece of measures to address global warming and growing oil imports. Representatives Henry A. Waxman of California and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, both Democrats, built their climate change bill last year in large measure around it.
But in trying to assemble a majority to pass it, Mr. Waxman and Mr. Markey dished out a cornucopia of concessions and exemptions to coal companies, utilities, refiners, heavy industry and agribusinesses. The original simplicity was lost, replaced by a bazaar in which those with the most muscle got the best deals.
Opponents labeled it a tax-and-redistribution scheme.
“We turned it into ‘cap and tax,’ and we turned that into an epithet,” said Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market research organization supported by conservative individuals and corporations. “We also did a good job of showing that a bunch of big companies — Goldman Sachs, the oil companies, the big utilities — would get windfall profits because they’d been given free ration coupons.”
C. Boyden Gray, White House counsel in the first Bush administration and a strong advocate of the acid rain cap-and-trade program, said that opponents were largely correct in labeling the Waxman-Markey plan a tax, because so many of the pollution allowances were given away to industry rather than allocated based on past emissions.
“This is potentially a $3 trillion tax,” Mr. Gray said, “which is pretty steep in the best of times, and poison in the worst of times.”
The House narrowly passed the bill last June, but the Senate has moved slowly to take it up. Mr. Kerry and Mr. Graham, along with Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, have been trying to find support for a comprehensive measure.
They, too, have been forced to seek compromise, offering incentives to oil drillers, nuclear power advocates, antitax groups, coal companies and utilities.
Two senators, Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, and Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, have proposed an alternative that they call cap and dividend, under which licenses to pollute would be auctioned to producers and wholesalers of fossil fuels, with three-quarters of the revenue returned to consumers in monthly checks to cover their higher energy costs.
Ms. Cantwell said that cap and trade had been discredited by the Wall Street crisis, the Enron scandal and the rocky start to a carbon credits trading system in Europe that has been subject to dizzying price fluctuations and widespread fraud.
She said her bill would require every pollution permit to be auctioned rather than given away and was 39 pages long, compared with Waxman-Markey, which weighs in at some 1,400 pages.
The Cantwell-Collins plan is almost exactly what Mr. Obama proposed in the campaign and after first taking office — a 100 percent auction of permits and a large tax rebate to the public.
“He called our bill ‘very elegant,’ ” Ms. Cantwell said. “Simplicity and having something people can understand is important.”
Selasa, 23 Februari 2010
Palm estate is forest
Palm estate is forest, says ministry
Adianto P. Simamora , The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Tue, 02/16/2010 10:09 AM | National
The Forestry Ministry is drafting a decree to include oil palm plantations in the forest sector to comply with international standards in mitigating climate change.
The ministry said it believed the policy would not lead to massive forest conversion into palm oil plantations as many critics feared.
“By definition, oil palm plantations will be defined as forest, but its management will be under the Agriculture Ministry,” head of research and development at the ministry, Tachrir Fathoni told The Jakarta Post on Monday.
He argued that many countries such as Malaysia, the world’s second biggest palm oil producer after Indonesia, had included oil palm plantations in its forest sector.
“By doing so, Malaysia can reap financial incentives from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) of carbon trade,” he said.
He said that the UN only categorized trees with a certain height as forest trees, without identifying their species.
“It is to anticipate the implementation of the REDD scheme,” he said.
Reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) allows forestry countries to receive financial benefits by stopping tree lopping.
Indonesia is home to the world’s third largest forest nation after Brazil and the Republic of Congo.
But the deforestation rate in Indonesia is the highest on the planet with more than 1 million hectares cleared per year due to illegal logging and massive forest conversion, including creating oil palm plantations.
Activists have said poor environmental management of oil palm plantations in Indonesia has led to the increase of greenhouse gas emissions.
But the Agriculture Ministry, managing the sector, insisted that the oil palm industry did not relate to deforestation.
It said that palm oil trees covered only 7 million hectares or 6 percent of the country’s total forest area.
Agriculture Minister Suswono earlier claimed that oil palm plantations utilized critical or marginal land into productive land.
The Agriculture Ministry issued a 2009 decree to allow oil palm plantations to be developed in Indonesia’s peat land.
The Greenomics Indonesia urged the Forestry Ministry to focus on its core business including managing industrial forest concessions (HTI) and forest concession holders.
“The ministry’s much-promoted sustainable forest management also remains in question. The Forestry Ministry should focus on its main core business,” Greenomics executive director Elfian Effendi told the Post.
He said that the Forestry Ministry should also resolve its different opinion of plantations to the Environment Ministry.
Greenpeace Indonesia media campaigner Hikmat Soeriatanuwijaya warned that the policy involving converting palm oil plantations into forest could lead to massive forest conversion.
Selasa, 29 September 2009
Roads are ruining the rainforests
Roads are ruining the rainforests
- 30 August 2009 by William Laurance
Source: www.Newscientist.com"THE best thing you could do for the Amazon is to bomb all the roads." That might sound like an eco-terrorist's threat, but they're actually the words of Eneas Salati, one of Brazil's most respected scientists. Thomas Lovejoy, a leading American biologist, is equally emphatic: "Roads are the seeds of tropical forest destruction."
They are quite right. Roads are rainforest killers. Without rampant road expansion, tropical forests around the world would not be vanishing at a rate of 50 football fields a minute, an assault that imperils myriad species and spews billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each year. We will never devise effective strategies to slow rainforest destruction unless we confront this reality.
In our increasingly globalised world, roads are running riot. Brazil has just punched a 1200-kilometre highway (the BR-163) into the heart of the Amazon and is in the process of building another 900-kilometre road (the BR-319) through largely pristine forest. Three new highways are slicing across the Andes, from the Amazon to the Pacific. Road networks in Sumatra are opening up some of the island's last forests to loggers and hunters. A study published in Science found that 52,000 kilometres of logging roads had appeared in the Congo basin between 1976 and 2003 (vol 316, p 1451).
As my colleagues and I reveal in a forthcoming article in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, these are just a small sample of the many new road projects slicing through tropical frontiers.
Why are roads so bad for rainforests? Tropical forests have a uniquely complex structure and humid, dark microclimate that sustain a huge number of endemic species. Many of these avoid altered habitats near roads and cannot traverse even narrow road clearings. Others run the risk of being hit by vehicles or killed by people hunting near roads. This can result in diminished or fragmented wildlife populations, and can lead to local extinctions.
In remote frontier areas, where law enforcement is often weak, new roads can open a Pandora's box of other problems, such as illegal logging, colonisation and land speculation. In Brazilian Amazonia, 95 per cent of deforestation and fires occur within 50 kilometres of roads. In Suriname, most illegal gold mines are located near roads. In tropical Africa, hunting is significantly more intensive near roads.
Environmental disasters often begin as a narrow slice into the forest. Rainforests are found mostly in developing nations where there are strong economic incentives to provide access to logging, oil and mineral operations and agribusiness. Once the way is open, waves of legal and illegal road expansion follow. For instance, the Belém-Brasília highway, completed in the 1970s, has developed into a 400-kilometre-wide swathe of forest destruction across the eastern Amazon.
Beyond the forest itself, frontier roads imperil many indigenous peoples, especially those trying to live with limited contact with outsiders. As I write, indigenous groups in the Peruvian Amazon are stridently protesting the proliferation of new oil, gas and logging roads into their traditional territories. The roads bring loggers, gold miners and ranchers who often subjugate the indigenous people. Even worse, the invaders can bring in deadly new diseases.
Throughout the tropics, infections such as malaria, dengue fever, enteric pathogens and HIV have all been shown to rise sharply after new roads are built. Some indigenous groups, such as the Surui tribe of Brazilian Amazonia, have been driven to the edge of extinction by roads and the invading loggers, colonists and diseases they bring.
What can we do to slow the onslaught? First, we must vastly improve environmental impact assessments for planned roads. In many developing nations, EIAs focus solely on the roads themselves, completely ignoring the knock-on effects. In Brazil, for instance, EIAs for Amazonian highways focus only on a narrow swathe along the route, often recommending only paltry mitigation measures, such as helping animals to relocate before building begins. EIAs for certain mines, hydroelectric dams and other large developments focus only on the project itself while ignoring the impact of the roads it will invariably spawn. New roads will continue to drive rainforest destruction so long as the EIA process is so fundamentally flawed.
The second thing we have to do is fight to keep the most destructive roads from being built - the ones that penetrate pristine frontier areas. There is no shortage of battles to wage. A proposed highway between Colombia and Panama, for example, would expose one of the world's most biologically important areas, the Chocó-Darién wilderness, to rampant destruction. Likewise, Brazil's BR-319 highway is threatening to open up the central Amazon like a zipper.
Brazil's BR-319 highway is threatening to open up the central Amazon region like a zipper
Finally, we need to pressure those promoting these frontier roads. These include timber corporations like Asia Pulp & Paper and Rimbunan Hijau, international lenders such as the Asian, African and Inter-American Development Banks, and massive infrastructure schemes such as Brazil's Programme to Accelerate Growth. In their scramble for tropical timber, minerals, oil and agricultural products, China and its corporations have become perhaps the biggest drivers of destructive road expansion.
Restricting frontier roads is by far the most realistic and cost-effective approach to conserving rainforests and their amazing biodiversity and climate-stabilising capacity. As Pandora quickly learned, it is far harder to thrust the evils of the world back into the box than to simply keep it closed in the first place.
William Laurance is a research professor at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama
Langganan:
Postingan (Atom)