Prosperity for Rhode Island

All the stuff I copied preparing for my 9/26/09 talk on sustainability

hat is a sustainable economy? Some random numbers.

Forests in the Northeast grow about 3% a year, meaning about 3% of forest volume can be curt each year without depleting the forest. This number variews by type of forest and conditions, but is close enough to be useful for all forests. As forests have been diminished by 50% in the last 10000 years, with the rate of depletion rapidly growing in the last 150 years, sustaining forests, with all the benefits they provide to peole means that no more than 2% of the standing volume of wood on the planet and in any country in any year should be removed.

Now that scientists have reached a consensus that carbon dioxide emissions from human activities are the major cause of global warming, the next question is: How can we stop it? Can we just cut back on carbon, or do we need to go cold turkey? According to a new study by scientists at the Carnegie Institution, halfway measures won’t do the job. To stabilize our planet’s climate, we need to find ways to kick the carbon habit altogether.

With emissions set to zero in the simulations, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere slowly fell as carbon “sinks” such as the oceans and land vegetation absorbed the gas.

These findings mean that we can now say: if you emit that tonne of carbon dioxide, it will lead to 0.0000000000015 degrees of global temperature change. If we want to restrict global warming to no more than 2 degrees, we must restrict total carbon emissions – from now until forever – to little more than half a trillion tonnes of carbon, or about as much again as we have emitted since the beginning of the industrial revolution.

Despite some good news, the researchers found that 68 percent of the worldwide fisheries examined by the team need rebuilding and that even lower rates of fish removals are needed to reverse the collapse of vulnerable species. Based on the available data, the team estimated that lightly fished and rebuilding ecosystems account for less than 10 percent of world fisheries area and catch, but represent examples of opportunities for successfully rebuilding marine resources elsewhere.

“This study clearly demonstrates that in both developing and developed parts of the world, if fishery exploitation rates are reduced sufficiently, species and their ecosystems have the capacity to recover,” Murawski said. “The study drew together two scientific approaches, one focused on conservation of marine communities and the other focused on the science of fishery population dynamics. The result is a product that has profound importance in the design of management systems to achieve diverse goals for conserving and using marine ecosystems.”

The 21 study authors, led by Worm and Hilborn, found that management tools can pay off in the long run. A combination of traditional approaches, such as catch quotas and community management, coupled with strategically placed fishing closures, more selective fishing gear, ocean zoning, and economic incentives hold promise for restoring marine fisheries and ecosystems. Laws that explicitly forbid overfishing and specify clear rules and targets for rebuilding were seen as important prerequisites.

“When you reduce fishing rates, the sacrifice begins to pay off,” Fogarty said. “Now it is a matter of getting the recovery underway. We are seeing this in the northeast United States in haddock, sea scallops, and other fishery resources. Sometimes the steps to get to recovery are painful, but the dividends at the end make it worthwhile.”

###

even lower rates of fish removals are needed to reverse the collapse of vulnerable species. Based on the available data, the team estimated that lightly fished and rebuilding ecosystems account for less than 10 percent of world fisheries area and catch, but represent examples of opportunities for successfully rebuilding marine resources elsewhere.

Technological applications

These rare-earth oxides are used as tracers to determine which parts of a watershed are eroding. Clockwise from top center: praseodymium, cerium, lanthanum, neodymium, samarium, and gadolinium.[4]

Rare earth elements are incorporated into many modern technological devices, including superconductors, samarium-cobalt and neodymium-iron-boron high-flux rare-earth magnets, electronic polishers, refining catalysts and hybrid car components.[5] Rare earth ions are used as the active ions in luminescent materials used in optoelectronics applications, most notably the Nd:YAG laser. Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers are significant devices in optical-fiber communication systems. Phosphors with rare earth dopants are also widely used in cathode ray tube technology such as television sets. The earliest color television CRTs had a poor-quality red; europium as a phosphor dopant made good red phosphors possible. Yttrium iron garnet (YIG) spheres have been useful as tunable microwave resonators. Rare earth oxides are mixed with Tungsten to improve its high temperature properties for welding, replacing thorium which was mildly hazardous to work with.

[edit]

Global rare earth production

Global production 1950-2000

Until 1948, most of the world’s rare earths were sourced from placer sand deposits in India and Brazil.[6] Through the 1950s, South Africa took the status as the world’s rare earth source, after large rare earth bearing veins were discovered in Monazite.[6] Today, those Indian and South African deposits still produce some rare earth concentrates, but they are dwarfed by the scale of Chinese production. China now produces over 95% of the world’s rare earth supply.[5]

The use of rare earth elements in modern technology has increased dramatically over the past years. For example, dysprosium has gained significant importance for its use in the construction of hybrid car motors.[7] Unfortunately, this new demand has strained supply, and there is growing concern that the world may soon face a shortage of the materials.[8] In several years, worldwide demand for rare earth elements is expected to exceed supply by 40,000 tonnes annually unless major new sources are developed.[9] All of the world’s heavy rare earths (such as dysprosium) are sourced from Chinese rare earth sources such as the polymetallic Bayan Obo deposit.[10] Illegal rare earth mines are common in rural China and are often known to release toxic wastes into the general water supply. [11] A rare earth element mine in California is set to reopen by 2012. A site at Thor Lake in the Northwest Territories is also under development. Locations in Vietnam have also been considered.[9]

Chinese export quotas have also resulted in a dramatic shift in the world’s rare earth knowledge base. For example, the division of General Motors which deals with miniaturized magnet research shut down its US office and moved all of its staff to China in 2006. [12]

On Sept. 1, 2009, China announced plans to reduce its quota to 35,000 tons per year in 2010-2015, supposedly to conserve scarce resources and protect the environment. [13]

The Hoidas Lake project has the potential to supply about 10% of the $1 billion of REE consumption that occurs in North America every year.[15]

“We’ve lost more than 50 percent of the world’s mangrove forests in a little over half a century; a third of them have disappeared in the last 20 years alone,” said Fatoyinbo, whose earlier study of Mozambique’s coastal forests laid the groundwork for the continent-wide study. “Hopefully this technique will offer scientists and officials a method of estimating change in this special type of forest.”

Mangroves are the most common ecosystem in coastal areas of the tropics and sub-tropics. The swampy forests are essential — especially in densely-populated developing countries — for rice farming, fishing and aquaculture (freshwater and saltwater farming), timber, and firewood. Some governments also increasingly depend on them for eco-tourism.

The large, dense root systems are a natural obstacle that helps protect shorelines against debris and erosion. Mangroves are often the first line of defense against severe storms, tempering the impact of strong winds and floods.

These coastal woodlands also have a direct link to climate, sequestering carbon from the atmosphere at a rate of about 100 pounds per acre per day – comparable to the per acre intake by tropical rainforests (though rainforests cover more of Earth’s surface).

Jane Nielson: Very few geoscientists speak about the scientific bases for environmental protection, because they either depend for employment on industry or developers, or they work for government agencies, which respond to political pressures from financial interests.

The perhaps subliminal belief (or lack of questioning of the idea) that resources can never run out - that there will always be a replacement just as cheap or easy to use as what we now consume in huge amounts. This attitude is emphasized by economists as well as by far too many scientists.

eslie Thatcher: Describe how an American West “not-at-risk” would look.

Jane Nielson: The population would be stabilized at a level commensurate with sustainability.

With the exception of already-established cities, sustainable land occupancy would look rather like the US at the end of the Spanish-American War. Desert areas would be de-populated, with the few remaining residents living on hunting, their water for daily use and vegetable gardens coming from spring-fed wells, rainwater harvesting, and reused graywater. Mountainous areas would be largely protected, and if open to logging, would be sustainably harvested, at a level limited by regrowth rates and energy costs. As a result, the mountains would appear largely forested, with generally open understory.

Ranches and farms would exist in areas that do not need constant irrigation, and crops would be raised using diverse permaculture and other ecological farming methods. Across the interior northern plains, a variety of fodder and grain crops would be grown together - perhaps in alternating strips - along with fruits and other produce as the seasonal temperature variations allow. Some lands would be growing diverse perennial grains (based on Wes Jackson’s “growing granola” experiment - assuming that it works out).

Grazing would be limited by carrying capacity considerations. Restoration programs would have enhanced the productivity of public rangelands, and the future equivalent of the BLM then would issue permits for limited herds that must be moved frequently. In many areas grazing would not be allowed, or would be highly restricted, to sustain wildlife.

Navigable stretches of rivers would support commerce, but industry would be set back from any streamside to protect water quality and support aquatic ecosystems. Although some floodplain areas may remain in crops, a high proportion would be parks or reserves to prevent flooding of habitations, and to support riparian wetland ecosystems.

Cities would be much reduced in size and many suburbs would have disappeared, reverting (with help) to wooded open space preserves or wetlands. The densest suburbs would have contracted into small exurban villages, separated from city centers by woodland and farms. Most village residents would have gardens, and neighborhoods would grow staple crops in former shopping malls of all sizes and shapes. City people also would grow a lot of their own food, mostly in cleared zones between neighborhoods.

All housing would include rooftop rainwater harvesting systems and holding tanks, to supplement centralized systems based on surface water and well-based supplies. Graywater systems would be the mainstay of landscaping, which would be dominantly native plants. Playing fields would grow low-water grass strains as much as possible, with only limited irrigation.

Wastewaters would be minimal, with the extreme reduction of synthetic chemicals allowing them to be treated successfully with series of swales, leading to ponds and wetlands. Garbage dumps would be things of the past, replaced by recycling yards with carefully designed drainage and remediation systems. Old dumps would have been reduced by mining them for usable materials. Materials reprocessing wastes would all be biodegradable.

Howard Wilshire: There would be a lot fewer people because these lands cannot sustain the current population. Sustaining the people who do live here means that urban sprawl, road-building, and destructive mechanized recreation would no longer take place. Much more of the land would remain in a natural state, or be used in sustainable manner so that the population would directly benefit from nature’s services - provision of clean air and water - and stable productive soils. There would be no water or energy subsidies, so communities would be smaller and more self-sufficient.

Richard Hazlett: A bottom line metric for a risk-free West is one in which water, energy and soil resources do not show continuing annual depletion and decay, and a landscape in which dangerous pollutants (whether agricultural, nuclear or mining related) do not continue to spread. The West would be less fragmented by roads and cattle grazing, slowing the infiltration of bio-invasive species and allowing natural biodiversity to respond successfully to environmental change. (The forestland corridor projects in Central America provide an example of how people can improve opportunities for all life while continuing to utilize large amounts of land on a regional scale). Implicit in these conditions for risk-free or low-risk occupation of the West are large changes in waste generation, treatment, and isolation, especially as regards mining and nuclear materials. Also implicit are large changes in our food production systems. Agro-industry has caused catastrophic and in fact unnecessary ecological damage, much of it irreversible. A low-risk American West would also be one in which people do not presume that they should be able to live anywhere they please. We need to work and live more closely with the land and what it can provide at the local level. Some of our great western cities, including, for example, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Vegas, are ecological monstrosities and really make no sense from the stand point of sustainability.

To the problem of soil loss, the industrialization of agriculture has added pollution by toxic chemicals, now universally present in our farmlands and streams. Some of this toxicity is associated with the widely acclaimed method of minimum tillage. We should not poison our soils to save them.

Industrial agricultural has made our food supply entirely dependent on fossil fuels and, by substituting technological “solutions” for human work and care, has virtually destroyed the cultures of husbandry (imperfect as they may have been) once indigenous to family farms and farming neighborhoods.

Clearly, our present ways of agriculture are not sustainable, and so our food supply is not sustainable. We must restore ecological health to our agricultural landscapes, as well as economic and cultural stability to our rural communities.

For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food. That is a mistake. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billons of dollars to the agribusiness corporations.

Any restorations will require, above all else, a substantial increase in the acreages of perennial plants. The most immediately practicable way of doing this is to go back to crop rotations that include hay, pasture and grazing animals.

But a more radical response is necessary if we are to keep eating and preserve our land at the same time. In fact, research in Canada, Australia, China and the United States over the last 30 years suggests that perennialization of the major grain crops like wheat, rice, sorghum and sunflowers can be developed in the foreseeable future. By increasing the use of mixtures of grain-bearing perennials, we can better protect the soil and substantially reduce greenhouse gases, fossil-fuel use and toxic pollution.

Carbon sequestration would increase, and the husbandry of water and soil nutrients would become much more efficient. And with an increase in the use of perennial plants and grazing animals would come more employment opportunities in agriculture — provided, of course, that farmers would be paid justly for their work and their goods.

Thoughtful farmers and consumers everywhere are already making many necessary changes in the production and marketing of food. But we also need a national agricultural policy that is based upon ecological principles. We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities.

This is a political issue, certainly, but it far transcends the farm politics we are used to. It is an issue as close to every one of us as our own stomachs.

Wes Jackson is a plant geneticist and president of The Land Institute in Salina, Kan. Wendell Berry is a farmer and writer in Port Royal, Ky.

Still, O’Neill said the modeling “helps clarify thinking about long-term policy goals. If we want to reduce warming to a certain level, there’s a fixed amount of carbon we can put into the atmosphere. After that, we can’t emit any more, at all.”

Caldeira and his colleague, H. Damon Matthews, a geography professor at Concordia University in Montreal, emphasized this point in their paper, concluding that “each unit of CO2emissions must be viewed as leading to quantifiable and essentially permanent climate change on centennial timescales.”

Steve Gardiner, a philosophy professor at the University of Washington who studies climate change, said the studies highlight that the argument over global warming “is a classic inter-generational debate, where the short-term benefits of emitting carbon accrue mainly to us and where the dangers of them are largely put off until future generations.”

When it comes to deciding how drastically to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, O’Neill said, “in the end, this is a value judgment, it’s not a scientific question.” The idea of shifting to a carbon-free society, he added, “appears to be technically feasible. The question is whether it’s politically feasible or economically feasible.”

——-

Researchers have predicted for a long time that warming will persist even after the world’s carbon emissions start to fall and that countries will have to dramatically curb their carbon output in order to avert severe climate change. Last year’s report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said industrialized nations would have to cut emissions 80 to 95 percent by 2050 to limit CO2concentrations to the 450 ppm goal, and the world as a whole would have to reduce emissions by 50 to 80 percent.

Humanity’s impact on the biosphere’s structures (e.g., land cover) and functioning (e.g., biogeochemical cycles) is considerable. It exceeds natural variability in many cases. Sanderson and others have classified up to 83% of the global terrestrial biosphere as being under direct human influence, based on geographic proxies such as human population density, settlements, roads, agriculture and the like; another study, by Hannah et al., estimates that about 36% of the Earth’s bioproductive surface is “entirely dominated by man”.

HANPP, the “human appropriation of net primary production,” is an aggregated indicator that reflects both the amount of area used by humans and the intensity of land use. NPP is the net amount of biomass produced each year by plants; it is a major indicator for trophic energy flows in ecosystems. HANPP measures to what extent land conversion and biomass harvest alter the availability of NPP (biomass) in ecosystems. It is a prominent measure of the “scale” of human activities compared to natural processes (i.e. of the “physical size of the economy relative to the containing ecosystem;” Daly, 2006). As human harvest of biomass is a major component of HANPP, it is also closely related to socio-economic metabolism as measured by material flow accounts.

The basic question of how much of the biosphere’s yearly biomass flows is used by humans was first posed in the 1970s (see Whittaker and Likens, 1973), and it took more than a decade until the first comprehensive – and still relevant – answer to that question was given (see Vitousek et al., 1986). This entry gives an overview of the research that has followed these seminal statements and proceeds by discussing issues of definition (section 2), presenting some basics on methodology (section 3) and giving an overview of the current knowledge on global HANPP (section 4). This is followed by a concluding section on interpretation and further research requirements (section 5).

This feast or famine, especially as it relates to nutritional bonanza of meat, pretty much sets a pattern, wired into our genes, to over-consume whenever possible. While in the Pleistocene (and 98% of human history) it was not really possible to over-consume often, 21st century technology allows the favored to over-consume daily. The result is heart attacks, diabetes, and a whole host of other health issues. And –a big and! — it allows us to seriously over-consume the entire planetary set of resources, resulting in extinctions, massive soil erosion and depletion, dirty air, loss of forests, fish and much else. Global warming directly comes out of the hard wiring that encourages people to over-consume.

Impoverished fishermen along the coast of tropical African countries like Mozambique and Madagascar may have only a few more years to eke out a profit from one of their nations’ biggest agricultural exports. Within a few decades, they may no longer have a livelihood at all.

That’s because swampy mangrove forests — essential breeding grounds for fish and shellfish in these countries — are being destroyed by worsening pollution, encroaching real estate development, and deforestation necessary to sustain large-scale commercial shrimp farming.

The decline of these forests threatens much of Africa’s coastal food supply and economy. The destruction of mangroves — one of Earth’s richest natural resources – also has implications for everything from climate change to biodiversity to the quality of life on Earth. Growing up in Cotonou, Benin, environmental scientist Lola Fatoyinbo of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) passed polluted mangroves daily. Inspired to help save the forests, she began a mission as a graduate student in the United States to gain more insight about African mangroves.

Her studies have brought her back to Africa, where she has journeyed along the coastlines to test a new satellite technique for measuring the area, height, and biomass of mangrove forests. She developed and employed a method that can be used across the continent, overcoming expensive, ad hoc, and inconsistent modes of ground-based measurement. Fatoyinbo’s approach recently produced what she believes is the first full assessment of the continent’s mangrove forests.

US MILITARY LARGEST SINGLE CONSUMER OF OIL IN THE WORLD <http://planetgreen.discovery.com/tech-transport/planet-biggest-gas-guzzler.html>

Planet Green - The U.S. military is the single largest purchaser and consumer of oil in the world. “All the tanks, planes and ships of the U.S. military burn about 340,000 barrels of oil per day,” explains Michael Graham Richard at Tree Hugger. “If you break it down, the Air Force uses the most fuel, followed by the Navy, and then the Army. If the Department of Defense were a country, it would rank about 38th in the world for oil consumption, right behind the Philippines, a country with a population of 90.5 million people.”

Some facts on U.S. military fuel usage since 2003:

Spending: 2003: $5.21 billion 2007: $12.61 billion

Consumption: 2003: 145.1 million barrels (397,500 barrels per day) . . .

2007: 132.5 million barrels (363,000 barrels per day)

2007 U.S. military fuel consumption equals: 90% more than Ireland’s annual consumption 38% more than Israel’s annual consumption 20 times Iceland’s annual consumption

In fact, every bit of economic growth in the 21st century has gone to the top 10 percent-those earning at least $109,000. Two-thirds was captured by the top 1 percent-folks earning more than $400,000.

If we’ve learned anything from the Great Recession-Mini Depression of the last 18 months, it’s that the skewing of income and wealth to the top has made our economy far less stable.

What is the effect of every economic development schemein RI, to benefit the 10%

HE extraordinary rainstorms last June caused catastrophic soil erosion in the grain lands of Iowa, where there were gullies 200 feet wide. But even worse damage is done over the long term under normal rainfall — by the little rills and sheets of erosion on incompletely covered or denuded cropland, and by various degradations resulting from industrial procedures and technologies alien to both agriculture and nature.

Soil that is used and abused in this way is as nonrenewable as (and far more valuable than) oil. Unlike oil, it has no technological substitute — and no powerful friends in the halls of government.

Agriculture has too often involved an insupportable abuse and waste of soil, ever since the first farmers took away the soil-saving cover and roots of perennial plants. Civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland. This irremediable loss, never enough noticed, has been made worse by the huge monocultures and continuous soil-exposure of the agriculture we now practice.

RP: Until recently, the GM industry was always saying they could feed the world better by using genetically modified crops. Critics responded by saying that, so far, GM crops are really just designed to be resistant to an herbicide, or produce their own pesticides. In other words, this isn’t about yield; it’s about pesticides.

Golden Rice was going to be the poster child for how genetically modified food was a good thing for the poor. The idea with golden rice was that there are millions of kids who go blind every year because of a preventable deficiency of Vitamin A. What Golden Rice was intended to do was to engineer Vitamin A into rice, which is the staple of some of the world’s poorest people. The trouble was that people wouldn’t eat it because it was considered inferior. The kinds of rice people prefer in Asia are white rice not brown, not golden. But even if there had been education campaigns, they still would have had to have 50 bowls a day to reach their daily recommended intake.

In the next generation of GM crops, they reduced that number to two bowls a day which is much more manageable but it never addresses the key issue: Why is it that these kids don’t have a balanced diet? The reason the golden rice becomes necessary is because the only thing these kids can afford to eat is rice.

The issue for GM crop companies is they are trying very hard to represent themselves as friends to the poor. In the long term, as more and more studies show, these crops are patently bad for the farmers and they certainly won’t help feed the world.

The Freeport mine, called Grasberg, has both the world’s largest reserves of recoverable copper and the world’s largest reserves of gold. For Papuans, most of whom still live in poverty despite the region’s wealth of natural resources, the Grasberg mine has long been a symbol of Jakarta’s centralized control and a natural target for freedom fighters.

Environmental activist Greg Garritt told the senators that dealing with global warming would be the most important thing they would do in their entire time in public service. He said he didn’t think the bill went far enough: greenhouse gas emissions, he said, should be reduced to zero.

Researchers think that the carbon cycle turns over about 330 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. Oceans absorb about half this. Earth-based measurements suggest there is a large unaccounted-for surface “sink” of atmospheric carbon dioxide, but its location is fiercely debated. The reason for this is the paucity of data over the tropics, where many of world’s dense (and highly inaccessible) rainforests are situated. The satellites will be able to look in detail there.

Although these data will not be as accurate as those taken on the ground, what they lack in precision will be more than made up for in coverage. It is believed that atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations have increased from about 280 parts per million to around 370 parts per million since the start of the Industrial Revolution. How much of this is because of human action is still a matter of conjecture, but it is widely accepted to be significant.

Some estimates say that humans are using 130% of the global biological productivity each year. 83%/130% why the difference?

Carbon Output Must Near Zero to Avert Danger, New Studies Say

By Juliet Eilperin

The Washington Post

Monday 10 March 2008

The task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperatures may be far more difficult than previous research suggested, say scientists who have just published studies indicating that it would require the world to cease carbon emissions altogether within a matter of decades.

Their findings, published in separate journals over the past few weeks, suggest that both industrialized and developing nations must wean themselves off fossil fuels by as early as mid-century in order to prevent warming that could change precipitation patterns and dry up sources of water worldwide.

Using advanced computer models to factor in deep-sea warming and other aspects of the carbon cycle that naturally creates and removes carbon dioxide (CO2), the scientists, from countries including the United States, Canada and Germany, are delivering a simple message: The world must bring carbon emissions down to near zero to keep temperatures from rising further.

“The question is, what if we don’t want the Earth to warm anymore?” asked Carnegie Institution senior scientist Ken Caldeira, co-author of a paper published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “The answer implies a much more radical change to our energy system than people are thinking about.”

Political Reality Confronts Physical Reality

As for equity: Since we live on a finite planet, equity for the global poor can only really be achieved by a reduction in material living standards for the billion or so inhabitants of wealthy nations. As we have seen, this notion is extremely difficult to sell to the governments of industrialized democracies now, and it will be no less so when their economies are in tatters.

However, steep declines in standards of living will be hitting these wealthy countries anyway, due simply to depletion of important energy resources, starting with oil. The only way to avert massive social chaos and famine as extraction levels decline will be to devote public capital domestically toward the building of low-energy infrastructure (e.g., electrified rail networks, trolley lines, wind farms) while moving many people to rural areas and teaching them to farm sustainably. Production and consumption will have to be largely re-localized, essential goods rationed by quota. Basically the same thing will have to happen in the poor nations.

Deforestation, mainly conversion of forests to

agricultural land, continues at an alarmingly

high rate – about 13 million hectares per year.

At the same time, forest planting, landscape

restoration and natural expansion of forests

have significantly reduced the net loss of

forest area. The net change in forest area in

the period 2000–2005 is estimated at –7.3

million hectares per year (an area about the

size of Sierra Leone or

Panama), down from

–8.9 million hectares

per year in the period

1990–2000.

Africa and South Americacontinued to have the largest net loss of forests.

Oceania and North and Central America also had a net loss of forests. The forest

area in Europe continued to expand, although at a slower rate. Asia, which had

a net loss in the 1990s, reported a net gain of forests in the period 2000–2005,

primarily due to large-scale afforestation reported by China.

Republic

of the Congo

Indonesia

Peru

India

Others

1 333

Trends in forest area by region, 1990–2005

(million ha)

200

400

600

800

1 000

1 200

Africa Asia Europe North

and Central

America

Oceania South

America

1990

2000

2005

Countries with high net change in forest area, 2000–2005

Previous figures slightly

underestimated total forest

area and overestimated net

annual loss

For FRA 2005, countries were asked

to provide information on their forests

for three points in time: 1990, 2000 and

2005. Total forest area figures for 1990

and 2000, revised to take into account

new and better information provided to

FRA 2005, are about 3 percent higher

than those estimated in the last global

assessment (FRA 2000).

Similarly, the net area change for 1990–

2000 was revised downwards (from –9.4

million hectares per year to –8.9 million)

because of new information.

Primary forests account for 36% of forest area –

but 6 million hectares are lost or modified each year

On a global average, more than one-third of all forests are primary forests (defined as

forests of native species where there are no clearly visible indications of human activities

and where the ecological processes are not significantly disturbed). The rapid decrease of

primary forest area reported for the 1990s continued in 2000–2005. This decrease stems

not only from deforestation, but also from modification of forests due to selective logging

and other human interventions.

A number of countries registered positive change rates in the area of primary forests,

including several European countries and Japan. This is possible because forests with no

human interventions can evolve over time to meet the definition of primary forests used in

FRA 2005.

Characteristics of the world’s

forests, 2005

(%)

Primary

forests

Modified

natural forests

36.4

52.7

Carbon in forest biomass decreased in Africa,

Asia and South America in the period 1990–2005,

but increased in all other regions. For the world

as a whole, carbon stocks in forest biomass

decreased by 1.1Gt of carbon annually, owing to

continued deforestation and forest degradation

partly offset by forest expansion (including

planting) and an increase in growing stock per

hectare in some regions.

Changes in carbon stocks in forest

biomass, 1990–2005

(Gt)

100

1990

2000

2005

Big Melt Meets Big Empty: Rethinking the Implications of Climate Change and Peak Oil

By Richard Heinberg

Global Public Media

Sunday 04 November 2007

Environmental and development NGOs are now fixated on climate change to the exclusion of nearly every other topic. Discussions in and among these organizations center on capping carbon emissions and trading emissions rights, and doing this internationally in a way that will be deemed equitable by the global South and acceptable to the industrial Northern countries.

Most of these policy organizations are seeking ways of implementing recommendations made in 2001 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which suggested that to keep the global average temperature rise to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (by consensus, the maximum increase the world’s climate system can absorb without triggering catastrophic climate change), the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere must be capped at 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalents. This will require a 60 to 80 percent reduction in carbon emissions below current levels by 2050.

In order to win any reduction agreement from less-industrialized nations, the richer, more industrialized nations will have to promise to reduce their emissions more and faster. A growing number of organizations (including the Global Commons Institute, EcoEquity, the Climate Equity Project, Feasta, Just Transition Alliance, The Sky Trust, and Third World Network) contend that the fairest solution would be to allocate annually capped emissions rights globally on an equal per-capita basis; then, if wealthy nations wished to continue using proportionally more fossil fuels, they would have to purchase emissions rights from more parsimonious consumers in poor nations. This would result over time in both a diminishing amount of total emissions (based on the declining trajectory of the annual caps) and an enormous transfer of wealth from the more-industrialized to the less-industrialized nations. Some organizations advocate immediate allotment of equal per-capita emissions rights; others envision a staged implementation of the program, that would give wealthier nations time to plan and adjust (the two most widely promoted versions of this strategy are known as “Contraction and Convergence” and “Cap and Share”).

From the perspective of less-industrialized countries, a global climate policy that does not include an equity provision is a non-starter.

According to the United Nations, Market Privatizations Would Be the Worst Scenario for the Environment

By Hervé Kempf

Le Monde

Saturday 27 October 2007

The planet’s ecological future directly depends on the political choices that will be exercised: this observation had never before been clearly spotlighted by a United Nations decision-making body. Now it’s done: the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) asserts in a thick report, the so-called “GEO 4″, published Thursday October 25, that generalized privatization of resources and services would be the worst scenario from an environmental perspective.

That’s the conclusion of an original approach to possible futures that a group of international experts has been conducting the last two years: it models each scenario as a function of the type of policies put into place. The point of departure for this modeling effort is the major ecological crisis, which the planet is already experiencing.

By actualizing the description through numerous sources, the UNEP report synthesizes changes in climate, biodiversity, soils’ health, water resources … It highlights the shrinkage in available resources per inhabitant, with the available earth surface for each human being going from 7.91 hectares in 1900 to 2.02 hectares in 2005.

The rapidity of the phenomenon is emphasized: the breadth and the composition of terrestrial ecosystems that “are being modified by populations at an unprecedented speed.” The experts insist on the concept of a threshold: “The cumulative effects of the continuous changes in the environment may reach thresholds that will manifest themselves as abrupt and irreversible changes.” This idea of “tipping points” is applicable not only to climate change, but also to the phenomena of desertification, drops in water tables, collapse of ecosystems, etc.

Tipping Points

The continuation of present trajectories inescapably leads to these tipping points, the UNEP indicates. That’s where the work with models comes in. The experts have defined four scenarios, according to the type of policy that is followed. In the first model, the State takes a back seat to the private sector; unlimited trade develops; natural goods are privatized. The second scenario is based on a centralized intervention that aims to balance high economic growth with an effort to limit its environmental and social impacts.

A third route would be to favor security to respond to civil disorders and external threats: a significant effort would then be devoted to security. Finally, the fourth option is one in which society chooses environmental sustainability and equity, with citizens playing an active role.

Modeling allows the influence on the environment of each one of these scenarios to be measured in terms of energy consumption, polluting emissions, the type of agricultural activity, water extractions and numerous other parameters.

The last scenario (sustainability) appears preferable from a social and ecological point of view, while the first scenario (privatization), although it assures the strongest growth, also manifests an environmental impact deemed unbearable, all while generating ever-greater social inequalities. In that case, “the environment and society rapidly reach, even cross over the tipping point.”

Desire and the Green Cure

By Richard Glover

The Sydney Morning Herald AU

Sunday 21 October 2007

I used to feel bad about mindless consumerism but not any more. The green movement has come to my rescue. With every purchase, I can now enjoy the warm glow of helping develop environmentally sound practices.

There’s my new briefcase, for example. It is shiny and luxurious and its purchase has allowed me to throw my old one into the bin. But there’s no eco-guilt for me.

According to the manufacturer, the leather in my briefcase was stained using “extracts of bark and seeds collected from renewable sources in the forests of Africa and India”. The work was all done by “traditional artisans”, all of them using “sustainable practices” in the “old saddler tradition”. There’s not a lot of detail on the leather but, based on the tone of the pamphlet, I’m pretty sure the cows would have been volunteers.

I feel I now deserve some sort of medal just for handing over my credit card.

I’m not alone in falling for this sort of sales pitch. People are always looking for an excuse to consume more and the latest excuse - bizarrely - is environmentalism.

Let’s call it “greensumerism”. Forget the simple mantra of “less is more”; with the help of the green movement you can now indulge in a frenzy of consumerism, with each luxury purchase excused by the idea that you are helping the development of the “green” sector.

People will ditch a perfectly good car in order to import the latest hybrid eco-model and expect to be praised for their sensitivity. Magazines like Vogue Living are now full of these luxurious holiday houses - temples to excess and over-consumption - which the owners claim as their personal contribution to sustainability.

Forests cover 30% of the total land area

The total forest area in 2005 is just under 4 billion hectares, corresponding to an average of

0.62 ha per capita. But the area of forest is unevenly distributed. For example, 64 countries

with a combined population of 2 billion have less than 0.1 ha of forest per capita. The ten

most forest-rich countries account for two-thirds of the total forest area. Seven countries or

territories have no forest at all, and an additional 57 have forest on less than 10 percent of their

total land area. Ten countries with the

largest forest area, 2005

(million ha)

Forest disturbances can be devastating –

but they were severely underreported

On average 104 million hectares of forests were

reported to be significantly affected each year by forest

fire, pests (including insects and diseases) or climatic

events such as drought, wind, snow, ice and floods.

However, the area of forest affected by disturbances

was severely underreported, with information missing

from many countries, especially for forest fires in

Africa.

comes have risen. Political institutions have become more

participatory. In part these gains in well-being have been

made possible by exploiting certain ecosystem services (the

provisioning services, such as timber, grazing, and crop pro-

duction), sometimes to the detriment of the ecosystem and

its underlying capacity to continue to provide these and

other services. Some gains have been made possible by the

unsustainable use of other resources. For example, the in-

creases in food production have been partly enabled by

drawing on the finite supply of fossil fuels, an ecosystem

service laid down millions of years ago.

The gains in human well-being are not distributed

evenly among individuals or social groups, nor

among the countries they live in or the ecosystems of

A large and growing number of people are at high

risk of adverse ecosystem changes. The world is ex-

periencing a worsening trend of human suffering and

economic losses from natural disasters. Over the past

four decades, for example, the number of weather-related

disasters affecting at least a million people has increased

fourfold, while economic losses have increased tenfold. The

greatest loss of life has been concentrated in developing

countries. Ecosystem transformation has played a signifi-

cant, but not exclusive, role in increasing the vulnerability

of people to such disasters. Examples are the increased sus-

ceptibility of coastal populations to tropical storms when

mangrove forests are cleared and the increase in down-

stream flooding that followed land use changes in the upper

Yangtze River. [C16]

Key Messages

? Everyone in the world depends on nature and ecosystem services to provide the conditions for a decent,

healthy, and secure life.

? Humans have made unprecedented changes to ecosystems in recent decades to meet growing demands

for food, fresh water, fiber, and energy.

? These changes have helped to improve the lives of billions, but at the same time they weakened nature’s

ability to deliver other key services such as purification of air and water, protection from disasters, and

the provision of medicines.

? Among the outstanding problems identified by this assessment are the dire state of many of the

world’s fish stocks; the intense vulnerability of the 2 billion people living in dry regions to the loss of

ecosystem services, including water supply; and the growing threat to ecosystems from climate change

and nutrient pollution.

? Human activities have taken the planet to the edge of a massive wave of species extinctions, further

threatening our own well-being.

? The loss of services derived from ecosystems is a significant barrier to the achievement of the Millennium

Development Goals to reduce poverty, hunger, and disease.

? The pressures on ecosystems will increase globally in coming decades unless human attitudes and

actions change.

? Measures to conserve natural resources are more likely to succeed if local communities are given

ownership of them, share the benefits, and are involved in decisions.

? Even today’s technology and knowledge can reduce considerably the human impact on ecosystems.

They are unlikely to be deployed fully, however, until ecosystem services cease to be perceived as free and

limitless, and their full value is taken into account.

? Better protection of natural assets will require coordinated efforts across all sections of governments,

businesses, and international institutions. The productivity of ecosystems depends on policy choices on

investment, trade, subsidy, taxation, and regulation, among others.

Chi9na has stopped all woodcutting in some watersheds due to flooding and desertification. It figurd out that trees were worth 3 times as miuch as living forests than they were as building materials or paper.

support systems of the Earth. Forests

also play a significant role in the socio-

economic development of many

nations by providing raw material to

various industries, meeting basic needs

“most

remaining tropical forests could be lost

over the coming century, destroying

priceless biological resources and

limiting options for sustainable growth

(The White House, 2000)”.

Totazl forest 3.5 billion hectares losss in tropics 1960 to 1990 450 million hectares developed countreis generally stable forest area.

A steady-state economy is incompatible with continuous growth—either positive or negative growth. The goal of a steady state is to sustain a constant, sufficient stock of real wealth and people for a long time. A downward spiral of negative growth, a depression such as we are entering now, is a failed growth economy, not a steady-state economy. Halting an accelerating downward spiral is necessary, but is not the same thing as resuming continuous positive growth. The growth economy now fails in two ways: (1) positive growth becomes uneconomic in our full-world economy; (2) negative growth, resulting from the bursting of financial bubbles inflated beyond physical limits, though temporarily necessary, soon becomes self-destructive. That leaves a non-growing or steady-state economy as the only long run alternative. The level of physical wealth that the biosphere can sustain in a steady state may well be below the present level. The fact that recent efforts at growth have resulted mainly in bubbles suggests that this is so. Nevertheless, current policies all aim for the full re-establishment of the growth economy. No one denies that our problems would be easier to solve if we were richer. The question is, does growth any longer make us richer, or is it now making us poorer?

A long run norm of continuous growth could make sense, only if one of the three following conditions were true:

1. if the economy were not an open subsystem of a finite and non-growing biophysical system,

2. if the economy were growing in a non physical dimension, or

3. if the laws of thermodynamics did not hold.

“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts:

• the concept of ‘needs’, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and

• the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.

Our Common Future, Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987. Published as Annex to General Assembly document A/42/427, Development and International Co-operation: Environment August 2, 1987

ReadeHow to save Indonesia’s dwindling rainforests

Still Pictures

Where tigers roam no more

AS A spectacle, the four-hour drive to Teluk Binjai from Pekanbaru, capital of Riau province on the island of Sumatra, tends to the monochrome. Mile after mile of palm-oil plantation alternates with mile after mile of regimented lines of acacia trees, grown for pulpwood. Only an occasional banana grove or superannuated rubber plantation offers a spot of variety. Mountainously laden timber lorries ply the interprovincial highway, their loads of acacia logs almost brushing as they pass. In one direction is the mill of Indah Kiat Pulp and Paper, a subsidiary of APP, part of the Sinar Mas group; in the other that of APRIL, Sumatra’s other big pulp-and-paper producer.

Off the main road, small patches of “natural” forest survive alongside the swathe of broad sandy corridor cut by a logging company. Some has been cleared fairly recently. Shrouded in white smoke, the peat soil still smoulders under the blackened tree-stumps. Gaunt and barkless, some trees still stand, like skeletal ghosts stalking a battlefield. Underneath, already oil palms are pushing up, planted by local farmers to feed Indonesia’s latest commodity boom.

In Teluk Binjai, a village of 400 families sprawling along the bank of the Kampar river, and its neighbour, Teluk Meranti, farmers feel squeezed. Living inside a logging concession, their access to the forest behind their farms is already curtailed. They want to be granted rights to 5,000 hectares of forest on the other side of the river, in the Kampar peninsula. This area of 700,000 hectares of peat forest, home to tigers, sunbears, hawk-eagles and other endangered species, is now being fought over by plantation companies, forest residents and local and international NGOs.

The stretch the villagers have their eye on is also part of a concession. They admit they have no legal right to the land, but they say the concession to convert it to acacia is illegal, since the area is supposedly protected. And the villagers claim customary rights. Their families have used the forest for generations. They still depend on it for rattan, fuel, honeybees, hunting and wood to build their houses and boats. But they use the resource responsibly, claims Muhammad Yusuf, a local farmers’ leader: “We only take the best trees.” And no more than they need.

Illegally, some farmers are already staking out claims across the river in the sought-after stretch of forest. One, in his second year there, says the village chief in Meranti granted him a six-hectare claim after his coconut grove in Teluk Binjai was destroyed in a land-clearing fire. He is planting oil palms. Speaking in a tiny hut, against the whine of a chainsaw from the nearby rainforest, he says he is too poor to send his 12- and 14-year-old sons to school. They are working in his fields, helping convert another small patch of peatland, and adding to Indonesia’s alarming emissions of carbon dioxide.

Stop it, for peat’s sake

Indonesia’s logging of its rainforests has long been identified as a big contributor to the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), and hence to global warming. This is one reason for the shocking statistic that Indonesia trails only China and America as an emitter of carbon. But now attention is also turning to the soil beneath the trees, and especially to peat. Al Gore, a former American vice-president and a vigorous climate-change campaigner, has pointed to evidence that the top two metres of soil contain three times as much carbon as the entire vegetation on the planet, and that soil degradation, such as the burning of peatland, is the main cause of Indonesia’s high level of emissions.

According to Greenpeace, an environmental NGO, Riau’s peatlands have the highest concentration of carbon stored per hectare anywhere in the world. As elsewhere in Indonesia, peat in Riau is disappearing. The trees growing on it are harvested and the land is either abandoned or converted to a plantation. Every year 1.8 billion tonnes of GHG emissions are released by the degradation and burning of Indonesia’s peatlands. By the calculation of WWF, an NGO, between 1990 and 2007 Riau alone produced more CO2 per year than Germany is saving to meet its commitments under the Kyoto protocol.

Small-scale settlers like those clearing the bit of forest opposite Teluk Binjai are a tiny part of the problem. Far more significant, in Riau (“the deforestation centre of Indonesia”, according to Yumiko Uryo of WWF) and across Indonesia, are large-scale commercial operations: illegal logging and the conversion of forest land by big plantation companies. By WWF’s estimate, of the forest cover in Riau lost in the past 25 years, 29% was cleared for palm-oil plantations and 24% for pulpwood by the big producers themselves—not counting large areas cleared by their suppliers.

The extent of illegal logging, like every other statistic on Indonesia’s forests, is disputed. By one reckoning, 73% of the $1.6 billion-worth of forest products (not including raw logs, whose export is banned) the EU imported from Indonesia last year came from illegally felled timber. But that is a guess, derived by deducting the timber that can be shown to be legal, a process complicated by the often murky ownership of the original forest lands. The Indonesian government reckons that no more than 10% of exports are illegal. It is working with the EU to devise a licensing system for timber exporters which would then be applied globally. Indonesia also faces difficulties in America. Congress, inspired by an unlikely coalition of domestic timber producers and NGOs, last year amended the Lacey act, a law dating from 1900 that bans the illegal commercial transportation of wildlife. It now covers the produce of illegal logging as well.

Protection of the forest against illegal loggers and enforcement of the law are said to have improved since 1997, when forest fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) smothered much of South-East Asia in a noxious, choking haze. The fires were spread by a prolonged drought brought by an El Niño weather pattern. Many were lit to clear land illegally logged. And even now the legal arrival of a logging company in an area is often accompanied by criminals chopping away at the edge of the concession. Decentralisation has complicated efforts to enforce the law. Local authorities resent efforts by the central government to assert control.

Hotspots of bother

Indonesia’s government denies it is doing as much to cook the planet as its critics allege. Agus Purnomo, a former director of WWF in Indonesia who now heads the secretariat of the National Council on Climate Change, says that the country’s third place in the carbon-emissions tables is a hangover from the disastrous El Niño of the late 1990s. With no serious forest fire for four years, he claims Indonesia has slid down to number 15 or 20. He reckons that the “hotspots” (small-scale forest fires) recorded this year—3,764 in Riau alone by July, according to a count by satellite—are “not a big issue”. Hotspots are now designated as crime scenes, he says, so that no one is allowed to plant oil palms there. If caught, those who caused them are prosecuted and sometimes jailed.

He points out that it is in Indonesia’s own interests to do its bit to reduce GHG-emissions and hence global warming. A study this year by the Economy and Environment Programme for South-East Asia, based in Singapore, mapped vulnerability to climate change across the region, divided into 530 subnational districts. Of the ten most endangered by climate change, seven were on Indonesia’s most populous island, Java, which would become increasingly prone to droughts, floods, landslides and a rise in the sea level.

Even more immediately, Riau, for example, is suffering a localised haze at the moment. It is not quite the eye-stinging, throat-burning, aviation-disrupting peasouper seen in 1997, but still the town of Dumai recorded a surge in acute respiratory illnesses in June and July.

Blucher Doloksaribu, who heads the provincial government’s Geophysical, Climatology and Meteorology Board, reckons Riau is already suffering its own local, accelerated version of global warming. As forest cover has shrunk from 78% in 1982 to 27% today (see map), minimum temperatures in Riau have increased, he estimates, by an average of 2ºC.

After a de facto two-year moratorium for an investigation into alleged corruption, logging has resumed in earnest in Riau this year. Green activists link this to the elections and the need for parties to raise funds.

The big pulp-and-paper and palm-oil companies have several lines of defence against attacks from greens. Responding to growing concern about the impact of palm-oil plantations, the big producers and consumers have joined a round-table on sustainable production. The firms insist that they do follow the law, logging only the “production” forests for which they have bought concessions. But their critics allege that they also buy from less scrupulous subcontractors, and that this year the pressure is especially intense since the moratorium had forced pulp companies to eat into their plantation forests earlier than they would normally have done.

The firms also defend their own practices as responsible and sustainable. Sinar Mas, for example, has set aside some 72,000 hectares (an area bigger than Singapore) of “production forest” as a protected “biosphere”, where the trees and wildlife will be preserved. Some even argue that palm-oil and acacia plantations can actually help reduce GHG emissions, though scientists scoff at this notion when the plantations are on cleared natural forest and, especially, peatland.

But Gandhi Sulistyanto, Sinar Mas’s managing director, also points to the huge economic benefits his business brings Indonesia, directly and indirectly supporting millions of people and producing more than one-tenth of Indonesia’s exports. More than half of Sinar Mas’s exports go to China and India. So, despite boasting of his firm’s green credentials, and his concern for minimising carbon emissions and saving biodiversity, he cannot conceal his impatience with NGOs: “They care about the orang-utans [which are indeed threatened by the spread of plantations], not the orangs [people].”

The great green hope: REDD

Mr Sulistyanto hopes Sinar Mas’s biosphere in Riau may yet bring the firm some income from an initiative known as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD). This is an idea that sounds almost too sensible to have gained currency. Since developed countries have become rich partly by cutting down their trees, and since old forests are better at storing carbon than new ones, it seems fair for the rich world to pay the poor world to stop logging (rather than, as at present, merely to plant new trees, under the so-called Clean Development Mechanism). There is a lot to preserve. More than half of Indonesia is still covered in forest. Sumatra may be a lost cause, like much of Kalimantan. But there is still, for example, Papua.

REDD forms part of the negotiations on a successor to the Kyoto protocol, which will reach a climax at meetings in Copenhagen this December. The idea may be better known in Indonesia than anywhere else. Businesses are already earmarking scraps of their concessions; Merrill Lynch, a big American investment bank, is nurturing a project; less established “carbon traders” are setting up shop in Indonesia; villagers in places like Teluk Binjai have visions of leisurely retirement at the international taxpayer’s expense; and the government is creating a complex bureaucratic infrastructure. The forestry ministry has already issued rules on the sort of conservation projects that might be eligible, as well as guidelines on splitting the revenue.

But so far forest carbon credits remain a small, voluntary market. Gordon Brown, Britain’s prime minister, has said a deal at Copenhagen should include transfers of $100 billion a year to the developing world, which would include funds for preserving forests. But there are plenty of question-marks still: the price of carbon, for one thing; how the money should best be used; and whether it would really be paid in perpetuity.

Agus Purnomo of Indonesia’s climate-change council is a sceptic. He finds it hard to believe that the sort of money needed to compensate for the loss of deforestation revenue would be forthcoming. The range at present under discussion—$3-10 per tonne of carbon emissions saved—would be wholly inadequate. He agrees with many that the main point of Copenhagen must be “deep, deep cuts” in rich-world emissions. “You cannot leave saving the atmosphere to poor people.”

So it is not easy to be optimistic about Indonesia’s forests. Ahead of big international gatherings the government makes big promises. It has, for example, banned the conversion of land where the peat is more than three metres deep. But green groups say that hardly helps, since peat bogs have varying depths, and draining a shallow part will erode the rest. The commercial pressures are bound to grow. The conversion of acacia and eucalyptus as cellulose for biofuels will add a new market, and the development of palm-oil micro-refineries will make it much easier to get the fruit to a refinery within 24 hours of harvesting. Perhaps most urgently, a renewed El Niño is brewing, threatening drought and devastating forest fires.

For the government, carbon emissions will become an ever more galling issue. Just as the country seems ready to take its place on the international stage, gaining credit for its peacefulness, its stability and its pluralism, it will find itself under attack, however unfairly, as a vandal on a planetary scale.

prosperity for RI wrote:

September 10, 2009 21:37

Given that nearly every fishery is overfished, but that it is relatively easy to bring them back if fishing is restricted. Doing this can eventually leading to larger sustainable catches. It ought to be a no brainer to act conservatively on fisheries, but greed seems to carry the day. If we can keep the lobster fishery healthy in the Northwest Atlantic, we ought to be able to figure out how to do the same with every fishery.

prosperity for RI wrote:

September 10, 2009 21:42

The record is pretty clear. If you take wild animals and try to meet a global commercial market, rapid depletion and extinction are just a short ways ahead. We have to take much better care of our plane

he defence industry comes out fighting

Eyevine

“DIPLOMACY without arms,” said Frederick the Great, “is like music without instruments.” A former Tory defence secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, quoted him this week in defending the sale of arms to countries thought likely to use them responsibly.

They presumably include the 45 or so states that sent delegations on September 8th to the world’s biggest arms-fest, the Defence Systems & Equipment International (DSEI) show in London. Libya and Saudi Arabia were among those invited.

British governments have rarely blanched at armaments as a staple of trade. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has its own Defence & Security Organisation to promote arms exports, with palpable success: Britain is one of the world’s biggest exporters of defence goods and services, usually ranking after America, with a market share averaging 21% over the past five years. Orders usually hover just over £4 billion ($6.6 billion) a year, though they were boosted in 2007 to £9.7 billion by a big order from Saudi Arabia for fighter-jets (see chart). These days the big buyers are Gulf Arab states, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore. The Brazilian navy is almost entirely British-equipped, though some of the kit is second-hand.

But arms-industry lobbyists are worried by the lack of clarity on future defence spending in Britain, since sales to their own armed forces are a springboard into foreign markets. They argue that with the decline of the financial sector as a money-spinner the British economy needs rebalancing—naturally, in favour of their own world-beating industry.

This month the Defence Industries Council (DIC), a lobby group, published a study that put defence squarely among the sectors worth investing in. A £100m government splurge on the defence industry, it calculated, would generate £227m in economic impact—less than the same slug of money for construction or carmaking would produce, but above telecommunications, pharmaceuticals and indeed banking. Defence firms provide high-quality jobs, use bags of technology and spend heavily on research and development, they point out.

So the lobbyists will have found some cheer on September 7th when Liam Fox, the shadow defence secretary, said a future Conservative government would strive to increase Britain’s share of global defence exports, using them as “a foreign-policy tool”. Britain has managed to enmesh its own servicemen in the national export drive. At trade fairs such as the DSEI, loyal British squaddies in combat dress on secondment to the business department do their bit to support British exports, explaining their equipment to all-comers on selected company stands.

The Ministry of Defence has its own Defence Suppliers Service, which helps companies, particularly small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs), to win British military-procurement contracts. There are around 9,000 British firms in defence and security, and more of them are SMEs than the sector can muster in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Norway combined, according to the DIC. Sales look set to grow, even if big wars decline, as some think likely. Oil states need to protect their installations and ships from terrorism and piracy; there is high demand for sophisticated kit for those in “dismounted close combat”, including thermal vision, body armour and unmanned aerial vehicles. Music to Frederick’s ears, perhaps.

Readers’ comme

All the stuff I copied preparing for my 9/26/09 talk on sustainability

Pages

Archives

Categories

Blogroll

Meta