This week’s Earth Minute discusses the plundering of Indigenous Peoples lands in Peruvian Amazon by illegal logging of Mahogany.
Category Archives: Posts from Anne Petermann
This week’s Earth Minute Podcast on KPFK
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This week’s Earth Minute Podcast on “Sojourner Truth with Margaret Prescod”
This week’s Earth Minute discusses the San Francisco Peaks, a mountain range sacred to more than 13 tribes in the Southwest United States are threatened by a recent USDA decision that would allow the Arizona Snowbowl Ski Resort to use reclaimed sewage water for snowmaking.
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This week’s Earth Minute on KPFK
This week’s Earth Minute discusses Monsanto and how they are using the aftermath of earthquake to get Haitian farmers hooked on their seeds and chemicals. The peasants have declared that they will burn these seeds calling them a “very strong attack on small agriculture, farmers, biodiversity and local creole seed varieties”. They are then instead demanding food sovereignty and the right to define their own agricultural policies to grow healthy food for the local market and to grow in a way that respects the environment and mother earth. Something Monsanto knows nothing about.
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Bioenergy: Bad for Forests, Climate, Biodiversity and Communities
New Study Warns Use of Trees for Bioenergy Production Will Worsen Climate Change
by Anne Petermann, Global Justice Ecology Project
The U.S. Social Forum in Detroit last week ended with an action challenging the world’s largest trash incinerator–located in the heart of one of Detroit’s poorest neighborhoods.
While the toxic legacy of incinerating trash is coming under intensifying scrutiny, however, plans are ramping up across the US and Europe to incinerate trees for so-called “bioenergy” production. This practice of turning standing forests and living trees into electricity, which also pollutes communities in the vicinity of the incinerator, is also being challenged by groups that foresee the impacts of exponentially increasing the global demand for wood for bioenergy production.
A new report was released today by Birdlife International, European Environmental Bureau and Transport and Environment titled “Bioenergy: A Carbon Accounting Time Bomb”. This report’s summary explains, “The carbon debt created when woody biomass is burned takes centuries to pay off. The result is that biomass can be more harmful to the climate than the fossil fuels it replaces.”
It continues, “While recovering waste biomass can have short term emission reduction benefits, increasing the harvesting of standing forests will mostly lead to worsening of the climate crisis–and that is before even starting to look at other impacts such as biodiversity loss or increased erosion.”
The report also warns about the impacts of converting forests to biofuel crops, “Growing biofuels on agricultural land results in the conversion of forests and other natural areas into cropland to replace those agricultural lands lost to biofuel production. This results in related emissions that can completely negate any climate benefits.”
The summary of this report can be downloaded by clicking here.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government is rushing headlong into support for production of bioenergy from trees with financial subsidies–awarding $4.2 million to various projects that will harvest wood for bioenergy production from U.S. national forest lands. This continues the trend of the U.S. Forest Service which has historically subsidized logging operations and timber harvests from our public forest lands. Since its founding in 2005, the Forest Service Woody Biomass Utilization grant program has awarded a total of $30.6 for biomass projects.
The World Economic Forum is also not surprisingly singing the praises of bioenergy. The WEF is promoting the myth that biorefineries have a major role to play in tackling climate change, in their new report “The Future of Industrial Biorefineries” that was launched today. The report was produced in collaboration with Royal DSM N.V., Novozymes, DuPont and Braskem. You can find the WEF release by clicking here.
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USSF: Tar Sands and the Boreal Forests
Clayton Thomas-Muller of IEN begins the Tar Sands Peoples Movement Assembly. Photo: Petermann/GJEP
Report from the Tar Sands Peoples’ Movement Assembly (PMA) at the USSF, Wednesday, June 23, 2010
By Anne Petermann, Global Justice Ecology Project
The Tar Sands Gigaproject represents the future of fossil fuel exploitation. As petroleum becomes harder to access, business as usual dictates that the petroleum industry go to greater and more extreme lengths to suck out the final remains of global oil reserves. From the depths of oceans to the petroleum trapped in the soil of the tar sands of Alberta, literally no stone should go unturned. This means that in the name of oil extraction the boreal forests unfortunate enough to grow over the tar sand deposits will have to be removed.
We’re talking about forests over an area the size of Florida. Forests that are part of the second largest forest carbon sink in the world. We’re talking about the unimaginably toxic impacts on the aboriginal communities that have lived in and with these forests since time immemorial. As person after person testified during the Indigenous Environmental Network’s Tar Sands PMA, the tar sands have killed people slowly and painfully in the tar sands project areas, in the communities where the oil is refined, and in the communities where the pipelines are located. The tar sands, as one grandmother explained, “are a monster.” And the pipelines are planned to head all the way to the coast of New England for export around the world.
Per barrel of synthetic tar sands oil:
4-6 barrels of water poisoned
4 tons of earth removed
And just to add insult to injury, much of this tar sands oil is being used to fuel the U.S. war on Iraq. (the US military, by the way, is the largest single user of fossil fuels on the planet)
I think at this point, we’re all clear that climate change means we need to end the use of fossil fuels….like, yesterday. The horrific oil spill in the Gulf and the highly disturbing footage of its toll which rolls in daily, are merely the latest and most extreme wake up call.
But instead, the trend of business as usual refuses to budge. It is moving in two distinct, yet intertwined directions: extreme fossil fuel development (such as the tar sands and deep water ocean drilling) and large-scale development of fossil fuel alternatives—both of which massively threaten communities and ecosystems, and both of which will devastate forests and worsen the climate crisis.
Keeping forests standing, as it turns out, is both key toward stabilizing the climate, and a key part of the transformation toward the better world we’re all working for. And yet these forests are under more threat than ever.
To understand this and put it into context, let me first take you to the World Forestry Congress which took place in Buenos Aires in October 2009.
The World Forestry Congress is a major gathering of timber industry executives, foresters and their non-governmental organization (NGO) lackies that happens every six years to evaluate trends in forestry and how best to exploit forests and maximize profits. Indigenous Peoples have very little role here. This is where the ruling class whites figure out the future of forests… and in turn, the role of those forests in filling their bank accounts. And what came out of this, the thirteenth World Forestry Congress, was positively chilling.
The twin strategies of the WFC were: REDD (the UN and World Bank scheme to supposedly “Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation”) and wood-based bioenergy promotion, both to be sold to an unwitting public as components of climate mitigation. Whoa, you say, how can an industry designed to clearcut forests profit from a scheme called “reducing emissions from deforestation”? And how can they possibly promote it at the same time as trying to exponentially increase the demand for wood through wood-based bioenergy development? And how could that be considered good for climate change? And why on earth would big NGOs like The Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International support this nonsense? And why is the Forest Stewardship Council—which supposedly carries the banner of sustainable forestry—behind it too?
Weelllll…
The newest trend in marketing is Green. Green, green, green. Everybody’s gotta be green. British Petroleum became “Beyond Petroleum”—whoops…not quite. So if ya wanna continue business as usual, you have to paint it green. Doesn’t matter if the paint is toxic…
But the climate crisis and the Gulf oil spill have opened the doors to enable the timber industry, through a bizarre and twisted logic, to claim the front lines of the renewable energy debate and climate mitigation strategies.
And if the global public is demanding action on climate change and the U.S. public wants to have its cake and eat it too (in other words continue our unsustainable lifestyle but pretend we’ve done our part), then the dual strategy of the timber industry makes perfect sense.
You heard Obama in the Oval Office talking about the Gulf oil spill. We need alternative energy. Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but he ain’t talkin’ windmills and solar panels. He’s talking nukes, “clean coal” and cutting down trees—for electricity, for liquid fuels, for butane, and whatever else they can come up with.
And this finally brings us back to Canada’s boreal forest—by way of the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement.
In this agreement, timber corporations and big NGOs got together to decide the fate of large expanses of boreal forest on Indigenous lands. Hailed as a great victory for the forests and especially the dwindling herds of woodland caribou, the agreement, in reality, is not worth the paper on which it’s printed. Riddled with loopholes big enough to drive logging trucks through, the agreement is designed to reframe the Canadian forest industry as climate-friendly.
It is designed to shift the boreal forest into bioenergy production, and to provide the groundwork to claim carbon offsets for the forests that don’t—for the moment—get cut.
One of the loopholes that pops up repeatedly is the fact that industry will be allowed to break the agreement for the sake of “forest health”. In other words, they will use the excuse of pine bark beetle infestation to clearcut at will.
This agreement is loaded with forest industry-speak. It goes on and on about how their “sustainable forest management” will be governed by the guidelines of “all three certification schemes” (including those created by and for corporations like International Paper). This means these guidelines will be crap.
So to sum up, industry is using this agreement to greenwash their plans to log the boreal forest for woodchips for bioenergy and “bioproducts” (i.e. replacing fossil fuels to make plastics, chemicals, textiles, etc) and to make it sound “climate friendly”. And I can pretty well guarantee that they will also try to fit this under REDD or a similar forest carbon offset scheme to make money on both ends—as was heavily promoted to timber industry execs at the World Forestry Congress.
Which brings us back to the Tar sands Gigaproject. The tar sands project is causing the country of Canada to have some of the fastest growing greenhouse gas emissions in the world. How convenient if there is simultaneously development of an agreement that supposedly protects vast expanses of boreal forest. Which, quite coincidentally, could be claimed as offsetting those very unfortunate emissions being caused by the Tar sands.
But this, my friends, is just the tip of the iceberg. They’re all one cascading market mechanism….forest offsets, biodiversity offsets (yes, you heard me right), the wood-based “bioeconomy” and “bioenergy”…like one great ‘bailout’ for the climate, but with no real benefits. And this market mechanism force is snowballing in the UN Climate process, the UN Biodiversity process and in no other than the World Bank and of course at the powerful urging of industrialized nations, as well as wannabe countries like Brazil. It is one scary future scenario. But more on that later.
To learn more about this bizarre future for the world’s forests, come to our workshop “Forests and Climate Change” which has merged with the workshop on biomass and the bioeconomy in cobo hall, d3-21, Thursday, June 24, 1-5pm.
To learn more about the tar sands gigaproject, go to: http://www.ienearth.org
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There is No One Magic Bullet Solution… So Get Over It!
By Anne Petermann
Blog Post June 7th, 2010
Back home to our little cottage on the lake—back to the sanity of being surrounded by native forest instead of megalomaniacal bureaucrats intent on capitalizing off the rape and plunder of the earth under the auspices of climate mitigation.
First, of course, we had one last stop prior to boarding our respective planes and trains back to sanity—a presentation at the European Parliament in Brussels.
This time it was one of the Ministers of Parliament (MEP) responsible for implementing the European Union’s “renewable energy” target of 20% by 2020 that took issue with our analysis.
Once again it was Deepak’s presentation that was most hotly debated—perhaps because it best showed, through graphic photographs, the wholesale devastation of primeval rainforests for woodchips for export—the direct and indirect result of the EU’s desire to fulfill its renewable energy commitment by burning trees for electricity.
The MEP explained that we had limited choices—wood-based fuels (liquid and electric) or even worse options like nuclear power or large-scale hydroelectricity. To me this is a false dichotomy. It is not either burn trees or build nukes or flood rivers. The solution is to transform the way we live on this earth. The solution is to find the small-scale truly sustainable alternatives that make sense for each bioregion. The solutions for Vermont are not going to be the same as the solutions for Belgium. And the big magic bullet solutions do not exist. Forget about it. Technology and the markets are not going to save us from this mess—especially since they have contributed so significantly to it.
The faster we get over the idea of the imaginary single magic solution, the sooner we can dig in to the work at hand.
Here in the United States, the crisis of burning trees for electricity is a little closer to home—especially in those regions that still have some intact forest left—whether primary forest or second growth native forest, these forests are now under the gun. With plans for new biomass electricity plants popping up all over the place, and with the EU demand for trees leading to increased woodchip exports from the U.S., our forests are under threat like they haven’t been since the continent was first invaded by those white folks who’d already trashed their own forests.
And don’t forget the threat from genetically engineered trees! Eucalyptus and poplar trees are being avidly engineered to provide better agrofuels (liquid transport fuels) and faster growing biomass. And it’s the Gulf Coast states where these Franken-eucalyptus plantations are planned to be developed.
So, while it was good to spend time with allies in Europe, and we had many important meetings about international forest policy and GE trees, it was really good to finally get back home to our office in Vermont where we are developing strategies to take on ArborGen and defeat their plans for vast industrial plantations of non-native, invasive, water depleting and flammable eucalyptus trees.
GJEP Co-Director Orin Langelle and I have collectively been working to protect forests and the rights of forest-dependent peoples for close to 50 years. This is one forest fight that we cannot, we will not, lose.
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Markets and Forests and Profits, oh my!
One of the many bizarre and telling displays at the UN Climate Talks in Bonn, Germany. Photo: Petermann/ GJEP-GFC
Climate Negotiations Descend into Lunacy
By Anne Petermann
I’m now on the train from Cologne to Brussels after finally leaving that hellhole of a conference center for the last time last night after our official “side event” presentation on the threats of wood-based bioenergy and GE trees to UN delegates, scientists and other participants. I have to say that stepping out of the building into the fresh cool German air was indeed a relief, and boarding the subway car for the ride back to the hotel felt like a huge weight lifting off.
But before we leave it completely, allow me to entertain you with yet another amazing yet true story of utter lunacy.
The absolutely nonsensical negotiations from Tuesday were—to my amazement—topped on Wednesday evening during our side event by a question from one of the participants following the presentation of Deepak Rughani of BiofuelWatch.
Deepak gave a very compelling powerpoint explaining the impacts that are already being caused to forests and forest peoples globally as a direct and indirect result of the rising demand for wood to fuel bioenergy facilities in the EU. He showed graphs and charts explaining that the EU directive for 20% of their energy to be “renewable” by 2020 was projected to have grave impacts on the world’s forests and forest dependent peoples because caused the vast majority of the ‘renewable energy’ is to be met through the burning of ever greater numbers of trees—almost all of which will have to be imported. He demonstrated the scientific projections that predict that this level of demand will, by the year 2065, require all of the lands currently covered in native forests or grasslands to be converted to bioenergy plantations.
He further explained that the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) defines this madness as “carbon neutral” since the trees that will be burned will eventually be replaced by new ones.
The very first question he got after completing his powerpoint was from a member of the IPCC who questioned his citations of IPCC definitions (which Deepak gladly offered to send him, and which are referenced in the report on the topic).
He said (and I am still a bit incredulous about this) that Deepak was wrong in stating that the goal of reducing emissions from deforestation and the goal of increasing demand for wood for biomass are not compatible. He said that, yes, of course we can increase the demand for wood 5 or 6 fold and still reduce our carbon emissions from logging, all we need are sustainability criteria and certification schemes.
Indeed. And if everyone on the planet would only lay down their weapons and hold hands, then the world would be an eden-like paradise where everyone gets along and no one or nothing is ever harmed…
But seriously. Massively increasing the demand for trees means more of them will be cut down. Period. And economics dictates that the so-called “low-hanging fruit” will be plucked (that is, logged) first—that means the forests without proper oversight, without clear land title, without people to defend them.
But that’s not the only contradiction of the reducing emissions from deforestation scheme (REDD). The really twisted thing about REDD is that it has actually been resulting in exactly the opposite of its stated intent.
As Deepak pointed out in his presentation, when the UN and the World Bank started talking about paying countries to stop cutting their forests—with the amount of money paid directly proportional to the amount of logging going on—guess what happened. Countries that had decreased their logging all on their own saw suddenly that they were going to miss out on this new gold rush, and reversed their anti-logging positions, allowing forest destruction to go ahead. And those that were already destroying their forests started to destroy them faster. And because REDD will be based on rates of logging ending in 2012, countries have another year and a half to ramp up those logging rates to be sure they can cash in on the prize.
And while the official UN process has not been able to come to a decisive agreement about REDD, it is moving forward quite nicely outside of the UN process. And as Camila Moreno, our contact in Brazil, explained, the slogan coming out of the Oslo, Norway conference on REDD (which occurred totally outside of the UN climate process), was, “just do it!”
In other words, take the lesson from the US and just go for it. Screw the participatory process. Establish bilateral agreements that circumvent the negotiations. Create WTO (World Trade Organization)-style “green rooms” that are accessible by invitation only to keep out those obnoxious ne’er-do-wells who talk about silly things like rights and justice and biodiversity and such.
It’s time we draw the line in the sand. And what better place than Cancun.
(Tune in Monday for wild and crazy stories from the European Parliament.)
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The Promotion of REDD: The Tentacles Spread
UN Climate Convention to Combine Forces with Biodiversity Convention on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation (REDD) Schemes
By Anne Petermann
As the promotion of REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) intensifies here at the intercessional UN Climate talks in Bonn, Germany, it is both growing in scope (to incorporate more and more uses of land—including agriculture) and expanding to include the other two conventions that arose out of the 1992 Rio Convention—that is the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification.
This merging became clear at the Oslo conference on REDD hosted by the Norwegian government. Ahmed Djoghlaf, the Executive Secretary of the CBD sent a statement there about the importance of biodiversity in mitigating climate change. And the second meeting of the Oslo body (called the REDD+ Partnership) will be held in Nagoya, Japan this October immediately prior to the UN CBD COP (Conference of the Parties), which itself takes place only a little over one month before the UN Climate COP in Cancun.
The key role of the CBD COP is spelled out quite clearly in the REDD+ Partnership paper promoting the Nagoya “Ministerial Meeting on Forest Conservation Cooperation and Climate Change.” The paper states, “Partners recognize that forest conservation provides co-benefits of biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation, and provides strong political momentum for the success of the CBD COP-10.”
As well, our allies who attended the Subsidiary Body (more UN-speak, sorry) meeting of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, which took place in Nairobi immediately before the Subsidiary Body meeting of the UN Climate Convention here in Bonn, alerted us to some disturbing developments at the CBD.
Two Biodiversity COPs ago, in Curitiba, Brazil in 2006, the CBD COP agreed to start a “Business and Biodiversity” initiative, which was officially launched at the CBD COP in Bonn in 2008.
The CBD has embraced this initiative and is going hog wild with the notion of embracing business and the markets in their policies and initiatives. In so doing, they are now emulating several of the programs and mechanisms of the UN Climate Conference—especially “offsets” and the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).
Offsets and the CDM are two components of the Climate Negotiations and the Kyoto Protocol climate agreement that are the bane of the climate justice movement. Both are designed to give polluting countries and companies in the Industrialized North the excuse to go on polluting while claiming to mitigate their emissions. They do this by funding projects in developing countries that supposedly compensate in some way for the pollution they are releasing.
Ironically, most of the time these projects are usually extremely destructive and very dirty. They can include, for example, large-scale hydro-electric projects that drown forests and displace thousands, and they can even include new dirty industries like cement plants, as long as those plants are just a little bit cleaner than they would have been if they did not receive funding from the CDM.
Then there are also offset projects that include so-called “green carbon” (good grief) projects like monoculture timber plantations that supposedly store carbon to “offset” that emitted by industry. The fact that this offset model has no scientific basis in actually addressing climate change is irrelevant. It sounds nice and makes a lot of money, and that’s all that matters.
Ah, capitalism…
So the UN Convention on Biological Diversity has looked at these bizarre, profit-oriented and ecologically destructive models and said, “yeah baby! Gimme some of that!”
And thus was born the “Green Development Mechanism” or GDM—the UN CBD equivalent of the CDM (yes, I’m afraid its true). But that’s only the beginning of their complete loss of sanity.
The CBD has also come up with something they like to call (I’m totally serious) BBOP. Yes, BBOP—as in Elvis Presley. As in BBOP a-loo-bop. But what makes this one such a delight is what it stands for—the Business and Biodiversity Offset Program. ‘Wait,’ you’re thinking. ‘Biodiversity offsets? This can’t possibly be for real!’ Ah, but it is. The CBD seriously intends to start a biodiversity offset program to allow business to continue to destroy biodiversity as long as they offset it with another project somewhere else.
For activists in the U.S. this is not completely new. There is a similar program there that has been in use for some time. And isn’t the U.S. just the ideal role model for biodiversity protection? You betcha!
By way of an example of how this has worked in the U.S., Walmart might be given a permit to build a new store in the middle of a supposedly protected wetland. But in order to do this, they would have to pay to construct a new wetland somewhere else. No really, that’s how it works.
So basically the UN has looked at some of the stupidest and worst models in the Capitalist world and incorporated them into their conventions. REDD, for example: paying some of the world’s biggest destroyers of forests to stop destroying some of them. Not only is this model completely fucking stupid, it is a clear reflection of the free trade model that took off in the 1990s and sought to force national governments to pay corporations their lost profits if they were prevented from profiting from “trade barriers” such as laws against pollution or violating the rights of workers. Except this time the forest-destroyers are holding the world hostage by saying, ‘pay us or fry.’
So what this means is that the activists following biodiversity loss and those following Climate will need to come together to create collaborative strategies and plans to both oppose these crazy market-based death schemes and organize alternatives—real alternatives—peoples’ alternatives—non-market alternatives.
That is our challenge.
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