No rainforest in going to be preserved in a nation that continues on a path of exponential growth of population like Liberia. The nature of exponential growth is that it always looks sustainable until the catastrophe hits and everything collapses and there's nothing that can be done to save anything and probably mass starvation.
The fertility rate is 5.16 in Liberia which corresponds to doubling the population about once every 25 years. Then if fertility ever drops back to steady state (2.1), you double the population at least twice more because of population momentum.
The hopeful factor in Liberia is that the fertility rate is dropping. IT was 5.85 in 2000. If it doesn't drop fast, no payment for forests will help. If it does drop fast, the locals will enjoy their environment and work to preserve it.
Right now Liberia has about the population and land area of Virginia, which means it's already overpopulated. Around mid-century it will have at least quadruple the population. Then -- if fertility drops very fast down to replacement level -- it will quadruple again. That will be sixteen times the density of Virginia. And that is the best case scenario.
>Right now Liberia has about the population and land area of Virginia, which means it's already overpopulated.
First, that assumes Virginia is 'optimally populated'.
Second, according to Google, the population of Liberia is 4.294 million (2013) and the population of Virginia is 8.186 million (2012), so using your Virginia-baseline, Liberia can about double its population before being considered over-populated. The Indian state of Kerala, meanwhile, has 34.8 million (2012) people in a smaller area (~38k mi^2 vs ~43k mi^2).
Suppose the population has been growing at a rapid clip, like in Liberia.
Then you will have a situation where the grandparent generation will have less population than the parents and the parents will be fewer than the children, e.g.:
2 80 year olds
6 60 year olds
15 40 year olds
40 20 year olds
100 babies
--------
163 people
One woman 80 year old had six babies with her husband. The three women in the next generation bore 15 babies. With a fertility rate around five, you will have a population pyramid where the babies outnumber the 80 year olds by about 50 to 1.
Then if fertility suddenly drops down to replacement level, the babies will eventually grow up to be 80 year olds in a country where the size of each generation is equal, e.g.:
100 80 year olds
100 60 year olds
100 40 year olds
100 20 year olds
100 babies
-----
500 people
So there's one more quadrupling (approximately) built in to the system even after the birth rate gets under control. Since the birth rate might not get under control until the resources run out in famine, war, or epidemic, we may be looking at a situation where high fertility countries are destined to have not only more people than they can support, but four times as many as they can support and chronic disasters for humanity. The only relief is thinking ahead and family planning, which is not necessarily our strong point as a species.
Say the population has been growing fast so most people are aged 0-20, and then the fertility rate drops to 2.1. Over the next 25 years you still have a lot of kids born while those people grow up, while there will not be many deaths because there will not be many old people to die off.
It never ceases to amaze me that political parties who fundamentally believe in the importance of "the market" don't trust it for reducing emissions. Hypocrisy at it's worst.
Cap and trade's first step is to hand out billions of dollars worth of emissions credits to major polluters which they can then resell. After that it's similar to a strait tax if more costly and less efficient, but you can see the appeal.
Cap and trade is more efficient than a tax, that's the whole point of it -- allowing the market to find the least costly way of reducing total emissions below the cap, as opposed to forcing everyone to reduce emissions by the same percentage regardless of the cost.
As for handing out billions of dollars of emissions credits to current polluters that they can then sell, this is completely false. The way the initial allocation works under most proposals is to give current polluters credits to cover part of their current emissions upfront. Then if they reduce their emissions beyond their allocated emissions they can sell the excess credits. This is what makes cap and trade so efficient, there are huge profits to be made by companies that can create technologies to reduce emissions the most efficiently.
Then over time the total cap decreases, and the amount of credits allocated to existing polluters also decreases, so that all companies will have to buy whatever credits they need at a yearly auction or whatever.
>> Cap and trade is more efficient than a tax, that's the whole point of it -- allowing the market to find the least costly way of reducing total emissions below the cap, as opposed to forcing everyone to reduce emissions by the same percentage regardless of the cost.
A tax doesn't force everyone to reduce emissions by the same amount. If cutting emissions is less profitable than paying the tax, you pay the tax, otherwise you cut emissions.
>> As for handing out billions of dollars of emissions credits to current polluters that they can then sell, this is completely false. The way the initial allocation works under most proposals is to give current polluters credits to cover part of their current emissions upfront. Then if they reduce their emissions beyond their allocated emissions they can sell the excess credits. This is what makes cap and trade so efficient, there are huge profits to be made by companies that can create technologies to reduce emissions the most efficiently.
How about if they just shut down their production and sell the credits? Giving the credits to incumbents is a large barrier to entry for competitors and a give away. If you are going to have credits rather than a tax, the credits should be auctioned.
> Giving the credits to incumbents is a large barrier to entry for competitors and a give away. If you are going to have credits rather than a tax, the credits should be auctioned.
Sure, but that's not an inherent feature of cap and trade. The only reason why most current proposals include this is because it's the only way the legislation has a realistic chance of passing. And there is at least a decent justification for it, in that it reduces any initial financial impacts, and then still transitions into a full auction over a few years.
How about if they just shut down their production and sell the credits? Giving the credits to incumbents is a large barrier to entry for competitors and a give away. If you are going to have credits rather than a tax, the credits should be auctioned.
I guess it wasn't entirely clear, but I was referring to repeated auctions for limited time permits (e.g. annual). That puts new entrants on an equal footing after a relatively short period of time.
A carbon tax is hardly going to cause an equal cut in emissions across all sectors. Sectors with cheap alternatives will switch and those without will not. Consider there are few alternatives for aircraft, but a coal power plant has lot's of clean alternatives at competitive prices.
A heavy carbon tax might add 1 cents a gallon to gas prices, which would basically be ignored by most people / companies, but the same tax would make new coal power plants unprofitable. In the end it let's the markets decide the most efficient approach even if that's to do nothing.
Yeah - I know this is how it has been proposed in the US, it is absurd and corrupt to hand out credits for free.. but I think cap and trade would be great if it were implemented by setting a cap that shrinks over time, and then auctioning tradable permits to emit. The revenues from these auctions could be used to cut income tax to make up for the increase in prices to consumers.
We already hand out billions of dollars worth of pollution credits to polluters. The only difference is that right now these manifest as externalized costs. The polluters pollute and everybody has to pay the price of climate change.
Well, they will help them build capacity to protect forests, and prevent new logging licenses to be granted, as well as place more forests in a "protected" status.
It's not like they just ask to stop and give them cash, like the headline suggests.
If trees keep getting cut down, the payments will stop.
FTA:
The country agrees to place 30% or more of its forest estate under protected area status by 2020. It will also pilot direct payments to communities for protecting the forest.
Ultimately the Norwegians will pay for results, with independent verification that trees remain standing.
I love the idealism of this but:
1) the price is far too low to have any effect, I am guessing.
2) won't this money go straight into someone's pocket?
3) how on earth do they expect this to be enforced?
We do this in several other countries already. We only actually pay the money if they meet certain goals. Currently we have 4 billion NOK (632 million dollars) still standing in a bank account, because the countries we intended to pay the money to hasn't met the goals we set as a pre-condition. Then again we paid 3 billion NOK (474 million dollars) last year, so it does work to some extent.
2) won't this money go straight into someone's pocket? 3) how on earth do they expect this to be enforced?
Sometimes #3 can be solved by #2. "Hey corrupt minster/police chief/army general, want more of that bribe? Get your corrupt police officers/soliders to stop those people cutting down trees! Since you don't have to obey the law that much, beat up those peasants who are chopping down trees"
When it comes to bribes / "lobbying", apparently our government prefers to go after US politicians (by paying Washington think thanks to produce "research" on various subjects of importance to Norway). Thankfully most of the stuff they lobby for is actually an improvement on typical US government policy (then again I'd be biased - I'm Norwegian).
The problem here is: cutting down trees creates jobs; receiving 150m doesn't. You still have to distribute them somehow and make these people figure out what to do.
The headline is sensationalist, what they are doing it paying for the government not to issue more logging licenses (easy to verify) and putting forests on "protected" status (as well as other concrete, targeted projects).
It's not like they are handing out cash to the government against a promise.
I don't think he means the money, I believe he meant distribute the workers.
More likely than not a majority of the people cutting trees down in Liberia are going to continue cutting trees whether the government wants them to or not.
They aren't just arrogantly trying to help an African nation, they have an interest in trying to preserve the rainforest and its biodiversity. It's quid pro quo.
Where does the demand go? Not only one has to pay Liberia and various parties not to cut trees but one also needs to reshape the demand (for trees) or make sure that the demand is redirected to renewable resources and/or to tree plantations. To me, it seems to be the hardest challenge.
If countries like Norway feel that standing trees provide a service to them, they should pay to keep them up.
It's not charity, the trees are providing a marketable good by processing CO2 emissions.
While I'm not an environmentalist, I do believe in markets as a way of solving larger problems and I think it would be interesting if a market was built on resource preservation.
For instance, if a type of tree processes more CO2, they should be worth more than one that does not and that can be expressed in whatever this marketplace would be. If I had more connections at a government level, I might be interested in such an idea but as it stands now the sales cycles would be too long to get a market like that going.
Because it's a public goods problem. If one country pays, all countries benefit equally, and the country that pays generally spends more than its benefit from that payment. So each country is better off not paying, regardless of what everybody else does, even though we'd all be a lot better off if everybody paid.
The problem, of course, is not in the fact that clearing Carbon CO2 emissions from the air. It's the fact that it might be worth more - in dollars - to cut those trees down and sell them. Perhaps not in this case, but certainly in other cases where countries have tried to sell protecting their own territory environmentally and balanced that against the worth of the resources on the market.
Thus the dollar worth of clearing CO2 emissions doesn't clearly align with the self-interest of doing so over buying trees to make paper and other goods. (The self-interest, of course, is in not dying in the future from some climate change related disaster.
That's why worldwide governmental intervention is needed to make sure the dollar value of keeping those trees up aligns with actual self-interest.
But as the threat becomes imminent, the appearance of "externalized" cost diminishes and the value on protecting those resources increases and they are no longer external.
We're already seeing this as several big companies and funds are suddenly putting real money into "green energy."
It'll always be harder for for-profits and bottom-line driven funds to pay to not have action, but nations are now apparently doing this. I wonder how much of that is accounted for in known corruption. (In the U.S. we call it lobbying.)
Edit: trying to clear up the "externalized" sentence. What I mean is that "external costs" aren't so external at a certain point.
Algae processes more CO2 than trees. You could convert the forests into logging land and just set up massive platforms on the ocean that manage algae. Maybe not even that.
Isn't that enough? Highly biodiverse environments like tropical rainforests are treasure troves of thousands of fascinating species that we don't know much about yet. No doubt we still have a lot to learn from these environments.
Biodiversity sustains ecosystems, which, should they collapse, could very well take us with them. Due to the incredible complexity and interdependence of these ecosystems we simply don't know what the results of collapse will be. Maintenance of biodiversity is therefore a risk avoidance strategy.
Additionally, I'll mention that I agree with blaabjerg's response: it's worth maintaining biodiversity for the fun of it.
Yeah, I could use "incredible complexity" on something else like, let's say for example, climate and meteorology. But instead of being conservative about what we pump into the atmosphere, we could just dump in it like that's what it's there for. And see where we end up. I don't think it's at all unreasonable to draw a parallel with that and ecosystem complexity.
Corollary: I don't see how a broadly conservative approach to managing biodiversity can be discounted because it isn't specific enough.
Pretty negative response in this thread to one of the only countries really making serious efforts to preserve the last few remaining tracts of rainforest on earth.
I really really like this idea as long as the money does not go to bureaucrats. If governments and people were serious about pooling money and purchasing land for conservation (ala Ted Turner) and/or supporting conversation efforts, the planet might have a fighting chance.
So you're saying we might have a fighting chance against environmental depredation if instead of using government bullying, we used the private sector to buy those lands, so long as we could guarantee the money wouldn't go to bureaucrats?
You might want to look into libertarianism, as it has been saying that for a long time now, and it has very good arguments as to why it works better than the alternatives.
The 'buy up the land' thing can work without changing our form of government. Go ahead and buy the land! Set up a campaign/foundation to do so (many already exist).
The pope once said evolution can still be a fact without changing the belief system of the catholic church.
You can try and adapt your thinking that way, but it is never as smooth as a principled theory. In other words, the buy-up-land thing cannot work without changing our form of government, as you'd have to at least do away with the concept of eminent domain.
> The pope once said evolution can still be a fact without changing the belief system of the catholic church.
Off-topic, but was this a good example of a "non-smooth unprincipled adaptation"? I was taught evolution by Catholics and it never seemed incongruous, but I'm not versed in the history.
Meh. Catholics, unlike many Protestant groups in midwestern America, have neither the tradition of 'sola scriptura' nor a belief in the Bible as inerrant, infallible historical record (or, for that matter, in the infallibility of every single word uttered by the Pope). Mendel was a monk. Lemaître was a priest. Even the persecution of Galileo was more politically motivated (Urban VIII in his role as Italian nobility) than theological per se.
Norway is not footing the bill as it has no money. It had to take $150M from its citizens pockets. I'm not sure how many Norwegians agreed to use that money to buy up trees. If most of them did, I guess you could say that is democracy at work. Otherwise I don't see it.
Norway is an interesting case as most of that money comes from oil reserves that where unclaimed by private individuals so it's fairly accurate to call it Norway's money.
Further, democracy is far from a simple Y/N vote on every issue. People trade favors so it's Y/N on (trees)+(healthcare)+(police)+... and you vote on those blocks. At first glance this seems worse. However people don't care about all issues equally so trading a weak no for a vary strong yes is worth it to people. In the end it's the same basis for all forms of trade as people don't value everything equally so trade ends up as a net benefit.
> Norway is not footing the bill as it has no money. It had to take $150M from its citizens pockets.
There is no difference in English. When someone says "Manchester United scored three goals", it is understood that individual players on the team so named kicked the balls into the net. Noone is under the impression that the corporation Manchester United plc pushed the balls using psychokinesis.
While I have confidence in the fundamental idea, the thought of actually enforcing / monitoring this seems somewhat laughable. (And thats coming from someone that has actual experience judging whether 1st world money was judiciously applied in a 3rd world country).
How is enforcement going to be a large issue? Doesn't every forest have a forester (Not sure if that is what it's called, but we have people who "takes care" of forests in Denmark). If a forester sees people cutting down trees with large machinery, he would just call the police?
I doubt anyone cares if Mr. Random goes into the wood with his axe, chops down a tree he can carry and runs off with it.
It's not necessarily as simple as calling the police in Liberia. Corruption levels there are significantly higher than they are in Denmark. What if the logger pays the policeman to do nothing about it?
Enforcement is definitely going to be a challenge, but hopefully they have a good plan in place.
Aerial photography + incentives paid based on evidence that the forest remains, coupled with dedicating part of the funding to paying locals to help look after it creates a strong incentive shared by many groups to ensure it works.
The fertility rate is 5.16 in Liberia which corresponds to doubling the population about once every 25 years. Then if fertility ever drops back to steady state (2.1), you double the population at least twice more because of population momentum.
The hopeful factor in Liberia is that the fertility rate is dropping. IT was 5.85 in 2000. If it doesn't drop fast, no payment for forests will help. If it does drop fast, the locals will enjoy their environment and work to preserve it.
Right now Liberia has about the population and land area of Virginia, which means it's already overpopulated. Around mid-century it will have at least quadruple the population. Then -- if fertility drops very fast down to replacement level -- it will quadruple again. That will be sixteen times the density of Virginia. And that is the best case scenario.