Forest Ethics: Paper Campaign Facts

Here are some slightly dated, but interesting, facts on forests and paper consumption:

Paper Campaign Facts
Forest Ethics

- Old growth forests make up 16% of the virgin tree fiber used each year to make paper products. (Abromovitz & Mattoon, Paper Cuts: Recovering the Paper Landscape (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute 1999, p21))

- Nearly 80% of the world's original old growth forests have been logged or severely degraded already and in the US we have lost 95% of our old growth forests. (source: Bryant et al., The Last Frontier Forests: Ecosystems and Economies on the Edge (Washington, DC: World Resources Institute 1997; US Forest Service, 1997 Resources Planning Act Assessment, Final Statistics, July 2000))

- 77% of the pulpwood harvested in the US is harvested in the South. (Smith & Sheffield 2000, A Brief Overview of the Forest Resources of the United States, USDA Forest Service, Washington DC and Asheville, NC).

- More than 90% of the printing and writing paper made in the US is from virgin tree fiber. (Abromovitz & Mattoon, Paper Cuts: Recovering the Paper Landscape (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute 1999))

- 40% of the world's industrial logging goes into making paper and this is expected to reach 50% in the near future. (Abromovitz, Taking a Stand: Cultivating a New Relationship with the World's Forests (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute 1998))

- Nearly a ton of new recycled paper can be made from a ton of recycled stock compared to the 2-3.5 tons of trees required to make a ton of virgin paper. This is one of the reasons recycled paper results in lower solid waste byproducts and uses less energy, water and chemicals. (Abromovitz & Mattoon, Paper Cuts: Recovering the Paper Landscape (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute 1999))

- Worldwide, the pulp and paper industry is the 5th largest industrial consumer of energy - in the US it is the 2nd largest industrial user of energy. (Abromovitz & Mattoon, Paper Cuts: Recovering the Paper Landscape (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute 1999))

- Paper comprises roughly 40% of the municipal solid waste burden in many industrial countries (Abromovitz & Mattoon, Paper Cuts: Recovering the Paper Landscape (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute 1999))

Encyclopedia of Life

Encyclopedia of Life (Press Release)
May 9, 2007 -- EOL

"We intend to make key components of the Encyclopedia available to the general public starting some time in 2008. As a ballpark estimate, we believe that we can produce the full encyclopedia in about 10 years."

A Leap for All Life: World’s Leading Scientists Announce Creation of “Encyclopedia of Life”
Biodiversity, Science Communities Unite Behind Epic Effort To Promote Biodiversity, Document All 1.8 Million Named Species on Planet

Many of the world’s leading scientific institutions today announced the launch of the Encyclopedia of Life, an unprecedented global effort to document all 1.8 million named species of animals, plants, and other forms of life on Earth. For the first time in the history of the planet, scientists, students, and citizens will have multi-media access to all known living species, even those that have just been discovered.

The Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard University, Marine Biological Laboratory, Smithsonian Institution, and Biodiversity Heritage Library joined together to initiate the project, bringing together species and software experts from across the world. The Missouri Botanical Garden has become a full partner, and discussions are taking place this week with leaders of the new Atlas of Living Australia. The Encyclopedia today also announced the initial membership of its Institutional Council, which spans the globe, and whose members will play key roles in realizing this immense project. An international advisory board of distinguished individuals will also help guide the Encyclopedia.

The effort is spurred by a $10 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and $2.5 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and will ultimately serve as a global beacon for biodiversity and conservation.

“The Encyclopedia of Life will provide valuable biodiversity and conservation information to anyone, anywhere, at any time,” said Dr. James Edwards, currently Executive Secretary of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility who today was officially named Executive Director of the Encyclopedia of Life. “Through collaboration, we all can increase our appreciation of the immense variety of life, the challenges to it, and ways to conserve biodiversity. The Encyclopedia of Life will ultimately make high-quality, well-organized information available on an unprecedented level. Even five years ago, we could not create such a resource, but advances in technology for searching, annotating, and visualizing information now permit us, indeed mandate us to build the Encyclopedia of Life.”

Over the next 10 years, the Encyclopedia of Life will create Internet pages for all 1.8 million species currently named. It will expedite the classification of the millions of species yet to be discovered and catalogued as well. The pages, housed at http://www.eol.org, will provide written information and, when available, photographs, video, sound, location maps, and other multimedia information on each species. Built on the scientific integrity of thousands of experts around the globe, the Encyclopedia will be a moderated wiki-style environment, freely available to all users everywhere.

“The Encyclopedia of Life will be a vital tool for scientists, researchers, and educators across the globe, providing easy access to the latest and best information on all known species,” said Jonathan F. Fanton, President of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. “Technology is allowing science to grasp the immense complexity of life on this planet. Sharing what we know, we can protect Earth's biodiversity and better conserve our natural heritage.”

“For more than 250 years, scientists have catalogued life, and our traditional catalogues have become unwieldy,” said Ralph E. Gomory, President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “The Encyclopedia of Life will provide the citizens of the world a ‘macroscope’ of almost unimaginable power to find and create understanding of biodiversity across the globe. It will enable us to map and discover things so numerous or vast they overwhelm our normal vision.”

Scientists began creating individual web pages for species in the 1990s. However, Internet technology needed to mature to allow fast and efficient creation of a comprehensive Encyclopedia. While specific Encyclopedia of Life efforts, including the scanning of key research publications and data, have been underway since January 2006, work has accelerated due to the support provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the recent discussion of the Encyclopedia of Life by renowned biologist Edward O. Wilson at the March 2007 Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Conference.

One of the world’s foremost scientists and environmentalists, Wilson, professor emeritus at Harvard University, “wished” for the establishment of the Encyclopedia of Life during his TED Conference address. Noting that “our knowledge of biodiversity is so incomplete that we are at risk of losing a great deal of it before it is ever discovered,” Wilson called for a contemporary, dynamic portrait of the living Earth.

“I wish that we will work together to help create the key tool that we need to inspire preservation of Earth’s biodiversity: the Encyclopedia of Life,” Wilson said at TED. “What excites me is that since I first put forward this idea, science has advanced, technology has moved forward. Today, the practicalities of making this encyclopedia real are within reach as never before.”

Ultimately, the Encyclopedia of Life will provide users the opportunity to personalize the learning experience through its “my eol” feature. The site can be made available in all major languages and will connect scientific communities concerned with ants to apples to zebras. As part of its work, the Encyclopedia of Life will collaborate and partner with a wide range of organizations, individuals, and experts to help strengthen the Encyclopedia and its impact on communities throughout the world.

“The solidarity of the U.S. and global communities for the Encyclopedia of Life is tremendously exciting and lifts my confidence that this vast, romantic global effort will succeed,” Edwards said. “We are also encouraged by the declaration in March 2007 by the environment ministers of the G8 nations to foster a global species information system.”

While initial work will emphasize species of animals, plants, and fungi, the design can be extended to encompass microbial life.

To provide depth behind the portal page for each species, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), a consortium that holds most of the relevant scientific literature, will scan and digitize tens of millions of pages of the scientific literature that will offer open access to detailed knowledge. In fact, the BHL now has scanning centers operating in London, Boston, and Washington DC, and has scanned the first 1.25 million pages for the Encyclopedia.

“I dream that in a few years wherever a reference to a species occurs on the Internet, there will be a hyperlink to its page in the Encyclopedia of Life,” concluded Edwards.


ABOUT THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LIFE
The Encyclopedia of Life is a collaborative scientific effort led by the Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard University, Marine Biological Laboratory, Missouri Botanical Garden, Smithsonian Institution, and Biodiversity Heritage Library, a consortium including the core institutions and also the American Museum of Natural History (New York), Natural History Museum (London), New York Botanical Garden, and Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew). Ultimately, the Encyclopedia of Life will provide an online database for all 1.8 million species now known to live on Earth. When completed, http://www.eol.org will serve as a global biodiversity tool, providing scientists, policymakers, students, and citizens information they need to discover and protect the planet and encourage learning and conservation.

Carbon Currency: Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative

When Carbon Is Currency
May 6, 2007 -- By Hannah Fairfield, The New York Times

Amid steadily increasing carbon emissions, and a federal government hesitant to take the lead on climate legislation, 10 states have joined to create the first mandatory carbon cap-and-trade program in the United States. They aim to reduce emissions from power plants by 10 percent in 10 years.

Leaders of state environmental and energy regulatory agencies hammered out the detailed model for the program, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, over the course of three years. The program sets a cap on the total amount of carbon that the 10 states — as a whole — can emit. Starting in 2009, each state will receive a set amount of carbon credits for its power plants, and each plant must have enough allowances to cover its total emissions at the end of three-year compliance periods.

In 2003, George E. Pataki, then New York’s governor, invited governors of 10 other states from Maine to Maryland to discuss a program to cut power plant emissions. All but one of the states joined the program; Pennsylvania has observer status.

Officials have closely watched the European Union, which started its carbon trading market in 2005; analysts say the Europeans have stumbled on some fronts. “We’ve learned a lot from the Europeans,” said Judith Enck, adviser on environment issues to Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York. “The way we distribute the allowances will be vastly different than the European experience.”

To build a carbon market, its originators must create a currency of carbon credits that participants can trade. In Europe, power companies received these credits directly and could buy or sell from one another as needed. But most companies passed the cost of the credits on to consumers even though they received them free — giving the companies windfall profits. Power companies in Britain alone made about $1 billion from free credits in 2005, according to a study by the British government.

Participants in the United States want to avoid that problem by selling some or all of the credits at auction, with the proceeds going to state energy efficiency programs.

In Europe, power companies were not the only businesses to profit from the new carbon market. Because power plants there can use credits earned from offset projects that take greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere (or put less of them into it), businesses wanting to earn offset credits inundated the Europeans with proposals — many of which would have a negligible effect on emissions or were for reductions that would have taken place anyway.

To sidestep that problem, the program here limits offsets to five categories: capture of landfill gas, curbs on sulfur hexafluoride leaks, planting of trees, reductions in methane from manure, and increased energy efficiency in buildings. Power companies can offset 3.3 percent of a plant’s total emissions from any combination of the five categories.

“We saw what happened in Europe, so we limited the categories and set our criteria upfront,” said Christopher Sherry, chairman of the regional program’s staff working group and a research scientist at the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. “We did that so we would have assurance that the reductions actually take place.”

Although Northeastern states have taken the lead in inaugurating a mandatory carbon market, California and some of its neighbors are not far behind. Those states are watching closely; Mr. Sherry and others involved in the 10-state effort are already helping California figure out how best to accomplish its climate plan.

“The idea is to see what everyone else has done, and learn from it,” said Dale Bryk, a lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council who has been involved with the Northeastern regional program and California’s advisory committee. “Let’s not start from scratch.”

Voluntary Restrictions Protect Quarter of World's High Seas from Trawling

Nations seek end to trawling seas
May 5, 2007 -- Associated Press via CNN

More than 20 nations agreed Friday to discourage unregulated and destructive bottom trawling on the South Pacific high seas, a victory for environmental groups.

The agreement, which takes effect September 30, is intended to protect about a quarter of the world's high seas, a vast area extending roughly from the Equator to the Antarctic Circle and from Australia and New Zealand to the west coast of South America.

Observers and ship locator monitoring systems are to be used, and vessels must remain at least five nautical miles (9,260 meters) from deep-water corals and other vulnerable marine ecosystems.

The agreement reached in Renaca, Chile, follows a U.N. General Assembly resolution in December aimed at getting tough on high-seas bottom trawling, which involves fishing boats that drag giant nets along the sea floor.

Enormously effective at catching fish, the nets also wipe out almost everything in their path, smash coral and stir clouds of sediment that smother sea life, marine experts say.

Orange roughy is the main commercial fish in the South Pacific high seas, mainly caught by New Zealand fishing vessels. Estimates of the fishing trade range up to about $10 million (euro7.4 million).

New Zealand officials agreed to the voluntary restrictions in the South Pacific high seas, but they said the restrictions could "severely constrain" its fishing vessels. The ecological costs of the huge nets are far higher, environmental groups said.

"This area contains thousands of these underwater sea mountains, or seamounts, that are considered to be some of the most ecologically rich habitats in the world," said Joshua Reichert, director of the private Pew Charitable Trusts' environment division, which coordinated the groups' campaign. "For all of us, this really represents a major step forward for marine conservation."

A U.N. report last year called bottom trawling a danger to unique and unexplored ecological systems. It said slightly more than half the underwater mountain and coral ecosystems in the world can be found beyond the protection of national boundaries.

The new agreement is among members of the fledgling South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organization: Australia, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Cook Islands, Ecuador, the European Commission, Federated States of Micronesia, France, Japan, New Zealand, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Russia, South Korea, Ukraine, the United States and Vanuatu.

Tackling Climate Change: A bargain

Tackling Climate Change: A bargain
May 4, 2007 -- The Economist (Subscription)

About 0.1% of world GDP would do it

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up under the auspices of the United Nations to establish a consensus on global warming and what to do about it, has now completed its fourth assessment report. The first two parts, published earlier this year, about the science and the impacts of climate change, were designed to spread gloom. Change was happening, they said; it was mankind’s fault; and it was going to be damaging. The third part, released on Friday May 4th in Bangkok, is about mitigating climate change, and is designed to spread hope. Just as mankind caused the problem, it says, so mankind can stop it—and at a reasonable cost.

In some areas of economic activity, emissions could be cut with no cost to consumers or taxpayers. The heating and lighting systems of many buildings, for instance, are startlingly inefficient. Improving this would cut both emissions and bills. Economists are troubled by this, for it implies that people and businesses are not maximising their economic self-interest; yet the low take-up of energy-efficient lightbulbs suggests this is indeed the case. Governments are therefore beginning to tighten regulations on the energy efficiency of buildings, and to talk about, for instance, banning incandescent lightbulbs. The IPCC reckons that such measures could cut 30% of projected emissions from this sector at no extra cost.

Transport is trickier, because car ownership is rocketing and the demand for fuel is fairly inelastic. If people want to drive they are going to drive, unless governments jack up petrol prices to levels that are politically unacceptable. So for emissions to fall in the transport sector, new technologies, such as more efficient biofuels or electric cars, are needed. Given a big R&D effort in this sector, there is a good chance that those will be forthcoming.

Similarly, in power generation, there is scope for cutting emissions. The cost of renewable energy, such as wind and solar, has been falling. Nuclear generating technology has improved. Carbon capture and storage, which involves taking the carbon dioxide (or C02) out of power station flue gases and injecting it back into the earth, is also a possibility, though that technology is at an early stage.

Technological solutions to climate change, then, are available. But most of those on offer in the power and transport sectors cost more than fossil-fuel generated energy. Fortunately, economics comes to the rescue. Burning fossil fuels imposes a cost to society that is not reflected in their price. Economics says that it should be; and if it were, the price of using fossil fuels would rise in relation to the price of using renewable energy.

Unfortunately, the social cost of carbon is hard to calculate. Plenty of economists have tried, with unconvincing results. It requires estimating the impact of climate change on economic growth, which involves too many unknowns. So the IPCC report starts from the other end. Rather than trying to work out the social cost of carbon, and letting it feed through to reduce greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere, it starts from a manageable greenhouse-gas concentration and works backwards to a carbon price. Conveniently, it says the “social cost of carbon is at least comparable to, and possibly higher than carbon prices for even the most stringent scenarios assessed by the IPCC”.

And what is the right price? The report says that to stabilise greenhouse-gas concentrations at 550 parts per million (a level most scientists think safeish) would require a price of $20-50 per tonne of carbon by 2020-30. That is along the lines of the carbon price established the European Emissions-Trading Scheme, which varied between $6 and $40 in 2005-06. It has not bankrupted the European economy so far. The IPCC’s economic models reckon, on average, that if the world adopted such a price the global economy would be 1.3% smaller than it otherwise would have been by 2050; or, put another way, global economic growth would be 0.1% a year lower than it otherwise would have been.

The world would barely notice such figures; so one might think that climate change can be easily sorted. The problem, of course, is that the numbers work only if they are applied globally. If a few countries—even a few big countries—adopt a carbon price, it will make little difference. All the world’s big emitters need to do it. Which brings the world straight back to the problem that sank Kyoto. No country alone can make a difference, and it is in every country’s interest to ensure that everybody else bears the burden. As the IPCC report convincingly argues, the technology and the economics of this problem are easily soluble. It is the politics that is so difficult.

Congestion Pricing

Excerpt from:
Don't Drive, He Said
May 7, 2007 -- By Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker via Greg Mankiw's Blog

The case against congestion pricing is often posed in egalitarian terms. “The middle class and the poor will not be able to pay these fees and the rich will,” State Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, of Westchester County, declared after listening to the Mayor’s speech. In fact, the poor don’t, as a rule, drive in and out of Manhattan: compare the cost of buying, insuring, and parking a car with the seventy-six dollars a month the M.T.A. charges for an unlimited-ride MetroCard. For those who do use cars to commute, eight dollars a day would, it’s true, quickly add up. And that is precisely the point. Congestion pricing works only to the extent that it makes other choices—changing the hours of one’s daily drive or, better yet, using mass transit—more attractive.

Designing Cities For People

Designing Cities For People
May 1, 2007 -- By Lester R. Brown, Earth Policy Institute

As I was being driven through Tel Aviv from my hotel to a conference center a few years ago, I could not help but note the overwhelming presence of cars and parking lots. Tel Aviv, expanding from a small settlement a half-century ago to a city of some 3 million today, evolved during the automobile era. It occurred to me that the ratio of parks to parking lots may be the best single indicator of the livability of a city--whether a city is designed for people or for cars.

The world's cities are in trouble. In Mexico City, Tehran, Bangkok, Shanghai, and hundreds of other cities, the quality of daily life is deteriorating. Breathing the air in some cities is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes per day. In the United States, the number of hours commuters spend sitting in traffic going nowhere climbs higher each year.

In response to these conditions, we are seeing the emergence of a new urbanism. One of the most remarkable modern urban transformations has occurred in Bogotá, Colombia, where Enrique Peñalosa served as Mayor for three years, beginning in 1998. When he took office he did not ask how life could be improved for the 30 percent who owned cars; he wanted to know what could be done for the 70 percent--the majority--who did not own cars.

Peñalosa realized that a city that is a pleasant environment for children and the elderly would work for everyone. In just a few years, he transformed the quality of urban life with his vision of a city designed for people. Under his leadership, the city banned the parking of cars on sidewalks, created or renovated 1,200 parks, introduced a highly successful bus-based rapid transit system, built hundreds of kilometers of bicycle paths and pedestrian streets, reduced rush hour traffic by 40 percent, planted 100,000 trees, and involved local citizens directly in the improvement of their neighborhoods. In doing this, he created a sense of civic pride among the city's 8 million residents, making the streets of Bogotá in strife-torn Colombia safer than those in Washington, D.C.

Enrique Peñalosa observes that "high quality public pedestrian space in general and parks in particular are evidence of a true democracy at work." He further observes: "Parks and public space are also important to a democratic society because they are the only places where people meet as equals. In a city, parks are as essential to the physical and emotional health of a city as the water supply." He notes this is not obvious from most city budgets, where parks are deemed a luxury. By contrast, roads, the public space for cars, receive infinitely more resources and less budget cuts than parks, the public space for children. Why, he asks, are the public spaces for cars deemed more important than the public spaces for children?

Now government planners everywhere are experimenting, seeking ways to design cities for people not cars. Cars promise mobility, and they provide it in a largely rural setting. But in an urbanizing world there is an inherent conflict between the automobile and the city. After a point, as their numbers multiply, automobiles provide not mobility but immobility. Congestion also takes a direct economic toll in rising costs in time and gasoline. And urban air pollution, often from automobiles, claims millions of lives.

Another cost of cities that are devoted to cars is a psychological one, a deprivation of contact with the natural world--an "asphalt complex." There is a growing body of evidence that there is an innate human need for contact with nature. Both ecologists and psychologists have been aware of this for some time. Ecologists, led by Harvard University biologist E.O. Wilson, have formulated the "biophilia hypothesis," which argues that those who are deprived of contact with nature suffer psychologically and that this deprivation leads to a measurable decline in well-being.

Throughout the modern era, budget allocations for transportation in most countries--and in the United States, in particular--have been heavily biased toward the construction and maintenance of highways and streets. Creating more livable cities and the mobility that people desire depends on reallocating budgets to emphasize the development of rail- or bus-based public transport and bicycle support facilities.

The exciting news is that there are signs of change, daily indications of an interest in redesigning cities for people, not for cars. One encouraging trend comes from the United States. Public transit ridership nationwide rising by 2.1 percent a year since 1996 indicates that people are gradually abandoning their cars for buses, subways, and light rail. Rising gasoline prices are encouraging still more commuters to abandon their cars and take the bus or subway or get on a bicycle.

When Beijing decided to promote an automobile-centered transportation system, a group of eminent scientists in China protested. They pointed out that the country does not have enough land to accommodate the automobile and to feed its people. What is true for China is also true for India and dozens of other densely populated developing countries.
Some cities are far better at planning their growth than others. They plan transport systems that provide mobility, clean air, and exercise--a sharp contrast to cities that offer congestion, unhealthy air, and little opportunity for exercise. When 95 percent of a city's workers depend on the automobile for commuting, as in Atlanta, Georgia, the city is in trouble.

By contrast, in Amsterdam only 40 percent of workers commute by car; 35 percent bike or walk, while 25 percent use public transit. Copenhagen's commuting patterns are almost identical to Amsterdam's. In Paris, just under half of commuters rely on cars. Even though these European cities are older, with narrow streets, they have far less congestion than Atlanta.

Not surprisingly, car-dependent cities have more congestion and less mobility than those that offer a wider range of commuting options. The very vehicle whose great promise was personal mobility is in fact virtually immobilizing entire urban populations, making it difficult for rich and poor alike to move about.

Existing long-term transportation strategies in many developing countries assume that everyone will one day be able to own a car. Unfortunately, given the constraints of land available for cars, not to mention those imposed by oil reserves, this is simply not realistic. These countries will provide more mobility if they support public transportation and the bicycle.